The Religious Language Newsletter
Volume 8, Issue 4 -- July/August 2007
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The Religious Language Newsletter (available by e-mail only) is
written and published every other month by Suzette Haden Elgin,
Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies
(OCLS), at PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137. For additional
information, or to unsubscribe, please e-mail ocls@madisoncounty.net.
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In This Issue: Editor's Note; Update on the New Atheists;
BookNotes; Quotes & Comments; Cyberspace; Poem -- "Disputation"
#Editor's Note
We have been having very strange weather here, but not the sort of "strange" that everyone had expected. Not blazing heat; not withering drought; not tornados or wildfires. As I type this note (on June 27th) we still haven't had any really hot weather, it has been going down to about 60 degrees every night, and we've been having one good rain after another. All the really bad storms have stopped politely at the Oklahoma/Arkansas border and made their way either north of us or south of us, giving us only very welcome rain. This is making everyone in our area uneasy, because it's just as abnormal as the summer-in-January we had earlier this year, and we can only wonder what's going to happen next.
And then there's the fact that we have no bees. For all the 27 years we've lived here, we've always had bumblebees and honeybees in abundance, often in such abundance that it made me carefully avoid planting anything that the seed catalogs identified as a "good bee plant." And this year very briefly we did have bumblebees, doing their Guard Bee duty over my violets patch -- but then we had a freakish Easter freeze, and we haven't seen a single bee of any kind since. I sincerely hope that things where you live are less marked by unsettling signs and portents.
[Update on June 28th: I am so glad to be able to report that we have now seen a bumblebee! Just one -- but thank you, Providence, for even one! One is a big improvement on none at all.]
As always, I thank you for all the excellent materials that
you've been sending me for this newsletter; I'm grateful.
#Update on the New Atheists
1. After briefly describing Gary Wolf's article, "The New Atheism," in the 11/06 issue of _Wired_ [and online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 14.11/atheism.html ], Albert Mohler writes:
"[Richard] Dawkins' new book, _The God Delusion_, reached the best-seller lists in recent weeks, and he has made media appearances on everything from the mainstream media to Comedy Central. Unlike many journalists, Wolf understands what makes Dawkins unique. It is not so much that Dawkins is attempting to convince believers that they should no longer believe in God. To the contrary, Dawkins is attempting a very different cultural and political move. He wants to make respect for belief in God socially unacceptable."
The source is Mohler's very informative article "The New Atheism?", at http://tinyurl.com/34ckz3 . Strongly recommended. The final sentence in the quote is, in my opinion, exactly right, and that is quite a bulky windmill for Dawkins to be tilting at.
2. And here is a quote from "The Church of the New Believers," in which Wolf is reporting on a discussion he had with Sam Harris, another of the New Atheists:
"We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. 'There would be a religion of reason,' Harris says. 'We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously -- a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variable of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without [expletive].' I do call it prayer. Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith."
I don't think it's possible to pray without having some addressee to pray _to_, which makes an "atheist prayer" an interesting paradox.
3. Thanks to Rebecca Haden for sending me a blogpost by Sam Harris [online at http://tinyurl.com/7qcd9 ] that begins relatively moderately. From the second paragraph:
"While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive."
This, like his later sentence "We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous", is civil enough. It's not news that many people find some religious beliefs "absurd" and/or "preposterous," and they have every right to say so. But Harris seems unable to resist the temptation to go too far. As in this section at the end of the post:
"When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world."
There is no justification whatsoever for his choice of the word "obscenity" except to incite the sort of reaction that leads to the "deepest and most dangerous fractures" he claims to deplore.
4. Here's Richard Dawkins in a particularly vicious 9/15/01 piece about the 9/11 tragedy titled "Religion's misguided missiles," at http://www. guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,552388,00.html :
"[The terrorists] had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story... My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the street with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used."
My thanks to LiveJournaler saint_monkey for sending the copy.
5. "Dawkins in the flesh bears no resemblance to the angry, hate-filled antireligionist he is portrayed as. In fact, he even believes that children should know their Bible. 'You'd be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions,' he says at the end of our chat. By then I've concluded that, by many Anglican standards, and certainly by most Einsteinian ones, Dawkins is quite religious. He would get on famously, I feel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury."
This is Ruth Gledhill, offering a different point of view, in "Richard Dawkins may be Britain's foremost atheist, but he is willing to be inspired and uplifted: Is he a believer after all?", online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ faith/article1767506.ece -- sent to me by LiveJournaler abishag. Gledhill goes on to say she believes that Dawkins' criticism of religion is "not as strong as people think," and suggests that "It sounds outspoken and strident because we are not used to religion being criticized."
I respectfully disagree. Dawkins' criticism of religious sounds "outspoken and strident" because it is consistently not just outspoken but also strident and intemperate.
6. The 6/6/07 issue of Religion BookLine had two brief items about Christopher Hitchens, author of _God Is Not Great_, and widely known as an "atheist evangelist." In "Hitchens at War with Religion," [at http://www. publishersweekly.com/eNewsletter/CA6449243/2287.html], Lynn Garrett writes: "Hitchens minced no words: 'I hate religion, and I want there to be a war on it. .... Hitchens said he was proud to join Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, calling them 'the three horsemen of the counter-apocalypse.' "
It must be frustrating to the New Atheists that so many of their best lines cannot be constructed without resorting to religious language.
And in "Hitchens Redux" [http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/ CA6449492.html?nid=2287 ], Jana Riess reports on Hitchens' performance on a panel called "Atheism: The Rise of a New Subcategory in Religion," during which he "used the session to lambast religion as 'foolish, puerile, idiotic, and wicked' and to attack those who disagreed with him, including religion scholar Karen Armstrong, who he said 'would not recognize a point if she sat on it.' "
Shades of Ann Coulter.
7. I recommend Daniel Lazare's article from the 5/17/07 _The Nation_, "What Makes an Atheist Get out of Bed in the Morning?", which you can read online at http://www.alternet.org/story/51887 . Here's a sample, immediately following a reference to the French Revolution...
"For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah.... As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late eighteenth century. But while united in their resolve to throw the bum out -- God, that is -- the antireligious forces appear to have given little thought to what to replace Him with should He go. They may not face the guillotine as a consequence. But they could end up making even bigger fools of themselves than the theologians they criticize."
8. I recommend Anthony Gottlieb's article, "Atheists With Attitude," on pp. 77-80 of the 5/21/07 _New Yorker_, (and online at http://tinyurl.com/2vmd9f ). On page 79:
"From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms -- [Sam] Harris and [Richard] Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point -- are helping to sustain the whole."
9. "What have we done," Mark Warren wants to know, to deserve the current flood of books trashing religion and everything to do with religion, including the Deity? And he answers his rhetorical question this way:
"Well, seeing as how He has had all of time to make His case to a captive humanity, and seeing as how He is accountable for several great and many not-so-great religions, and seeing as how some of the top stars of those religions are maniacs, and seeing as how He Himself is responsible for a few of the best-selling books ever, it is only right and proper that we now face the season of the down-with-God books. This is a healthy development, for the religious have not been well-behaved lately."
This is cute, and it might slide by on its cuteness, if it weren't for the fact that the question it actually answers is "What has _God_ done" to deserve "this ungodly publishing trend?" Tacking on "for the religious have not been well-behaved lately" at the end doesn't cancel out Warren's sloppy argument structure; he must have tossed off this essay between planes. And then there's the fact that the New Atheists -- who seem to me to be ever more a group impossible to distinguish from a religion -- have not been well-behaved lately either.
[The source is "Thank God for Christopher Hitchens: For He Has Written The Finest Of The Down-With-God Books" -- on page 42 of the 5/07 _Esquire_. (Notice that the title is also cute.) Ordinarily, when _Esquire_ decides to publish a piece that uses religious language you can count on it to be not only worth reading but spectacularly good; I don't know where the editors were this time. I was disappointed.]
10. Finally, to read the posts and discussion about the New Atheists movement at my blog, you'd go to http://ozarque.livejournal.com/404104.html?mode=reply, http://ozarque.livejournal.com/404877.htm, http://ozarque.livejournal.com/ 406366.html, and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/ 406689.html .
#BookNotes
1. _Journey Notes: Writing for Recovery and Spiritual Growth_, by Richard Solly and Roseann Lloyd; Harper & Row 1989. ISBN 0-06-255410-7.
I'm very late mentioning this useful book, which was a gift from Nancy Burnett and Sally Lloyd; I checked, however, and it's still available at amazon.com (which will mean that it's available through other book dealers as well). I want to quote here from Chapter 5 -- "Diamonds in the Rough: Writing Affirmations, Meditations, and Prayers," where on pp. 103-104 the authors list and discuss four barriers to being able to write prayers:
"1. _Guilt over previous desperate pleas_. This is the plea of, 'God, get me out of this one and I'll never do it again.' This guilt deserves to go to the big pit with all our other guilts.
2. _Confusion about our definition of God_. It is possible to pray without having a conscious definition of God. ... It is possible to pray without any sense of whom or what we're praying to. ...
3. _Weariness over all the pain in the world_.
4. _Guilt over a sloppy spiritual program_."
... and they follow that on page 105 with a suggested five-part template for prayer-writing.
The book is filled with fine examples of poems and essays and lists and letters .... even doodles and drawings. Recommended.
2. _The Power of Simple Prayer: How to Talk with God About Everything_, by Joyce Meyer; FaithWords/Hachette 2007. ISBN 0-446-53196-0 and 978-0-446-53196-2.
I read this book [for which I thank Diana Cook] all the way through. Every word. Not only because the subject deeply interests me, but also because I wanted to be fair to its author and to the work. Prayer is always a difficult subject to write about; a book about prayer that includes long stretches of theology is even more difficult. I've re-read some parts of the book that seemed to me to be problematical, several times, in an effort to make sure that I wasn't misunderstanding. That said, I cannot recommend this book. For reasons of space, I'm going to offer only one example of my reasons for that; it turns up at almost the very beginning of the book, on page xi. It says:
"The Bible says that we do not have certain things because we do not ask God for them (see James 4:2), and part of the great mystery of prayer is that He requires us to ask for what He already has in store for us. ... He has set in motion a spiritual law, which He Himself abides by, that says He will not do anything on earth unless someone prays and asks."
I find this truly horrifying in its potential for creating a crippling burden of guilt. There you'd be, if you took this sequence of religious language seriously, always terrified that something had not happened simply because you had failed to pray for it to happen. Heartsick because something had happened simply because you had failed to pray for it _not_ to happen. For a devout person who takes this concept seriously, it is in my opinion a sure path to a sort of compulsive-obsessive disorder in the context of prayer, and it constitutes theological malpractice on the part of its author.
Joyce Meyer -- a reliably best-selling author -- won't have any reason to be concerned about my opinion, however. The book's sales rank at amazon.com is a very robust 2,276, and every customer review posted there raves on and on about how wonderful it is.
#Quotes & Comments
1. The 5/28/07 _New Yorker_, on pp. 30-37, had an excellent article by Adam Gopnik titled "Angels and Ages: Lincoln's language and its legacy." And on page 32, after noting that "Two prominent strains of rhetoric run through the period -- the Biblical and the classical -- and political ideas tend to get tinted by whichever of them the speaker uses", Gopnik writes:
"Lincoln's rhetoric is... deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis."
And on page 33:
"His rhetorical genius lay in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity."
My thanks to Wib Smith for the copy. The article is online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528fa_fact_gopnik .
2. Thanks to Douglas Dee for sending "Why Men Don't Pray (and how to see through our own excuses)," by Fr. Thomas D. Williams, on pp. 43-46 of the Winter/Spring 2007 _Catholic Men's Quarterly_. Here's a sample from page 46, responding to the excuse that goes "I am an active sort, not a contemplative":
"Some have gone so far as to accuse contemplatives of escapism. Instead of getting their hands dirty with hard work, contemplatives would hide away in their safe, inner retreats. I think that those who indulge in such criticisms must never have tried praying. Once we strip away its romantic trappings, prayer is really _hard work_. ... Of the three types of work -- physical work, intellectual work and spiritual work -- spiritual work is the hardest."
I agree. Prayer is nourishing and necessary; it is also very hard work indeed, and one of the most common temptations I know is the temptation to skip praying. So many good reasons to skip it always present themselves.
3. The 4/16/07 issue of _Time_, pp. 44-48, had an article by Walter Isaacson titled "Einstein & Faith." On page 47, Isaacson quotes from Einstein's "What I Believe":
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
I was not surprised by this. I _was_ surprised by this section of the article on page 48, about a talk Einstein gave at a Spinoza Society meeting:
"Einstein, on the other hand, believed... that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. 'Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.' "
4. In "We're all responsible for Iraq," in the 5/9/07 _USA Today_ (online at blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/05/were_all_respon.html ) James Reston, Jr. begins by asking in what sense the average American can "be held accountable for the chaos of Iraq," goes on to write that "The philosophers tell us that there are four types of responsibility for which an individual and a society can be held to account for aggressive or unprovoked war," and then discusses each of the four: criminal guilt, metaphysical guilt, moral guilt, and political guilt. Of metaphysical guilt, he says this:
"Metaphysical guilt means that every human being is responsible for injustices committed anywhere in the world, but especially crimes that are committed in our presence and with our knowledge. When both a nation and an American citizen acquiesce in the dissolution of accepted moral norms, metaphysical guilt applies."
Reston says of the Iraq war that nobody any longer perceives it as a "noble cause." Which is not entirely accurate; there are still a few groups and a few individuals -- including the president of these United States -- who profess to hold that perception. But for most of us, I believe this guilt is a heavy burden that is only going to get heavier. My thanks to Patricia Mathews for the copy.
5. The 4/30/07 issue of _Fortune_ had a brief piece by Geoff Colvin titled "The 500 Gets Religion: Why big companies are in the business of solving the world's woes." It claims that big corporations were desperate to repair their images after the business scandals of 2001-2003; it lists a batch of things these corporations are now doing "that benefit the customer not at all, but that benefit the environment or the larger society." And it points out that this is a new business model, but that "dialing back today's high expectations" if the economy goes sour isn't going to be easy.
Colvin ends with this: "The Fortune 500 is in a new business. It's worth asking whether it knows what it has gotten itself into."
The title for this piece would infuriate the New Atheists and inspire them to further rants. Why should it be "The 500 Gets Religion?" Why the "moral behavior equals religious behavior" link? Why not "The 500 Launches A New PR Strategy?" Or "The 500 Goes Liberal"? Or "The 500 Goes Humanist?" The subtitle would have fit any of those nicely. [You can read the whole thing online at http://money. cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405462/index.htm .]
6. Thanks to Sally Lloyd for sending an interview with neuroscientist Marc Hauser, by Josie Glausiusz, on pp. 62-66 of the 4/07 issue of _Discover_. Hauser wants to "draw on an analogy with language and ask whether there might be something like a universal moral grammar, a set of principles that every human is born with. It's a tool kit in some sense for building possible moral systems. In linguistics, there is a lot of variation that we see in the expressed languages throughout the world. The really deep insight of Chomskian linguistics was to ask the question, 'Might this variation at some level be explained by certain common principles of universal grammar?' ... The analogy with morality would simply be: There is going to be a suite of universal principles that dictate how we think about the nature of harming and helping others, but each culture has some freedom -- not unlimited -- to dictate who is harmed and who is helped.' " [on page 62]
And on page 64: "There are rules for permissible killing. Who does the killing is simply a parameter in that space of permissibility."
I recommend reading the entire article; you'll find it online at http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/the-discover-interview-marc-hauser . And I want to mention, while I'm here, that Chomsky long ago (in an article in _Z_ magazine) made this same proposal.
#Cyberspace
1. Linguist List for 5/31/07 had an intriguing notice for a book edited by Allyson Jule titled _Language and Religious Identity: Women in Discourse_. Here's a quote from the abstract:
"This collection of studies from around the world connects applied linguistic research with the complexities of gender and religion. The contributors explore the ways in which women in various religious situations use language to reveal and to create a religious identity of their own, and how language itself is used to position women in particular roles. The studies come from the USA, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Canada, the UK and Poland. The varieties of engagements explored include on-line churches, small churches, emigrant experience, theological conversations and religious practice experienced in and through the media. ... "
2. Announced at http://www.christiancomicsinternational.org/cci_news.html:
"Crosswind Comics in Kansas USA has released a 48-page, full-color comic book based on the Gospel of Luke. Designed for outreach, The Amazing Gospel is available in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. ... A second printing is planned for the summer in Arabic, Indonesian, and other languages. ... For a free copy of The Amazing Gospel, write to the Gospel Tract Society at 1105 S. Fuller St., Independence MO 64050-4221 USA."
3. From the _PEN Weekly NewsBlast_ for 5/25/07:
"During a period in which the Christian Right wielded a great deal of influence in the federal and state political spheres, it appears to have been strikingly unsuccessful in its long-term efforts to push state and local school boards to adopt science curricula that include questioning the theory of evolution and teaching intelligent design as a legitimate alternative theory of creation, according to a Connecticut College researcher. Kimberly Trebbi Richards found that the Christian Right's initial short-term successes occurred through exceptionally effective development of interest group organization and lobbying techniques focused on electing or re-electing supportive officials. ... Richards examined case studies from three major state or local areas where the Christian Right was initially successful in influencing science education at the elementary or high school levels: Kansas, Georgia and Pennsylvania."
For more information, go to http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/ behold.pl?ascribeid=20070522.125620&time=14%2048 .
4. The _Internet Scout Report_ for 10/27/06 had this brief description of "In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000," at http://www. asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/ITB/html/introduction.htm :
"... This delightful interactive online exhibit ... brings together (with some nice audio commentary) a number of important early Hebrew and Christian bibles. The sections of the site tell the stories of the earliest printed Bibles and also how readings from early Bibles brought the Old and New Testaments to life in a very vivid fashion. The exhibit site is rounded out by some very fine extras, such as a bibliography, a chronology, and for those who find themselves a bit confused by all the names that are bandied about, a 'Who's Who.' "
5. Linguist List for 5/8/07 had an extremely interesting dissertation abstract focused on the "Buk Baibel" -- the Tok Pisin translation of the Bible. [Tok Pisin is a lingua franca for most of Papua New Guinea.] Author Timo Lothman discusses the history of the translation and its effects on the society and on Tok Pisin, and analyzes several of its books. Samples:
"In the course of the translation enterprise, a Church Tok Pisin register has been built up which contributes to the stylistic character of the bible. In this regard, the difficulties which can arise when translating ideologically laden source texts are shown by means of numerous text examples."
"Tok Pisin as the most important unifying element of a young heterogeneous nation has changed massively the traditional linguistic ecology on the spot. In this respect, the standardized and qualitatively outstanding Bible translation into Tok Pisin has a retarding effect on the 'natural' development of the language."
[I find the second quotation particularly interesting (despite its odd word order) because I have for many years believed that the King James Bible has had a "retarding effect"-- in the sense that Lothman is using the term -- on the Ozark English that is my native dialect.]
The full text of the abstract is at http://linguistlist.org/pubs/diss/browse-diss-action.cfm?DissID=17145 .
6. In "Will the Next Harry Potter Be a Mormon?" ( _Religion BookLine_ for 5/2/07), Juli Cragg Hilliard reports that "after a survey of 2,000 LDS readers found Potter atop their 'favorite reading' lists," Deseret Books' Shadow Mountain imprint asked Brandon Mull to write a Harry-Potter-type series for readers age 9 and up, and Mull responded with the "Fablehaven" series, which has sold a huge number of copies for a small press, and for which movie rights are now in negotiation.
Deseret Books is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
7. I'm very late with this next item; I stumbled over it by accident, in a copy of the 9-10/03 issue of _Poets & Writers,"in an article by Deborah Garrison titled "Last Words: Bringing A Poet's Final Work to Print." Garrison writes of her experience as editor for _False Prophet_, a book of psalms written by Stan Rice, who had died of brain cancer before his wife (author Anne Rice) sent in the manuscript. I recommend reading the entire article if you can locate it; it's extraordinary. Here, I'll just quote from a section on page 21 in which Garrison writes about Rice's use of the word "Selah":
"As Rice's psalms accumulate, you begin to read the word as a kind of 'So be it,' or maybe a 'Thus I set it down for you to ponder' -- a ritual utterance that recalls us to the act of writing itself, and to its sacredness, even in the face of the unanswerable questions throughout. For me, the _Selah_, as the last word on each page, also carried another meaning. These poems _were_ Stan's last words, and had to be considered finished."
She goes on to say that with the exception of a few spelling changes she published the book "exactly as he left it."
Here is a brief sequence that Garrison quotes on page 21 from "Psalm 212," the last one in the collection:
"... I was lost/and sang my broken-down songs in/ the hell of the hour,/Then in my heart moved an oar,/And I was found by a breeze from a door in the sea of forms/And was rowed to the cherry trees/on the shore./Selah. Selah."
For some of his poems and paintings, and links to more material, go to http://www.thundersandwich.com/ts15/stanrice.html .
8. _First Things_ for 4/07 had a very interesting review article by John Farrell titled "The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe." Farrell writes, of Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_, that it...
"started out as a long novella and rapidly grew to a four-volume science-fiction tour de force. The hero, Severian, is a lictor -- a professional torturer -- whose entire life had been dedicated to the infliction of agony. 'It has been remarked thousands of times,' Wolfe once said, 'that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was 'a humble carpenter' that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem to have noticed that although Christ was a 'humble carpenter,' the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip.' "
9. My thanks to Cindy Brown for an article by Michael Gilbert, at http://www.theolympian.com/news/story/120193.html , titled "Fort Lewis to consolidate memorials for dead." In which Gilbert reports that so many soldiers from Fort Lewis are now dying in Iraq that "the post will hold one ceremony for all soldiers killed each month," and that numerous other Army posts have had to make the same adjustment; the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, has lost more than 130 soldiers and has been holding group memorial services since 2004. According to Chaplain Jack Van Dyken (of Fort Lewis):
"This is not an intent to streamline the process or in any way detract from honoring the soldiers. It's just being cognizant of the fact that when you have this many, the time involved in doing each one individually is just prohibitive."
10. "Picking up her Catholic rosary, Meg Williams, a 24-year-old from Maine, begins her prayers like this: 'Hail Persephone, full of strength and beauty...' Williams calls herself a Christo-Pagan, a blend of traditional Christianity and pagan goddess worship. For her, adapting the Catholic rosary brings a peace that adhering only to the Christianity of her youth did not. 'It makes me feel very connected to God,' said Williams, who didn't want her city named because she -- like many pagans who aren't open to their families -- still lives in what some call the 'broom closet.' 'Going through this cycle of prayer, it switches your brain into recognizing that something holy is happening and God is with you,' she said."
This is from an article by Kimberly Winston titled "Retooling Rosaries For Pagan Rituals: Former Catholics Find A New Spirituality In Prayer Beads," at http://tinyurl.com/2q8tsv .
11. Thanks again to Cindy Brown, for an excellent article by Shankar Vedantam titled "If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural," from the 5/28/07 _Washington Post_, online at http://tinyurl.com/3dj24p . Vedantam discusses some of the new research in neuroscience demonstrating that making moral choices rather than immoral ones activates the human brain's reward center, and its implications for a number of fields, including theology. He writes:
"The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate."
And...
"Such experiments have two important implications. One is that morality is not merely about the decisions people reach but also about the process by which they get there. Another implication, said [neuroscientist] Adrian Raine... is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people."
12. In the context of item #11, I want to quote from a brief review of _The Spiritual Brain: How Neuroscience is Revealing the Existence of God_, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary (due out in 9/07), at http://www.publishersweekly.com/ article/CA6449501.html?nid-2287 :
"Following C.S. Lewis's dictum that to 'see through' all things is the same as not to see, neuroscientist Beauregard and journalist O'Learly mount a sweeping critique of a trend in 'the pop science media' to explain away religious experience as a brain artifact, pathology, or evolutionary quirk. ... In recently published research using Carmelite nuns as subjects, Beauregard's group at the University of Montreal found specific areas of brain activation associated with contemplative prayer. But these patterns are quite distinct from those associated with hallucinations, autosuggestion, or states of intense emotional arousal, resembling instead how the brain processes 'real' experiences. ... Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled.
13. Cyberplaces to check out: "Christian Allies Caucus Controvery In Israel," at http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/5/26/916159169 ; review of _The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition_, at http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6449501.html?nid=2287 .
#Poem
"Disputation"
Sitting in the plentitude of Arkansas,
abundantly blessed,
the old woman frets about Africa;
she fusses at the Almighty
for the abundance of misery,
in the voice she would use
with a drunken hunter on her land.
"Restrain Yourself," she mutters,
"that's what having mercy _means_."
There is nothing disrespectful about it;
she follows the patriarchs' example;
her respect for the Almighty's power is boundless.
She tries to remember how many minute organisms
she has slaughtered that morning;
she tries to remember the concept of scale.
But still.
Her purpose when she slaughters those creatures is
to keep her body fit to do the work
God has blessed her with,
and fit to work for God's good in the world.
What conceivable earthly or unearthly purpose
could there be
for the slaughter going on in Africa?
"You," she says to the Holy One,
"You get carried away."
Copyright © 2007 Suzette Haden Elgin
All rights reserved
Contact: ocls@madisoncounty.net