Antiquitopia

First the issue was the fact that Warren, a staunch opponent to gay rights, was even chosen at all. See here . Now, at issue, is whether he will refer to this first-century Jewish dude from Nazareth, whom some people worship as the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. From the Associated Press : Warren's inauguration prayer could draw more ire By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll, Ap Religion Writer Tue Dec 30, 9:35 pm ET President-elect Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation drew one kind of protest. Whether the evangelical pastor offers the prayer in the name of Jesus may draw another. At George W. Bush's 2001 swearing-in, the Revs. Franklin Graham and Kirbyjon Caldwell were criticized for invoking Christ. The distinctly Christian reference at a national civic event offended some, and even prompted a lawsuit. Warren did not answer directly when asked whether he would dedicate his prayer to Jesus. In a statement Tu...

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. In fact, it continues to be a best-seller year-in and year-out with an estimated 25 million copies sold yearly. Several people may realize this, but for those who have not been paying attention, the Bible now comes in all shapes and sizes. If you live in NY, just go down to the American Bible Society (just north of Columbus Circle), and you'll see Bibles as comic books, as survival kits, the green Bible, etc. The Bible has become adapted to all niche markets, or nearly so. As reported by the Wallstreet Journal : It's an astonishing fact that year after year, the Bible is the best-selling book in America -- even though 90% of households already have at least one copy. The text doesn't vary, except in translation. The tremendous sales volume, an estimated 25 million copies sold each year, is largely driven by innovations in design, color, style and the ultimate niche marketing. There's Scripture as accessory, wrapped in...

A follow-up on my last posting about the coincidence of the Moon and Venus from Space.com (although I picked it up from Yahoo! News): Celestial Show Set for New Year's Eve Robert Roy Britt Editorial Director SPACE.com robert Roy Britt editorial Director space.com Tue Dec 30, 11:47 am ET A delightful display of planets and the moon will occur on New Year's Eve for anyone wishing to step outside and look up just after sunset. Venus, brighter than all other planets and stars, will dangle just below the thin crescent moon in the southwestern sky. It'll be visible -- impossible to miss, in fact -- just as the sun goes down, assuming skies are cloud-free. Soon thereafter, Mercury and Jupiter will show up hugging the south-southwestern horizon (just above where the sun went down) and extremely close to each other. Jupiter is very bright and easy to spot; Mercury is faint and harder to see, but it'll be apparent by its location just to the left of Jupiter. Jupiter and Mercury ...

Having been couped up in NYC with all of its light pollution, I had not noticed something in the western sky that has been occurring, it seems, since November for a few hours after sunset. Indeed, while I am currently ensconced in the midwest and a much clearer night sky, I was startled to see an immensely bright object in the western sky very near the moon. At first I wasn't even sure what it was, but had a hunch which was proven correct by later inquiry--it is Venus, the third brightest object in the sky from our vantagepoint (after the sun and the moon). On November 30, you could see it in conjunction to Jupiter. Tomorrow night, December 31, it will be at its closest conjunction to the moon! (So head out and look at the two brightest objects in the night sky next to each other.) On Jan. 22, with the help of binoculars or a telescope, you can see Venus one degree away from Uranus. Venus will continue to appear brighter every evening and reach its brightest appearance, appr...

What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, all , world ,...

The NYTimes reports that, after collating evidence from 80 years of study from around the world, consistently those who are involved in their religious institution of choice have a higher level of self-control than those who do not. This is an awkward question for a heathen to contemplate, but I felt obliged to raise it with Michael McCullough after reading his report in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin. He and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control. This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school, but Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives. He confesses to not being much of a devotee himself. “When it comes to religion,” he said, “professionally, I’m a fan, but personally, I don’t get down on the field much.” His professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion...

That's right, according to Reuters , Virgin Mary gave birth on Christmas Day to a baby boy, whom she named Jesus. Virgin Mary's husband or Jesus' father is a carpenter by trade. Peruvian Jesus born to Virgin Mary on Christmas Mon Dec 29, 2008 10:02am EST LIMA (Reuters) - Virgin Mary, a 20-year-old Peruvian woman, gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas day and named him Jesus, Peru's state news agency said on Friday. The baby's father, Adolfo Jorge Huamani, 24, is a carpenter. Religious Peruvians compared him to Joseph the Carpenter in the Bible. "Two thousand years later the story of Bethlehem is relived," read the headline about the birth in El Comercio, the main newspaper in Peru, a predominantly Catholic country. The mother, Virgen Maria Huarcaya, delivered the 7.7 pound (3.5 kg) boy, Jesus Emanuel, in the early hours of Christmas at the central maternity hospital in Lima, the capital. "A few days ago we had decided to name my son after a professio...

For those furiously revising and revisiting Judas traditions in the wake of the discovery and continued study of the Gospel of Judas, it might do some good to read Borges' short story, "Three Versions of Judas." It is, as usual, labyrinthine in presentation, provocative, and amazing! The story, using basically just the canonical Gospels and some heresiological reports, revises the relationship between Jesus, God, and Judas. It suggests that Judas seems unnecessary. For a teacher who performs public miracles in the day and has a large following, it should not be difficult to find him. Therefore, Judas' betrayal seems superfluous. It seems to exist only for the purpose of damning Judas. Yet it is a superfluity that signals that something else is going on in the story, something subterranean. The Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless satisfaction to change and death; in order to correspond to such a s...

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men. Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon. (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Shape of the Sword," trans. Donald A. Yates)

I was reading Borges' short story, "Funes the Memorious." It is the tale of a Uruguayan boy who, one day, falls off a horse and, when he awakens, sees the world anew. In fact, he has perfect perception--he can see clearly all the most minute details. He can feel the most subtle changes in temperature, etc. At the same time, he awakens to a perfect memory. He remembers everything, absolutely everything. Every detail, every sight, every sensation. He can recall a day, but to do so takes an entire day. By comparison, our perception and memory are a dreamlike haze: For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was paralyzed. The fact scarcely interested him. He reasone...

It seems like I am thinking about Babel/Babble lately with my last post and just (re)reading "Library of Babel" by Borges. I had read this short story in college, and it has persisted in my memory ever since. This library is eternal and infinite. Each room is a hexagon with the same number of shelves and books on each wall (except two). Two walls lead to adjacent hexagons, while a spiral staircase infinitely moves up and down to different floors with ever new hexagons. There are no two books alike in the library, but the books contain all possible combinations of twenty-five symbols, with all possible syntaxes, languages, books, writing, and, well, babble. As such, this same blog posting will be already found somewhere in the library (as well as any past and future postings I may write and miswrite). The inhabitants of this library are called librarians. The main character is a librarian who has been searching for the book of books, the catalogue of catalogues, all of...

Sitting one Sunday in a Pentecostal service, I listened as someone began to “speak in tongues.” Such occurrences have a strange effect on me. I grew up in this church, and have noticed a sharp decline in the past decade or so of people speaking in tongues (and a slight recent resurgence), and so, at least psychologically, there is a strange feeling of comfort, of reminiscences of my childhood when such utterances occasionally occur. I care much less for the so-called “interpretation” afterwards, the attempt to make this excitable speech intelligible. It always seems like a betrayal of that speech, which, as excitable, should remain unknowable. At the same time, I am a scholar of religion. I cannot but think about that this is a phenomenon that occurs in multiple contexts throughout the world, whether a Shaman on the Eurasian Steppes (you can also see it in the movie Kundun , about the life of the current Dalai Lama), the Pythia in ancient Delphi, or a Pentecostal service in twent...

For my winter break, I am reading Borges. In Borges, worlds collide, or rather they infiltrate one another. They are not the infiltrations of worldviews or of governments into one another, although secret societies are involved. Rather, it is the mutual infiltration of fantasy and reality. How reality becomes fantastic or fantasy becomes real. It is the task of imagining a world. A world of pure imagination, and yet to imagine is to rearrange what you know--or, more accurately, rearrage what you perceive. Perceptions become reversed, as in a mirror, turned upside-down and twisted all around, until you find a world of fantasy, a world of pure imagination. And then, once Borges has set up this alternate world of pure fiction and imagination, he starts pulling the threads of reality. He begins to drain our perceived world of its reality and the imagined world feels more real. In fact, it begins to impinge on our reality, or, perhaps more accurately, this imagined world begins to manifest ...

With the large growth of the Catholic population in the U.S., mostly due to the influx of immigration from Latin America, combined with a huge downturn in the number of Catholic seminarians, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is experiencing a priest shortage. In an attempt to rectify this problem, many U.S. dioceses are recruiting priests from around the world, particularly Africa and Latin America, but also places like India, to fill churches in places like Kentucky (which has seen a surge in Latin American immigration in the past 10 years). Foreign priests-to-be also make up about 1/3 of all Catholic seminarians in the U.S. The shortage is to the point that many priests, at the moment, have to serve four or five churches at the same time, rushing from church to church to perform mass. It is a crazy lifestyle, but one that reminds me of what the Methodists did in the 19th century, when their ministers had to circulate from church to church on horseback. See the full, rather lengthy,...

You want to know where your Communion / Eucharist wafers come from? Well, if you are in the U.S., it probably comes from one place, a single bakery in Rhode Island that services 80% of Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Southern Baptist churches--interesting combination. This bakery has been owned and operated by the Cavanagh family for well over 60 years. The family-owned company makes about 80 percent of the communion bread used by the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States. It has a similar market share in Australia, Canada and Britain, and is now looking to expand to West Africa. “We feel as though we’re a bakery, and all we’re making is bread,” said Andy Cavanagh, the company’s general manager, and part of the fourth generation of Cavanaghs to work here. “It’s not that we don’t have respect for what happens to it, but that transformation is out of our hands and takes place in a church. The best thing we can do is make sure the bread is ...

I should first note that when I say "biblio-" in the "bibliotopia," I am not referring to the Bible, but to books in general. Ask Stephen Prothero about biblical literacy in the U.S. This Bibliotopia is about where , in what cities, people read the most. USA Today has just reported on the top ten most literate cities in the U.S. Tied at number one are Minneapolis and Seattle, which have alternated between number 1 and 2 for years, evidently: For the past six years, the two cities have traded the first and second spots in the rankings, which analyze six key indicators of literacy (newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources) against population rates for cities with populations of 250,000 or more. The study does not look at reading test scores or how often people read, but what kinds of literary resources are available and used. This is "one critical index of ou...

Because it is my mother's favorite Christmas song, here it is: "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." What a beautiful view that default screen gives us!

With the economy down and kids off from school, game consoles are down in sales, but traditional boardgames like Scrabble and Monopoly are actually way up in sales. They provide a rather cost-effective entertainment, family time, etc. From the Times (London): Board games have been forgotten lately, in favour of games consoles and brainteasers such as Su Doku. But now, with the kids on holiday and financially flummoxed families looking for cheap ways to entertain at home, they are winning again. Initial signs suggest that sales of old stalwarts are enjoying a resurgence this Christmas. According to NPD, the market analysts for the toy industry, Mattel's Scrabble is topping the family games category, with sales up 21 per cent on last year. In August this year, Monopoly's latest incarnation, Here & Now: The World Edition, launched simultaneously in more than 50 countries and 37 languages. The brand's September sales accounted for 9.6 per cent of the entire UK games market...

One of the themes I emphasized this last fall in my class is the use of deceit in literature. You can find it almost in any ancient document. It is rife in the Odyssey , Aeschylus' Oresteia , and perhaps most prominent in Genesis. You can find traces of it in the Iliad , in the Hymn to Demeter , and so on and so forth. It is probably the clearest common thread of mcuh of ancient literature. And...uh...modern behavior with all the recent scams and scandals in the news. But, we are not the only ones with the penchant for deceit. It turns out it is quite common in the animal world, particularly among other primates: In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one...

That's right; Muslim punk is spreading across the U.S. About five years ago, a book came out and spread among micro-networks of primarily young Muslims fed up with the Bush Administration's policies, general non-Muslim attitudes, and more conservative Muslim leaders. How do you critique and express frustration? Through punk bands. This book is about punk bands and Islam. The book inspired an entire subculture of young Muslim punk bands. That subculture is now inspiring an independent film based on the book, "The Taqwacores." Here is the article from the NYTimes : December 23, 2008 Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book By CHRISTOPHER MAAG CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo. “This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn. A Muslim...

If you want to celebrate Hanukkah Reggae-style, you can see Matisyahu and his giant mirrorball dreidel this week: Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer. See more here .

Ok...so I thought that Rick Warren's analogy between gay marriage and brother-sister marriage was bizarre. I also thought his analogy between homosexuality and pedophilia ridiculous--unless he is stuck in Periclean Athens. But the award for the strangest homosexuality analogy goes to Pope Benedict XVI: VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. "(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed," the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration. "The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less." The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality "a d...

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History")

On Narnia and Christmas: two things created out of a conglomeration of elements...but how old are they? An article from the NYTimes claims that MOST of our ideas of Christmas are...Victorian! December 18, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor It’s a Narnia Christmas By LAURA MILLER EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season. I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed ...

Some people were worried when Obama and McCain appeared at Saddleback Church for their first public meeting on the same stage months ago during the Presidential campaign...it seemed then mostly due to separation of church and state issues. Now people are upset that Warren is offering a prayer at Obama's inauguration...not because of separation of church and state issues (there is ALWAYS a prayer at these events), but because of Warren's positions on abortion and same-sex marriage. While I personally differ with Warren on these issues also, there are a few things to make clear. Warren is NOT like Dobson or other evangelical leaders. He does not incite divisiveness in the way they do, although he's made some rather crude analogies vis-a-vis gay marriage lately. He does try to create coalitions with people who differ with him on many issues: thus he has been effective working on issues of poverty and HIV/AIDS with people who oppose him on other social issues. Although h...

As I continue to dawdle through Walter Benjamin's essays, I am often struck at some details. In fact, as Benjamin reads, he writes. He reads for details, the obscure, buried detail the perspective from which brings new light upon the rest of the writing, or the world. To read this way, to see this way--which for Benjamin is the same, since he was one of the foremost proponents, if not the catalyst, for reading the world as a text--one must dawdle. Not necessarily with a great deal of concentration, although that is sometimes required, but more like someone walking, browsing without urgency. It is not skimming, for that suggests that one is in a hurry. Just as Benjamin read the world as a text, he strolls through texts. It is only appropriate that one of his footnotes best captures this attitude: A pedestrian knew how to display his nonchalance provocatively on certain occasions. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs ...

From Walter Benjamin's "What is Epic Theater?" One can go even further and remember that interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context. In a way, by quoting this text about quotation, I have interrupted Benjamin's context, his discussion of the "quotable gesture" in epic theater. As my quote stands, you may not even realize that this is about gestures or even theater, except that I have told you so. Yet this violence of extraction allows the quotation to take wing; it reinvigorates it with new life as I place it in a new context. Yet to quote also interrupts the context of placement. When I quote something, it interrupts my own prose, creating a cacophany of voices, or, to put in M. M. Bakhtin's terms, heteroglossia. I often find in reading other people's work that I find ...