July 30, 2012, 11:22 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Let me be start by saying that I like and respect New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. I had the pleasure of interviewing him a few years back on Faith Complex. Although we disagreed on nearly everything under the sun, he was thoughtful, generous of intellect, and quite funny.
With that preamble rendered, I am simply staggered by his recent head-scratcher of an Op-Ed entitled “Defining Religious Liberty Down.” It’s worthy of scrutiny because it raises the volume considerably in the already clamorous “religious freedom” debate. For Douthat voices the argument that some unnamed group out there–who could that be?–doesn’t care a whit about religious freedom.
For those who are not familiar with this new culture-war killing zone, let me bring you up to speed. A seemingly value-neutral term has shifted ideological shape in the past election cycle. “Religious freedom”…
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July 30, 2012, 11:06 am
By Laurie Fendrich
(Photo by burstingwithcolors, Flickr/CC)
What better event is there to capture the competitive spirit of Western civilization than the Olympics? From their start as simple sprints in 8th century B.C. Greece, the Olympics have been all about fierce competition and winning. Baron de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics (after a long hiatus beginning in the 4th century, the Olympics were revived at the end of the 19th century), famously described the Olympics with the words “swifter, higher, stronger.” He ought to have said, “swiftest, highest, strongest.” Face it. Who remembers the winners of the silver and bronze medals? Coming in second or third in the Olympics is much worse than kissing your sister; earlier today, I even saw a headline about the U.S. swim team earning a silver medal that read, “…
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July 30, 2012, 10:48 am
By Carl Elliott
Geoffrey Wilkinson as Ben Gunn, courtesy of Aveleyman.com
I’m sitting in a pink plastic yard chair, feet up, glass in hand, looking out over the palm trees and the mangroves. Across the bay are the mountains of Viti Levu. I have never really been an enthusiast of tropical paradises, yet this is the third time I have found myself in the Fiji islands on my birthday. I suppose there are worse ways of dispelling the malaise. No phone, no Internet, just a bottle of Bounty Rum and a stack of hard-boiled crime novels. The monkey-faced fruit bat, I’m told, is one of only two mammalian species native to Fiji, and the further the sun sinks over the horizon, the closer the bats swoop down over our porch. They look like something out of a Hunter Thompson drug hallucination.
The first time we visited Fiji was almost accidental. Air…
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July 28, 2012, 6:00 pm
By David Barash
Fitzroy massif on a – rare – clear day: Climbable, but just barely, and not by me! (photo by Yoav Altman)
Call me David. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing and drooling at the ice giants marching about me here in the Pacific Northwest, such that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking the hats off any Republican I meet — then, I account it high time to get back into the mountains as soon as I can. (Nearly always, without a copy of Moby Dick.)
Or, when that isn’t immediately possible, to think and write about those mountains once again.
“Learning the ropes” applied originally to seamanship, but it aptly…
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July 27, 2012, 11:12 am
By Michael Ruse
Expectedly, my argument last week that the randomness of Darwinian evolution poses a major but not necessarily insuperable problem for the Christian has brought down on my head the wrath and contempt of the New Atheists. (The junior ones at least. The senior ones, like Aristotle’s unmoved movers, are so busy contemplating their own perfection, that they have no thoughts for chaps like me.)
Loveable, predictable Jerry Coyne is “baffled” by my constantly trying to find ways of reconciling science and religion. He thinks it a “waste of good philosophical brainpower.” (I note the adjective. Thanks for the compliment!) In exasperation he declares: “If you seek a theological solution to a scientific dilemma, then you’re not reconciling science with faith—you’re distorting science to comport it with faith.” And he exhorts me to stop catering to “unfounded superstition.…
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July 25, 2012, 4:06 pm
By Marc Bousquet
So I just finished a brief radio appearance (CBC) on the subject of Massive Open, Online Courses (MOOCs). The main guest was George Siemens who, with Stephen Downes, helped pioneer these courses in Canada. Even though all of the press coverage has gone to the competing Stanford edu-preneurs behind Coursera and Udacity, Siemens and Downes have done much of the most important work, theoretical and practical, distinguishing between good and bad MOOC’s.
At the heart of the work of Siemens and Downes is connectedness. Both have written importantly about the social character of learning, the way that actual learning means entering a community of persons asking tough questions, with a shared passion, etc. Relatedly, both insist that knowledge is not “a thing to be acquired,” but an activity. As any working researcher knows, academic, professional, medical, industrial, and pharmaceutical…
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July 25, 2012, 12:47 pm
By Mark Bauerlein
(From Image Editor via Flickr/CC)
Here’s a conversation-stopper: “George W. Bush.”
Or rather, the mention of the man’s name halts one conversation and ignites another one. In gatherings with academic friends and colleagues, it has a visceral effect. I’ve witnessed it time and again as people have talked about the economy or about education or about the Middle East and I recalled No Child Left Behind or the highway/transportation bill or Bush’s disgust with Arafat, always adding the ex-President’s name.
Everything changes—the content and direction of the discussion, the tone of people’s voices, their postures and expressions. The ordinary back-and-forth of exchange gives way to people’s eagerness to denounce and decry.
For awhile, I responded by invoking this or that fact, mildly …
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July 24, 2012, 10:29 am
By Todd Gitlin
(via New York Daily News)
He’s dazed. His brow furrows. His blinks are slow in coming. At times his head rolls around. His eyes are vacant. He doesn’t focus—doesn’t appear to, anyway, though at times he seems to be trying to. James E. Holmes appears in court. He looks lost. ”Ordinary” is one word for him. “Unprepossessing” is another. In some moments he seems unfathomably sad. What does he know? What does he think? Does he have any idea where he is, and why?
What does an alleged mass murderer look like? This one looks like this. Nothing extraordinary shows.
There is evil in the story, but none of it is visible. Take away the guns from James E. Holmes and he’s another suffering soul. You could say just another suffering soul.
Take away his guns.
Take away his guns.
July 24, 2012, 10:23 am
By David Barash
As far away as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and as close as your local gun-toting lunatic.
I’m not so naïve as to think that the Aurora tragedy will cause any change in the stunning U.S. refusal to engage in anything that even approaches minimally common-sense gun control. (How crazy is it, for example, that people on terrorist watch lists are still permitted to purchase assault rifles?) The Republican Party is besotted with the NRA, while the Democrats are scared silly of it. And of course, following every massacre, the claim will be made, as it has been before, that if only the populace were more armed—not less—we would have witnessed a classic Gunfight at the OK Corral, with citizen Wyatt Earp blowing away the bad guy(s) … just like in the movies.
Nor am I so egotistical as to think that my biological a…
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July 23, 2012, 3:07 pm
By Laurie Fendrich
Photo by Tanaka at New York Daily News site, from a 2009 article
Together with his wife Dorothy, Herbert Vogel, who died Sunday at the age of 89, spent about half a century accumulating an enormous collection of edgy contemporary art. In 1991, the couple gave almost their whole collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2008, they divvied up what remained of it among fifty museums in fifty states.
More striking than the couple’s generosity and sense of giving back to society is that unlike most contemporary art collectors, the Vogels were not wealthy. Herbert Vogel was a high-school dropout who earned his living as a postal worker, sorting mail during night shifts at various New York post offices. His wife worked as a reference librarian at a Brooklyn library. Even after they retired, this middle-class …
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July 22, 2012, 12:20 pm
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Politico reported on July 17 that campaign officials deny that there will be any repeat this year of Rick Warren’s 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. It is not clear from the report whether these officials hale from the Romney or Obama camps (or both).
It’s the only news item of its kind that I have seen, so I am a bit confused (see my subsequent post of July 19 on the matter). Most news agencies are still reporting that the event is on the books. If–and at present it’s a big if–Warren’s hope for a 2012 reprise is currently off the table we must ask: Why?
Warren’s exceptionally dimwitted tweet about the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado (Hint: the teaching of evolution is to blame for the massacre) came after the Politico report and can’t be seen as a factor. So did Professor Berlinerblau’s column/intervention in which he called attention to the pastor’s amateurish…
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July 21, 2012, 7:52 am
By David Barash
Dawn in Puerto Encantado, Venezuela. Sex, anyone?
A little while ago, I worried that the next time someone asked me about the book, Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, I might vomit. An over-reaction? Perhaps. And one likely composed, in part, of simple envy, since their book seems to have sold a lot of copies. At least as contributory, however, is the profoundly annoying fact that Sex at Dawn has been taken as scientifically valid by large numbers of naïve readers … whereas it is an intellectually myopic, ideologically driven, pseudo-scientific fraud.
Written by people who don’t know diddly-squat about evolutionary biology, and—worse yet—who don’t know how much they don’t know, Sex at Dawn purports to demonstrate that human beings are “naturally” polyamorous, that…
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July 20, 2012, 3:06 pm
By Michele Goodwin
Last week, Judge Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI, released a copiously detailed, lengthy report about Penn State’s role in Gerald Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on campus. The report notes that there was a “total disregard” for the young boys who were the sexually abused victims of Gerald Sandusky—the former coach. According to Freeh, the most senior members of the university’s governing structure, “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”
Indeed, to those closely following the investigation, indictment, and trial of Sandusky, the report provided important details, but was no surprise. Last year, when I first blogged about this issue, I wrote, “More curious is the statement released by Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, who claims the perjury charges against [Tim] Curley and [Gary] Schultz are …
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July 20, 2012, 1:25 pm
By Michael Ruse
Over on his blog, Why Evolution is True, the eminent Chicago evolutionist Jerry Coyne has taken on the role of my doppelgänger, since we agree 90 percent of the time and then 10 percent of the time find ourselves in completely different positions. Although perhaps I am his doppelgänger and exist only as a function of his imagination or psychic aura.
Putting such fascinating Germanic speculations aside, a couple of days ago Coyne raised a point about the science-religion relationship that has long troubled me and that he thinks – and I agree entirely – is not dealt with adequately by those who want to promote harmony between science and religion, the dreaded (or pitiful) “accommodationists,” a label that Jerry Coyne bestows with scorn and that I wear with pride.
The problem is this. If Christianity is true, then the existence of humans cannot be a contingent matter….
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July 19, 2012, 10:29 am
By Carl Elliott
Near Dunedin, New Zealand
Another spectacular winter morning in Dunedin, New Zealand. Clear blue sky, frost on the ground, lush green hills plunging into the South Pacific. It is hard to complain about the setting, still less about the kindness and decency of the inhabitants. It has been nearly 22 years since my wife and I first landed in Dunedin, in August of 1990, when I began a postdoctoral fellowship at the newly established Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago. I still wonder why we ever left.
It was an extraordinary time for bioethics in New Zealand. In 1990, the country was still reeling from the shock of a medical research scandal – the “unfortunate experiment” at the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland. In that study, which had begun in 1966 and continued for a…
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July 19, 2012, 12:59 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Fox News is reporting that Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren is planning a reprise of his 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. I would urge those in both the Obama and Romney camps to skip this event. I truly hope that a 2012 get-together does not come to pass.
I say this not only because the idea of a sectarian cleric religious-testing American presidential candidates is deeply problematic on Church/State grounds. (Will rabbis, Roman Catholic priests, imams and atheist chaplains be granted the same access and interviewing privileges?)
I would also avoid the shindig because the previous forum that Warren hosted was a disaster by standards of fair journalistic practice.
Let me take you back four years to Saturday August 16th, 2008. Pastor Warren opened his event with words that have intrigued me ever since:
We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not …
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July 18, 2012, 1:03 pm
By Todd Gitlin
For years, I’ve opposed calls for academic boycotts of Israel. (Here’s one sample and here’s another.) I won’t rehearse all the arguments here. Suffice to say that the life of the mind in universities is irreducibly precious for a deeply challenged civilization that is in so many ways hostile to intellectual life. For all the challenges that universities impose for free thought, all on their own, any decision to restrict academic contacts on any political ground is a case of cutting off a lobe of the brain to spite the face. In a world where many nations impose onerous political conditions on intellectual autonomy, choosing one particular nation’s universities for special opprobrium—especially when discussion in precisely those universities is rambunctious and unimpeded—is flatly wrong.
The State of Israel has just (again) kicked the Palestinians in the head, and demonstrated …
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July 18, 2012, 10:43 am
By David Barash
Isaac Newton, painted by Godfrey Kneller. The late Sir Isaac wasn't shy about making use of a prior "scientific consensus."
Responding to a recent post by our own Mark Bauerlein, a commenter (flailing—and failing—to find justification for her disavowal of the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming) noted that she was “trying [unsuccessfully, one gathers] to think of a concept that is more ‘anti-science’ than consensus.” I find this observation to be uncharacteristically thought-provoking on her part, although in this case she is—characteristically—wrong-headed and downright uninformed. I fear, however, that she is not alone.
It may be that some people, lacking any real concept of science, are indeed under the impression that consensus is somehow inimical to the scientific …
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July 18, 2012, 8:00 am
By Guest Blogger
(Photo by Paul Hart via Flickr/CC)
By Lisa Russ Spaar
Is there a subject more often evoked in poetry than our earth’s own natural satellite? The earliest poems in a host of languages—Greek, Chinese, Tamil, Hebrew, Arabic, to name but a few—include lunar references, images, tropes, confessions, curses, and appeals.
Scientists think the cratered mass of cosmic debris includes earth matter sent into orbit along with other planetary stuff in a seminal terrestrial collision. Cycling around our globe, it has been mythologized, romanticized, blamed, worshiped, and charged with symbolism, not only in writings about the moon but also in copious writing about writing about the moon. As poet Paul Legault puts it in a feature on moon poetry posted at the Academy of American Poets Web site…
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July 17, 2012, 1:45 pm
By Mark Bauerlein
Let's get oriented, shall we? (Photo by Dru Bloomfield via Flickr/CC)
Russell Jacoby’s article on conservative anti-intellectualism in this week’s Chronicle Review opens with a fair appraisal.
“Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history.”
For conservatives who are tired of hearing liberals and leftists rehearse the “conservatives-are-stupid” charge, it’s a welcome concession. But as Jacoby’s next sentences signal–”The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular”—the essay shifts…
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