What kind of reader are you?

Let’s see… very little activity here of late. Considered ending this project a few times but can’t bring myself to do it. Then, in the last two days I came across a number of stories that are worth sharing.

 Lets start with a quiz, shall we?

 From the virtual pages of Crunchy Con, What kind of a reader are you?

 

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Literate Good Citizen     You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you’re not nerdy about it. You’ve read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

What a bitch

Unbelievable. What a bitch this Maier woman is. “A stalwart member of the left…” says The Globe; I never would have guessed.

globeandmail.com- ‘I really regret it. I really regret having children‘

And this story of hers is funny and sad, but not in the way she thinks:

 

“We went to a family dinner in the suburbs of Paris. It took us a lot of time to go there with the children, and we went because the children wanted to go. We didn’t want to go, my partner and I, and it was a bit boring, but we took them anyway,” she says with a Gallic nonchalance, strolling across an empty floor in the enormous, art-filled house in one of the better corners of Brussels where she lives in a kind of exile from France with her partner, Yves, 45, their daughter Laure, 13, and son, Cecil, 10.

“And on the way back, the two of us thought that it would be nice to see an exhibition on Belgian surrealists. Once inside the museum, the children began to be awful.” Laure said that the exhibition was “bullshit.” Cecil began to scream, so Yves took him outside. “And I started yelling at him for this: ‘Why aren’t you more strong with him?’ And we began to argue. We didn’t see anything. And at that point, I thought, ‘I really regret it, I regret having children.’ “

Who gets surprised that kids react badly to an exhibition on Belgian surrealists, after what has already been a busy day for them? Who expects kids to be just like adults, and not just any adult, but ones that think just like me me me?

 

Judging by her book on work, she probably isn’t any fun to work with either.

September 13, 2007 Untitled

A test post using journaler, a donation ware journal program for Mac. 

Profaning iconography is dead

Here’s the conclusion to Camille Paglia’s exploration of “what is wrong with the arts today.” It’s taken from a journal called Arion:

Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials. But here’s the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It’s time to move on.For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts.1 The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas’ six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

Aside from the silly bit about Star Wars, her point is one I agree with wholeheartedly. The entire essay is good reading, running down how art and religion have interacted in the west since the Reformation. I find that since I’ve taken religion more seriously, my response and my understading of the arts has deepened. These are deeply human issues to work through.

Rejoice with the wife of thy youth

Naomi Wolf has some interesting things to say about life in a sex saturated culture in New York magazine:

Pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” [Proverbs 5.18] These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

If this wasn’t such a sad story, I might get more schadenfreude out of it. As it is, I came to similar conclusions myself some time ago. It lead to the shocking realization that popular characterizations about traditional social mores are wildly superficial and inaccurate. To name two, there’s the misplaced idea that all religious people have always been literalists on every line of the Bible, as well as the idea that past social norms are always arbitrary.

Room for the poor?

Rod Dreher has a question.:

What is it about our time that makes the heavy old forms of Christianity — Orthodoxy and Catholicism — so apparently ill-suited to compete with the amorphous Pentecostalism that’s sweeping the poor? Is it the case that the very complexity and depth that appeals to middle-class North American intellectuals makes the faith relatively inaccessible to the masses? Is it the case that we live now in a demotic age, in which any institution that depends on hierarchies and traditional authority will struggle for the hearts of the common man? That is, in the past it would have been understood that the Thing That We All Do is worship at the Catholic/Orthodox parish, whether we remain as beginners in faith, or have plumbed the theological depths of the Tradition, because That Is What We Do — but today, there is an unregulated free market in faith, and we are free to choose.

Is it the case that the more demotic forms of Protestant Christianity preach a gospel that, however twisted in some of its manifestations (e.g., the prosperity gospel), nevertheless holds out to suffering people the hope that their lives can change for the better — whereas the older, more traditional forms of Christianity are more accepting of suffering as part of the human condition, to a degree that tips over into fatalism?

One of the things I admire so much about Catholicism is its depth and its breadth. It has room for all kinds of spiritual approaches, and popular piety as well as high theological rumination. (Perhaps this is true of Orthodoxy also; I don’t really know). I liked that I could go to mass on Sunday, and could share a pew with people from all walks of life, sociologically speaking. But in our country, I do wonder if the poor (excluding the immigrant poor from Latin America) have any entry point into Catholicism or Orthodoxy. And why that is. And how it should change within the tradition, because it’s impossible to imagine a Christian church that has no room for the poor and working classes.

In thinking about this question, I turn to my own experience in my local parish. We do have services for the poor – St. Vincent de Paul, family events that are inexpensive, etc. – and I do see a range of people in the pews. There are a lot of older European white people, but there are also families, rich and poor, and more than a few families from Asia. In the end, though I’m not certain how much of Rod’s question applies here in northwestern Canada. We don’t have the kind of evangelicial footprint he writes of, though they are here. We do have a history of being settled by people fleeing religion. There are good number of spiritualists, agnostics and atheists in this part of the world, and we have to overcome their idea that we are the bad old empire.

I think that’s the barrier to getting young people; they think we’re the page about to be turned. Rebecca and I are both of the opinion that being current and fun – with no watering down, because you never want to patronize – would help. I would suggest sports programs and web-sites that are current, informative and well put together would help. They can act as ice breakers. In the US south, where Rod hails from, the danger traditional Christianity faces is in some ways similar. It looks different and strange, like an alpine flower brought down from the mountain. Perhaps down there, it needs to have more resemblances to local fauna to make outreach easier. Still, individual can do-ism in the culture is going to be a challenge for a Church with a structure like Catholicism.

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Good advice

Some good advice from an Orthodox website.

When your “gettin’ it done”, don’t forget family.

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Religion, Catholicism, Christianity

Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems

Another reason – as if you needed another reason – to avoid Microsoft products.

Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems. 

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Justice in a vacuum

Here are two articles I read today; I found both to really interesting. The first is a New Yorker article about an economist who thinks democracy leads to bad policy when it works properly. Why? People are uninformed and irrational. They choose based on prejudice rather than current theory. They tend to choose to tax and spend and regulate.

Fractured Franchise: Books: The New Yorker:

[Bryan] Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.”

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). Economists know that these positions are irrational, because the average person actually benefits from market competition, which provides the best product at the lowest price; from free trade with other countries, which (for American consumers) usually lowers the cost of labor and thus the price of goods; and from technological change, which redistributes labor from less productive to more productive enterprises.

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith, Caplan thinks.

As the twig is bent

ABC News: God vs. Science: Most Scientists Are Nonbelievers

An interesting story at ABC on a study about scientists and religiosity.

The question Elaine Howard Ecklund most wanted to answer was pretty basic: Does the study of science drive a person away from religion? It does not, she said in an interview.

Nearly all the scientists who said they believe in God, and have a current affiliation with a church, were raised in a home where religion was considered very important, she said. Thus, they conform to the same pattern seen in the population at large. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

Most of the scientists who believe in God have children, she said. And the 3,000 pages of transcribed interviews tell her something else.

“In my interviews, some scientists reclaimed the religion of their youth when they had children, and people in the general public do that as well,” she said

I’d wager that a lot of the ones who were ambivalent about religion were raised that way too.

Ecklund is convinced that her research shows that whether a scientist believes in God is determined primarily during childhood, and most of the scientists she studied came from homes where religion was not considered important. Her study, published in the current issue of the journal Social Problems, puts it this way:

“These data reveal that at least some part of the difference in religiosity between scientists and the general population is likely due simply to religious upbringing rather than scientific training or institutional pressure to be irreligious.”

Aha.

That is likely to be hotly debated in the years ahead, and there is a hint in her own research that suggests otherwise. The disciplines she studied include physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science and psychology. Physicists did not lead the list of nonbelievers, which may be a bit surprising given the historic battles between the church and Galileo and Copernicus. Of all those surveyed, biologists were least likely to be religious, the study shows.

The antagonism of biologists to religion is true to my experience – in reading popular scientific works as well as debating on the web. The question is why? I think the popular view of Darwinism as the ultimate stick with which to bash religion makes it attractive to people who are curious about the world and detached from religion. Then there is the “problem of pain”, which is considered to be among the most serious problems anyone with a benevolent view of God is said to face. I don’t personally find it to be the toughest nut to crack; you either grasp suffering as being potentially redemptive or you don’t. For good or ill, my problem has always been divine hiddenness.

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