The connection (or lack thereof) between science and religion has been debated as long as science and religion have existed. Some scientists accept the late Stephen Jay Gould’s suggestion that the two are “NOMA”—Non-Overlapping Magesteria—because science and religion occupy distinct realms, the former concerned with what is, the latter with what should be. Others (including myself) reject NOMA, pointing out that religion often makes claims about the real world that not only overlap with those of science, but are frequently contradicted by the latter.
There is, however, an intriguing exception: Buddhism. Perhaps this is because Buddhism is as much philosophy as religion, or maybe because Buddhism is somehow more “valid” than, say, the…
From Wikipedia, a 1947 photograph of Wittgenstein by Ben Richards
“I first saw Wittgenstein in the Michaelmas term of 1938, my first term at Cambridge. At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a remark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbor: ‘Who is that?’: he replied, ‘Wittgenstein.’”
So begins Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by Norman Malcolm, a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge and his lifelong friend. It is a small book, published over half a century ago, but its influence would be hard to overstate. Not many philosophical books have created as many disciples. If philosophers were evangelists (and so…
We all know the GOP ain’t exactly feminist. After all, many Republicans want to control women’s reproductive lives, destroy equal pay for equal work laws, and limit civil rights and privileges to women who marry men. But the GOP-controlled House bill on violence against women that passed last night has been called by The American Bar Association
a retreat from the battle against domestic and sexual violence.
Although the Violence Against Women Act has previously enjoyed bipartisan support, in the current and highly ideological climate, Republicans in the House wanted to take away key protections for battered women. They also did not want to extend domestic violence protections to LGBT citizens, illegal aliens, and American Indians.
That’s why Jezebel calls the GOP House version of the bill “The violence against SOME women act.” According to Jezebel, the House bill is supported…
From Wikipedia, a Théodore Chassériau portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, who may have known Americans better than we know ourselves.
Several commenters have asked Brainstorm bloggers to weigh in on the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley. My conflicted opinion on the matter kept me silent for a while—perhaps no better than Hamlet’s dithering. In any event, with the dust now somewhat settled, I’d like to say something.
I found Ms. Riley’s two Brainstorm posts on Black Studies programs so sloppy, arrogant, repugnant and indefensible as arguments that they pushed to the very back burnerthe issue of free speech in general and, in particular, Ms. Riley’s rights or privileges as a Brainstorm blogger. All I could focus on was that Ms. Riley had violated the fundamental responsibility of any writer—…
The story focuses on a 54-page advertising plan that somehow dropped into the Times‘ outstretched hands “through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone.” The financial force behind the plan is the “conservative billionaire” Joe Ricketts who, according to a proxy, “is very concerned about the future direction of the country” (as conservative billionaires are wont to be).
The prospectus itself details a media strategy to flesh out the connections between Barack Obama and his controversial pastor,…
Most working artists in America (certainly most who teach at colleges and universities) hold a Master of Fine Arts degree, established by the College Art Association, more than 50 years ago, as the terminal degree in the fine arts. As Dan Berrett writes in this week’s Chronicle,however, that may be about to change. The College Art Association is now tiptoeing around the idea of embracing the studio Ph.D. as the new terminal degree in the fine arts. Recently, the CAA hosted a workshop entitled, “Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?” The title tells you everything you need to know about how differently people in the art world view the idea.
On one side are those for whom a Ph.D. in studio art can’t come too soon. It would address the needs of internationally a…
“No, no civil war. I’m an optimist,” observes my colleague, the anthropologist and Georgetown School of Foreign Service Professor Gwendolyn Mikell.
Dr. Mikell is here reflecting on the recent explosion of sectarian strife in Nigeria–strife which is often understood by analysts in the Western media as predicated on ethno-religious conflict between the Muslim north and Christian south.
The treacherous headline grabber in all of this has been the jihadist group Boko Haram. This fundamentalist Islamist sect advocates the imposition of Sharia law and has engaged in horrendous assaults on Christian communities. Amongst the most frightful was last year’s Christmas massacre which resulted in the deaths of dozens of Catholic worshipers in Madala.
Professor Mikell complexifies the media narratives and argues against “Nigeria-on-the-brink” ruminations. In a piece in the Huffington…
Not everyone writes to provoke, but provocative writing is common in the blogosphere, including the segment of blogging for traditional news and opinion outlets. Editors’ goals for bloggers resemble their aims for columnists. Generally they want to hire someone whose edginess is both deniable and claimable—not one of our reporters, but one of our loosely affiliated thinkers.
That dynamic tension is mirrored in commenting policy. Most provocative bloggers push buttons and boundaries in order to provoke reader reaction, yet moderate the responses they provoked. From the perspective of the provoked, that can feel arbitrary: You casually mishandled or demeaned my beliefs, but I can’t call you or the persons who agreed with you an ugly name? That’s not fair!
On the other hand, bloggers who moderate their comments typically do so because they value the quality of the conversation…
My good friend Elliott Sober, perhaps today’s leading philosopher of science, is being roughed up by the New Atheists. Recently in a book, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?, and then in a lecture that he gave at the University of Chicago, Elliott argued that if mutations are guided by God down at the quantum level, science cannot lay a finger on this claim. I should say that I don’t think that Elliott thinks that this claim is true and also that it is not original with him. Physicist-theologian Robert J. Russell has been pushing something like this for some time now. Elliott is simply making a technical point. He wants to show that science is not all-embracing. There is room for claims of a non-scientific nature.
As a child my mother told me that dreams had projective powers: I remember details of dreams I had when I was six or seven as accurately as I recall my best friend’s telephone number.
One dream pulls me back to the nighttime fears the way a fierce undertow carries you out past the safe boundaries, past the point where you can still see the shore. I dreamed of death. I’ve since learned that most children do. Talk to a child for half an hour in calm conversation while taking a walk or making sand castles, and see whether death, heaven or hell does not come up.
In this dream I spoke to my guardian angel, pale, thin boy who looked to be not of much use.
“Do you know that some people don’t go anywhere,” said the angel, shifting transparent wings uneasily, “after they die?” “But I will,” I can hear myself say, “I will go to heaven and be with everybody from my class and from my…
Much of the commentary on the firing of Naomi Riley from The Chronicle has focused on the substance in her original post. The main charge against her is that she condemned a field without even reading the evidence and that her follow-up was glib and evasive. The main charge against the respondents is that they are mouthpieces of political correctness tossing irresponsible, ad hominem charges of racism.
The substance of Riley’s charges is an empirical matter that may be settled through, for instance, a general review of the dissertations in black studies for the last five years. That kind of study, however, if it came up with a negative evaluation, would likely provoke the same ire even if it offered a careful summary of the theses. That’s why the emotional and rhetorical side of the reaction is a topic in itself. They exceed the thing that prompted them. The…
A couple of weeks ago, while discussing the announcement of the Harvard / MIT edX initiative, I included a brief recap of what’s been happening over the last six months in the land of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), which began as follows:
Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so.
Later than day, I received an email titled “error in your blog” from a person who works in communications for Stanford, which I’m reprinting with permission. The person said:
Students who did well did not receive a certificate. Neither Stanford nor the professors issued a certificate. All students who completed the courses received a letter from the professor saying that…
United Nations Peacekeeping Missions, of which R2P would presumably constitute a subset (Wikipedia)
Writing a new edition to one of your own textbooks is a two-edged sword that leaves me suitably ambivalent. On the plus side, it’s encouraging that one’s book did well enough to induce the publisher to urge an update (even if part of the motivation is simply that used-book sales are beginning to impinge on the bottom line); on the minus, going over material that you’ve already written, and then rewritten in previous editions, can taste a bit like old chewing gum in your mouth. So it is with mixed emotions that I’ve been preparing a new third edition of Peace and Conflict Studies (Sage, co-authored with Charles P. Webel).
Then again, there are some added personal payoffs, notably the stimulus to…
Addressing the 2012 graduating class of Liberty University today Mitt Romney enthused: “[W]hat the next four years might hold for me is yet to be determined. But I will say that things are looking up, and I take your kind hospitality today as a sign of good things to come.”
Things are looking up, especially after Barack Obama’s evolving views on same-sex marriage look like they are about to send fence-sitting conservative Christians charging into Romney’s arms.
So the presumptive GOP nominee’s main job today was to further exploit the opening granted to him by his opponent (Please note: I am not necessarily saying Obama was tactically mistaken in endorsing gay marriage. I am saying that the immediate benefits accrue to Romney).
With a friendly audience in front of him, Romney did what he had to do:
Some years after I first came to Canada in 1962, the country changed from using the Imperial system of measures – pounds, gallons, miles – to the metric system – grams, liters, and kilometers. As you can imagine, there was lots of grumbling from older people, with one or two garages defying the law and refusing to change. Then, some years later, with a new party in power, a move was made to switch back to the Imperial system.
It couldn’t be done. No one under 20 had the slightest idea what was being talked about. And when they learned, they recoiled with horror. Sixteen ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, and gosh knows what number of stone in a hundredweight. Certainly not 10. The move was quietly dropped and Canada measures things in the sensible way, like the rest of the world, with one notable exception.
Fifteen years ago, Obama supported gay marriage, then he started “evolving” on the issue, and then yesterday he came out in support of gay marriage with a powerful statement that
At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Needless to say, this statement is incredibly important. As Richard Socarides wrote over at The New Yorker,
President Barack Obama’s announcement today that he fully supports marriage equality for gay and lesbian Americans is historic. It will certainly go down in record books with events like Stonewall as an important milestone in the equal-rights movement.
Whatever made the President change his mind, there is little doubt that coming out in favor of gay marriage is a political risk. How much of one remains to be seen, but the Right…
Grades are in; graduation photographs are posted on Facebook. Amanda Tinder Smith, erstwhile graduate candidate, is now Amanda Tinder Smith, Ph.D.–and will be starting work as a faculty member at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in the fall. Sam Ferrigno, B.A., has an internship at Yale University Press, where he’ll get to know Niamh Cunningham, who not only works at YUP but has completed the first year of her M.A. program in English at Yale. Next fall Lisa D is starting her M.F.A. at Columbia in play writing; three other former students will also start writing programs elsewhere.
The ceiling in my office is fixed. Nothing has fallen on my head–at least not literally–for several weeks now.
So far, so good, right? Some great recent graduates are still looking for serious work (I can supply them with excellent references) but at least we’re off to a good start for the summer…
Last Friday, representatives of Quebec’s student unions were summoned to emergency talks with the government. They were joined by college and university administrators and labor union leaders, whose goal was to hammer out an agreement that would end the 12-week long strike.
Meanwhile, members of the Quebec Liberal Party were gathering in Victoriaville, 70 miles southwest of the provincial capital, for the first day of their annual policy convention.
As negotiations began, buses shuttled thousands of students and their supporters to the Liberals’ conference. Organizers moved the convention site to a location far from Montreal in a futile effort to prevent the mass demonstrations that have occurred daily—and now nightly—in the city’s streets for months.
Clashes quickly erupted between protesters and provincial riot police. According to…
President Obama told ABC news yesterday that on the subject of same-sex marriage he has been “going through an evolution on this issue.”
He may indeed be going through an intellectual evolution in his thinking about the rights of gay people to marry. His recent remarks indicate that he has undergone a theological evolution as well. Recall that Obama cast his new-found stance on this issue as a reflection of his Christian scruples (a point I hope to explore in greater detail forthwith).
But permit me now in my capacity as a student of Faith and Values campaigning to point to a third type of evolution in his thinking: Obama’s strategists have completely given up on religious conservativesand concluded that they are irredeemably lost to Mitt Romney.
This observation needs to be properly contextualized. In 2008, Democrats were still reeling from the damage that the so-called…
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
As a child my mother told me that dreams had projective powers: I remember details of dreams I had when I was six or seven as accurately as I recall my best friend’s telephone number.
Fifteen years ago, Obama supported gay marriage, then he started “evolving” on the issue, and then yesterday he came out in
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May 16, 2012, 9:30 am
Commenting, Moderation, and Provocation
By Marc Bousquet
Not everyone writes to provoke, but provocative writing is common in the blogosphere, including the segment of blogging for traditional news and opinion outlets. Editors’ goals for bloggers resemble their aims for columnists. Generally they want to hire someone whose edginess is both deniable and claimable—not one of our reporters, but one of our loosely affiliated thinkers.
That dynamic tension is mirrored in commenting policy. Most provocative bloggers push buttons and boundaries in order to provoke reader reaction, yet moderate the responses they provoked. From the perspective of the provoked, that can feel arbitrary: You casually mishandled or demeaned my beliefs, but I can’t call you or the persons who agreed with you an ugly name? That’s not fair!
On the other hand, bloggers who moderate their comments typically do so because they value the quality of the conversation…
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