Strangely Warmed

Hi! This is a test

2007-02-14T20:56:00.000-05:00

Hi! This is a test post from my phone.

Ideas and tools for increasing productivity and fighting procrastination and stress

2005-12-27T00:41:00.000-05:00

Tricks and strategies culled from Boice, Fiore, and Pavlina

From Boice:

The "contingency method": in other words, make some other normal, desirable behavior, like taking a shower, contingent upon writing. Write first, shower later. No writing today, then no shower today. Presumably this would work if extended to other unpleasant tasks like grading.
Public commitments with social pressure: post some quantifiable reminder of your goals and your output in some visible place. Tell someone else what you're planning to get done, and then have them hold you accountable.

From Fiore:

The "unschedule": This is a document which is intended to show exactly how much time you actually have to get work done. To make it, you plan out a week in advance but don't actually write in tasks or work. Instead, write in everything that's not work, plus things like meetings and scheduled events at work that will take up time you might have spent on particular tasks. The point is to show how you probably have less time to get things done than you might think.

Adjusting self-talk: acc. to Fiore, there are a predictable set of things that procrastinators say to themselves, and he wants you to replace them with other things:

I have to	I choose to
I must finish	When can I start?*
This is too big	I can take one small step
I must be perfect	I can be human
I don't have time to play	I must take time to play

Schedule previously committed time, leisure time, health activities, "routine structured events" (e.g., commuting, classes, etc.)
Fill in your schedule with work only after completing a half hour of quality work
Take a break after each thirty-minute period.
Keep track of hours worked and total them at week's end.
Keep one day a week open for errands and relaxation.
Give yourself thirty minutes to work before starting on any recreation or social activity.
Think small.
Keep starting.
Never end down. ("To avoid creating poor work habits, never take a break when you're at the end of a segment or when you're ready to give up.")

Work in the flow state. This seems trickier, but it mostly means keeping yourself relaxed and focused while working. He recommends visualization and relaxation techniques to help make this easier.

From Pavlina (see esp. this page)

Keep a detailed time log. According to Pavlina, when he started logging his time (he says: "If you get up out of your chair, it probably means you need to make an entry in your time log") he discovered that he was only getting work done for 25% or less of the time he spent in the office. So his response was simply to cut down on the number of working hours and in response (he says) "[m]y brain must have gotten the idea that working time was a scarce commodity" and the ratio of productive time to time spent in the office shot up. This is a lot like Fiore's strategy of telling his clients not to work more than five hours a day or twenty hours a week on any particular project. He finds that people become more efficient this way.

What this means for me

Some key elements to keep in mind are:

Recordkeeping is going to be a key element of whatever I do. Boice, Pavlina, and Fiore all agree on its importance, both in planning (in the sense that it's the only way to develop even a semi-accurate sense of how long tasks take and how much time you have available)
Oddly enough, none of these three writers mention the planning process per se, in the sense of to-do lists, carefully delineated priorities or timelines, or whatever. However, I can't help thinking that that's going to make a big difference too.
I know perfectly well that I have to learn how to break my work down into, say, half-hour chunks. Also, I have to come up with a way of getting myself to think only about the half-hour chunk that's in front of me right now.
I think Fiore is probably right that making a firm, scheduled, non-negotiable commitment to relaxation, exercise and the like is a very good idea.
I am still looking for a simple, portable, useful way of tracking tasks and projects. See below on this.

Concrete implementation ideas (i.e., new things to do, not new ways to think):

Make an "unschedule" as described by Fiore.
Track both (1) time worked and (2) output.
Develop a simple way of keeping track of ongoing projects, "next actions," priorities, and available time.

Some thoughts on the above and associated problems:
First, Boice's "contingency method" is a great idea, but it's dependent upon being confident that I know what I should be working on. That is the first and most important problem for me. A good deal of my vulnerability stems from a persistent sense that I am focusing on the wrong things and letting the important things slide. I do have problems focusing and being productive, but before I can solve those, I also have to deal with the phenomenon of being overwhelmed by competing priorities and projects that I don't know how to balance or juggle.

Second, the ideal to-do list format still evades me. Of course I am setting myself up for a miserable disappointment if I postpone dealing with my productivity issues until I have a perfect system available to me, so I'm not going to think that way. I do, however, want to lay out a few of the most important characteristics of a good to-do list system as I imagine it:

Must be easily portable
Some part of it has to be non-electronic (ideally, I'd want to maintain and update lists online or at my computer once per day but be able to carry around a paper version to refer to and make updates on)
It should be possible to file tasks across several dimensions, e.g., priority, context, project, difficulty, time req'd., or whatever
It should be possible to save notes with each task
It should be possible to save information and supporting (reference) material by project, not by task
I want to retrieve only current (next) actions quickly and easily, without having to sort through tasks manually

Woody Guthrie: This Machine Kills Fascists

2005-12-04T16:48:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I know this is pretty random, I've been thinking about Woody Guthrie lately. His song about Sacco and Vanzetti has been running through my head. Also I came across this fantastic photo here. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version, and read the text on the guitar. What a bad-ass!

Sacco's wife three children had,
Sacco was a family man.
Vanzetti was a dreamin' man,
His book was always in his hand.

Two good men's a long time gone,
Left me here to sing this song.

Sacco earned his bread and butter
By being the factory's best shoe-cutter.
Vanzetti spoke both day and night
And told the workers how to fight.

Two good men's a long time gone ...

One Guthrie album has been in heavy rotation at my house for quite some time: Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child. Who would have thought? These are lullabyes and children's songs he apparently used to sing to his son Arlo. They are marvellously affectionate at times. This is right up there with Ella Jenkins 'a Jambo for children's music that doesn't insult the intelligence or good taste of parents or children.

Bonus: Here's a poster designed by Ben Shahn on the Sacco-Vanzetti execution (thumbnail below right).

Another test

2005-12-04T01:51:00.000-05:00

A test of posting via Ecto

[composed and posted with ecto]

Filed in: test, blogging

2005-11-05T13:46:00.000-05:00

I am fooling around with Flock (when I should be working on a pre-tenure review ... never mind!) and I want to see if their built-in blogging interface works here ...

2005-11-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Checking to see if the blogging topbar from Flock can successfully post to this blog. Bear with me, please. If it can, it'll be awesome ... Flock is a nice, smooth browser with a couple great features.

technorati tags: test, geekery

Halloween 2005

2005-11-04T01:58:00.000-05:00

Halloween 2005 (2)
Via Flickr - this photo belongs to myroblyte.

The piglet, dressed up as a lion for Halloween.

Time management, stress management, and life management for academics; or, This is not an abandoned blog

2005-11-04T01:52:00.000-05:00

Since I haven't posted anything here in five weeks or so, after keeping up a regular schedule of about two or three posts a week before that, one might fairly presume that Strangely Warmed has grown strangely cold. Well, um, all I can say is, I've been busy. Actually, it's been kind of a hellacious semester thus far. I've been keeping my stress level pretty well under control, but I am still overworked, massively so, and I don't feel that I've been able to keep sufficiently motivated to stay on top of my most important work. I'm almost a month behind on grading, many moons behind (after several postponements) on a couple of important book reviews, and a couple of weeks behind on a major pre-tenure review document. This just by way of documentation. So, blogging has kind of receded in importance.

At this point, I'm more or less just popping back in to say "Hi". I did sort of half-watch the Apprentice tonight. Normally I wouldn't mention this except that it was about, of all things, teaching. The contestants, who are divided up into two teams, each had to desigen a one-day seminar for the adult education company The Learning Annex. They chose a topic and planned the execution, and after it was over, participants rated them on "educational merit," "entertainment value," and "presentation." The team with the lower average score lost, and a member of that team was fired. Not to stretch a point or anything, but are there other educators out there who find this kind of, well, revealing? For one thing, this is the only episode I've seen (admittedly I've only seen a couple) where the final measurement of who won and who lost isn't in terms of money, suggesting that the rating system sort of stands in for cash value. Okay, so I am in the throes of writing up a pre-tenure self-evaluation, but I often feel like I'm being rated on entertainment value and presentation, and that these are immediately and directly translatable into something akin to a cash value. Those little computerized evaluation forms that the students fill out at the end of the semester — a friend of a friend calls those "customer satisfaction surveys."

So the "entertainment" component is annoying. More significantly, though, if this is the primary model that people have in their mind about education, it seems unsurprising that students should be averse to being challenged, confronted, or forced to think (not forced to work, mind you) by a professor. You're paying for a service, after all, and being confronted with confusing, uncomfortable cognitive dissonance doesn't feel like the product you ordered. Being made to work hard is a little different; after all, people pay for personal trainers all the time. I think that many of my students (and, probably, their parents) have a kind of coach or personal-trainer paradigm at the foundation of their thinking about education: they pay to have someone make them into a better, fitter, stronger person by really putting them through their paces, giving them lots of tough hoops to jump through — but it should always be obvious how the activity being performed helps lead to the desired goal. At no point should the coach or trainer suggest that you need to rethink your goals. However, if you subscribe to any kind of Socratic-type idea of what education is for, then you have to be open to the possibility that it includes moments of aporia, moments where students feel frustrated or even angry because they don't see the point of what they're doing. This would have to be a necessary step towards real, pardon the expression, enlightenment.

Hey, maybe I am the next Friedlander after all

2005-09-20T11:01:00.000-04:00

I just uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr. They are from a recent stroll through the ass-end of the neighborhood where I live.

see the rest of this set at www.flickr.com

Filed in: image personal

Nicely posed photo of GWB with firefighters (but why aren't they out rescuing people?)

2005-09-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

Photo of Bush and firefighters in Biloxi from Reuters, Sept. 3, via Yahoo News

If you read this article from the Salt Lake Tribune (linked via Daily Kos), this kind of photo-op bullshit looks a lot less innocent. In the meantime, FEMA is prohibiting reporters from photographing the dead. I recall a famous quotation from John DiIulio, a very interesting character, who remarked to Ron Suskind in an Esquire article from January 2003 that

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus... What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Smart guy, that DiIulio.

Filed in: katrina outrage politics

Welcome NAASR members; apologia for my anonymity

2005-09-18T01:12:00.000-04:00

I understand that a link to this site has gone out on the NAASR mailing list. Welcome, welcome all. To give a brief self-introduction, I'm a junior faculty member at a small, Middle Atlantic, all-undergraduate liberal arts college, which, I suppose, it would be poor breeding to refer to as "second-tier." My training is in the history of Christianity, but, no doubt like many of you, I now do a little of everything at my current institution while struggling to keep my hand in with research. As it happens, MTSR is pretty much the only journal I read cover-to-cover, though it sometimes makes me sputter. Anyhow, browse away. I use this blog to jot down random thoughts on religion and religious studies, especially as they creep into the political discourse, the media and popular culture; but also my reactions to scholarly work I run across, miscellaneous details of my personal life (like how I learned to get my infant son to sleep through the night or my various struggles with developing a decent time management strategy), political screeds, and various tools and toys I've found online or elsewhere (see the next post down). As an experiment, I also decided to keep a separate teaching diary at another site. If you're interested, feel free to visit; linked headlines are reproduced in the brown box in the sidebar under the title "Cephalophore."

It's late, and I'm on my way to bed, but I feel the need to offer a sort of excuse for writing an anonymous blog, which in my view violates some of the core principles of both academia and the Web. Ideally we want everything to be open and transparent, to allow for review, and to foster accountability — don't we? Well, there's a simple reason why I don't give my name here, though — not knowing much about Internet security and so forth — I imagine it wouldn't be hard to track me down if you were determined. Mainly I want to keep the blog non-Google-able at least until after my successful, knock on wood, tenure review, which is coming up in a couple years. In case you missed it, the Chronicle ran a story not long ago (under the pseudonymous byline of "Ivan Tribble," which all of a sudden strikes me as a little ironic) called "Bloggers Need Not Apply." According to Ivan Tribble, you are basically committing suicide on the academic job market if you are keeping or have ever kept a blog. The money quote is:

You may think your blog is a harmless outlet... [but t]he content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Don't get me started on the bizarre illogic of those committee members' concerns (though Ivan Tribble's odd hostility towards anyone who knows too much about computers suggests that he might be talking about himself). But the point here is, if the Paper Of Record for Academe has issued such a strong fatwa against blogging, then I'm not going to reveal any more of my identity than I'm comfortable with until I'm damn sure I'm never going to be on the job market again (i.e., at least until after tenure). I try to be civil and more or less professional online, but hell, it is an online diary; I do talk about whatever strikes my fancy, and while I make a point of never saying anything about anyone I wouldn't repeat directly to their faces, I do use cuss words and talk about politics and other impolite things. So, gentle reader, if you do puzzle out who I am and where I work — that is, in the unlikely event that you're interested enough to do so — you'll be doing me a great favor if you keep it quiet until, oh, February 2009 or so. Thank you kindly.

Oh, and by the way, I've been finding blogging to be fun, and kind of addictive. I recommend it, if the Chronicle doesn't scare you too badly. And for the most part, you can do it for free, without any technical knowledge. Get in touch with me (you can send me an email at myroblyte at gmail dot com) in the very unlikely event that you should want my advice. Beyond blogging, there are a number of simple but promising collaboration tools popping up around the web. Some other time I'll talk about the Religious Studies Wiki that I want to develop (the almost completely empty front page of which can be found here).

Filed in: personal academe blogging

Get your own church sign

2005-09-16T01:17:00.000-04:00

I've always wanted my own church sign. Now you can get yours at
www.churchsigngenerator.com.

You are lucky, now you can learn about my teaching adventures

2005-09-15T00:39:00.000-04:00

Another new feature has been added to the blog. If you scroll down slightly, in the right sidebar just under the "profile" link, you'll see a new grey box titled "Cephalophore." This is my online teaching diary, where I intend to post notes after each class (or each day of teaching). Click on the post titles to visit the blog page. The address is cephalophory.blogsome.com. Cephalophore is another favorite word of mine, along with myroblyte. (In case you have been wondering, a myroblyte is a holy person, most commonly a dead one, whose person exhibits at least one of the following characteristics: incorruptibility — i.e., his or her corpse does not decay —; his or her body emits a sweet smell; and milk or honey instead of blood, pus or other bodily fluids may be released from his or her orifices or wounds. I'm not making this up, I swear, though I suppose it's possible my memory is off in a few of the details. I'll save the definition of cephalophore for another day.)

Filed in: academe blogging

Return of the repressed: the barnyard epithet

2005-09-13T15:21:00.000-04:00

Vice President Dick Cheney cursed at Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, in a confrontation on the Senate floor while members were having their annual group picture taken earlier this week... According to [an] aide, Mr. Cheney... responded with a barnyard epithet, urging Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility.
(From the Washington Times, login required)

Anyone remember back in June 2004 when Dick Cheney told Senator Pat Leahy to fuck himself? (His spokesperson commented as follows: "Reserving the right to revise and extend my remarks, that doesn't sound like language the vice president would use, but there was a frank exchange of views.") Apparently he's recently gotten a taste of his own medicine, from a fairly wacky sounding Gulfport physician named Ben Marble. Story is here, and a CNN video has been posted online here. Ben Marble's own fairly loopy-looking website is at HurricaneKatrinaSucked.com.

Filed in: katrina politics sick humor

More on Katrina

2005-09-12T22:39:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I listened to This American Life, the 9/11/05 show. By the time it was over, I was shaking, literally, and my wife was in tears. There was a lot that was disturbing, but what mainly got me were the two stories about people not being allowed to leave the New Orleans convention center. One account was from Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, the latter of whom spoke with Ira Glass by phone. These are two San Francisco-based EMTs who had been attending a conference, were turned out of their hotel when power and food ran out, and found themselves shut out of all shelters and turned back from every route out of the city. Their original story is posted at the Socialist Worker Online site. Their account is pretty melodramatic and tends to lionize the "working class" of the city and to paint a fairly rosy picture of how regular folks helped one another out, so much so that it seems difficult to believe at times. Critics on various sites have made much of the fact that the authors are "card-carrying," as it were, socialists or whatever and therefore untrustworthy, that they insert a few jabs at Bush into their story, that they accuse Southern governments and law enforcement agencies of racism — c'est incroyable! — and that various details seem implausible — one long discussion spent a great deal of time on the fact that the authors refer to military rations as C-rations and not MREs as if this somehow cast doubt on their story.

The internet is full of stories about this stuff, so I'm not going to post a whole catalogue of links. But as far as I can tell, it is pretty much an uncontested fact that police from neighboring jurisdictions, six days after the hurricane struck, were actively preventing people — dehydrated, starving, and helpless people of all ages — from walking across the bridges that connected New Orleans to the outside world. Even Fox News had something about this (a compressed version of the video can be seen by following the links at this blog site. The police chief of the neighboring (and mostly white) town of Gretna confirmed to UPI that he had closed the bridges into his city. "We evaucated our people and locked the city down," he said, adding that "[i]f we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged." (See also this NYT article, which gives a few more details; may not be available online for long.) I can't help noticing the language: our people.

The other story was if anything more upsetting. Where the Slonsky and Bradshaw story portrays a desperate group of people looking for a way out and being thwarted, this one shows people trapped for days in an increasingly hellish situation. This was the phoned-in account of Denise Moore, an Army veteran who was also in the convention center. Her story is posted online at Daily Kos. She described being treated more or less as a prisoner. Besides the squalid and dangerous conditions, which were well-known to everyone (except Michael Brown) from the beginning, she recounted a series of humilitating and terrifying experiences: being made to line up in the heat for hours, over and over again, to wait for buses that never came; watching people literally die all around her; seeing water trucks repeatedly pass by the convention center without stopping, and trucks full of National Guardsmen zoom past with their weapons aimed at the evacuees. According to her, the looters were actually keeping the rest of the people in the convention center alive by distributing water, food, and diapers. Authorities kept sending buses to drop more and more people off at the center, but no one ever brought supplies. Again, when groups tried to walk out of the city via the nearby bridge, they were threatened and turned back by armed personnel. The rumor began spreading that the government was planning to open the floodgates and drown everyone. Rational people were beginning to be convinced that the government had "brought them there to die" or even to be killed. As dehydration set in, people became delirous, and some assumed that any police or military who approached were there specifically to do them harm. It just sounds like the most horrific, week-long hell of suffering, degradation, violence, and insanity. From everything I've read, it's completely believable, and not only that, it was preventable.

This was the story that really made me sick. Anyhow, I had a couple of reflections about it. First, as horrific as it is, I can't imagine that it will ever be widely publicized in the national media — largely because it is so horrific and extreme. People are unwilling to confront the possibility that the government — the people who are supposed to be able to take care of things in a massive crisis like this — can be not only catastrophically incompetent but callous to the point of viciousness, of murderousness. And this makes me wonder about the meaning of "truth" in a culture like ours. Assuming these accounts are true, I predict that most people will never know about them, not because there's some massive media conspiracy covering it up, but because people simply don't want to hear it. Why should the news media be saddled with the responsibility for destroying the moral underpinnings of people's worldview (in this case, the idea that the government is basically solicitous of the needs of its citizens in an emergency; that people in uniforms are really there to help us; and that the guys with guns are really better than the rest of us — more mature, tougher, trained somehow, because of the massive responsibility of wielding deadly force)? I believe that most people can't stand to have their illusions shattered too radically, and that's why they'll just change the channel. I'm no exception. Confronted with overwhelming evidence that my own elected representatives are capable of great evil, or are capable abandoning me in a crisis, is more than I can handle most of the time — I mean, listen to me now, I'm getting all worked up, and I don't like that. This is why, I think, none of my students have ever heard of depleted uranium munitions — it just causes too much cognitive dissonance to imagine that their own government has been using chemical weapons against innocent civilians in conflicts for a decade or more, and it's not widely reported.

The other thing is this: I keep thinking back to Joe Carter's post at the evangelical outpost a short while back. The post was titled, "The Battle for New Orleans: Is it Morally Licit to Shoot Looters?" I mentioned this in an earlier post. I finally realized what bugs me about this: the completely unthinking identification of moral authority and ethical subjectivity and agency, on the one hand, with political and material power, on the other. There was no discussion of the question, "Is it morally licit to loot?," except in a completely sideways fashion (i.e., it was discussed as it pertained to the question of when it would not be O.K. to shoot looters, viz., when they were stealing things they needed for survival or whatever). The various participants in the discussion basically placed themselves in two roles: the role of policeman (by speculating on the permissabilty of shooting various classes of lawbreakers or otherwise disruptive characters) or the role of property-owner (by trading quips along the lines of, "So you think it's not O.K. to shoot looters? I guess we should send them all to your house!"). It's as if the people trapped in desperate situations are not capable of making moral decisions at all, given this kind of rhetorical construct. Say you're a poor Black person stuck in the convention center: your options, morally speaking, are to sit tight and wait for help, or become a criminal and therefore morally condemned to death (because, after all, the highest necessity is "restoring order," even before people can be rescued).

Finally, conservative protestations of "playing the race card" notwithstanding, I think Denise Moore's story has an important lesson for middle-class white people all around the country. I challenge everyone: imagine what kind of life you would have had to have led, what kind of mental world you would have to inhabit, in order to be able, completely rationally, to believe that your government was planning to exterminate you because of your race (or your class, maybe). Just try to imagine that. Most people are going to hear that and think, "That's crazy, the government doesn't want to kill black people; why would it?" But the thing is, these people are not crazy; there has to be another explanation for their beliefs. What is it, folks? Can you guess?

I'm kind of ranting at this point, because I'm quite tired and I've been writing for some time. But this has really been bothering me for days.

P.S. In case you haven't seen it, though, this is a really fascinating blog on what's been going on in New Orleans, written by an ex-Special Forces soldier who now does security for DirectNIC (I think). For further details of the horrendous situation inside the convention center as of a week and a half ago, see this post. Excerpt: "[A]ny attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them... Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint... 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids." And (via a link from his blog) this wiki contains a huge collection of information, images, and resources; worth a look.

Filed in: katrina politics

Time to churn out another mediocre conference paper

2005-09-10T14:08:00.000-04:00

Damn, I just discovered I'm on the program for the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference! Who's in charge here anyhow? Shouldn't someone have emailed me that my proposal was accepted? Sigh. I guess, since I never really submitted a formal proposal, and probably no one had my email address, I should have realized it was my job to check. Anyhow, time to get cracking! I've got two weeks. Gotta buy those plane tickets, too. Hopefully it won't really be "mediocre," but I'm quoting an old friend of mine, who once told me that he had decided to swear off academic meetings until he could get a new article into a peer-reviewed journal, and commented wryly, "You know, you could just go on giving mediocre conference papers for the rest of your career."

In the unlikely event that you, gentle reader, are interested in seeing what goes on at the Sixteenth Century Studies conference, you may click on this link to see a PDF of the entire program.

Filed in: personal research dysfunction

Spinning Katrina

2005-09-05T22:02:00.000-04:00

This New York Times article describes the political strategy "rolled out" this weekend by Rove and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. Pretty sickening, even for this administration. The strategy seems to be:

put recognizable faces on the ground in the region (Rice and Rumsfeld, not Chertoff or Brown);
don't permit discussion of the past, but focus on the future and on what's happening now;
rein in Republican public statements so as to avoid seeming to "play politics";
and stay on message by blaming state and local officials (all Democrats, by gum!) for the mismangement of the crisis (i.e., it is the federal government's role to "support" state and local efforts, which were not forthcoming).

Some choice quotations:

In many ways, the unfolding public relations campaign reflects the style Mr. Rove has brought to the political campaigns he has run for Mr. Bush. For example, administration officials who went on television on Sunday were instructed to avoid getting drawn into exchanges about the problems of the past week, and to turn the discussion to what the government is doing now.... One Republican with knowledge of the effort said that Mr. Rove had told administration officials not to respond to Democratic attacks on Mr. Bush's handling of the hurricane in the belief that the president was in a weak moment and that the administration should not appear to be seen now as being blatantly political. As with others in the party, this Republican would discuss the deliberations only on condition of anonymity because of keen White House sensitivity about how the administration and its strategy would be perceived.
In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
"The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials."

Nice to know Rove is back in the saddle. I feel safer already. Too bad about all the dead people, but then again, they stubbornly refused to leave, right?

Filed in: katrina politics

Looters and foragers

2005-09-05T17:36:00.000-04:00

In the aftermath of Katrina: black people photographed carrying groceries are looters; white people photographed carrying groceries are resourceful foragers. Image stolen directly from bird's eye view blog; this one was too good not to post. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.

Filed in: katrina image

I am going to have a book contract any minute now

2005-09-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

Here's the FedEx tracking report for my book contract. It should be delivered to my publisher's doorstep within hours. Yeehaw! Tenure, here I come.

Filed in: personal

On New Orleans and Katrina

2005-09-04T22:47:00.000-04:00

As usual, it's late, and there are things I ought to be doing, but for much of the last week I've been following the news from the south with horror. I'm interested in the way things like this get portrayed in the media, and in the way people think about them in a religious or metaphysical framework, so I was looking at blogs like GetReligion and the evangelical outpost. A couple of observations:

One of the first things that the evangelical outpost wanted to talk about was whether it was OK to shoot looters. Why, I wonder, was this the most pressing question that came to mind?For an example of what I'm talking about, first read Joe Carter's post and then read through the voluminous comments attached to it. Mine is number 56, and a gentleman by the name of MikeT responds to me in comment number 67. I commented, half tongue-in-cheek, but only half, that there seems to be an extraordinary concern with keeping people from taking big-screen TVs that don't belong to them.
On the other hand, then you see things in the news like this: "Kenny Lason, 45, a dishwasher at Pat O'Brien's, a French Quarter restaurant famous for its signature 'Hurricane' cocktail, took a long slurp out of a bottle of Korbel extra-dry champagne. He broke a store window to get it, and he is not ashamed. 'They wasn't giving us nothing,' he said. 'You got to live off the land.'" This is what looting looks like close up, I suppose, and it's not hard to imagine that a person who believes he has been abandoned to die by the authorities wouldn't feel particularly bad about stealing a bottle of expensive liquor that he'd never be able to afford under ordinary circumstances.
Something that turns my stomach: more stage-managing by Bush and his associates. This is directly from the ZDF, one of the major German TV stations:
"Wo der US-Präsident das Katastrophengebiet besuchte, räumten Hilfstrupps vorher ordentlich auf - aber nur dort. Aus Biloxi zitierte ZDF-Korrespondentin Claudia Rüggeberg verzweifelte Einwohner, Bush solle in seinen Limousinen statt lauter Bodyguards und Assistenten lieber Hilfsgüter herbeischaffen. Entlang seiner Route hätte Räumtrupps vor Bushs Besuch Schutt weggeräumt und Leichen geborgen. Dann sei Bush wieder abgereist 'und mit ihm', so Rüggeberg, 'die ganzen Hilfstrupps'. An der Lage in Biloxi habe sich sonst nichts verändert, es fehle an allem."
A rough translation: "Wherever the President visited the afflicted area, troops cleared things up nicely beforehand -- but only there. In Biloxi, ZDF correspondent Claudia Rueggeberg quoted desperate residents saying that Bush should have brought supplies, rather than a staff of bodyguards and assistants, in his limousine. Troops were assigned to clear away debris and conceal corpses along Bush's route. When Bush departed, 'the emergency troops left with him,' according to Rueggeberg. The situation in Biloxi remains the same; all supplies are lacking." The video of this report, which is in German, can be viewed here, and the quotation that US bloggers are drawing from can be found at War and Piece.
This is from a recent press release from Mary Landrieu's office. She is a Democratic senator from Louisiana. This is via Americablog.
"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government."
The whole "blame game" phenomenon. The Bush administration and its supporters blame state and local government for ineffective planning and for failing to take the necessary steps to bring federal aid to the area, and announces that "We will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives." (Rhetorically, I suppose, he's appealing to his "base" -- he's just a good guy trying to do the right thing, but all those politically correct regulations, and those bull-headed Dem politicians, are stopping him from doing what he needs to do.)Meanwhile Mayor Nagin is crying and raging on the radio (listen, if you can stand it). I've been startled by the willingness of ABC and other networks to mention the possibility that race was a factor, but in lots of other places this suggestion is decried as "race-baiting."
Related to the race point: interesting that so much of the coverage of New Orleans focuses on its otherness. You see only black faces. The lamentation of its passing centers on its uniqueness, on its difference from other American cities, on its special laid-back attitude, on its French, Caribbean and African heritage, on its distinctive cultural achievements (music and food). Hell, it's the city of Anne Rice's vampires, right? .... Imagine, on the other hand, that a disaster of this magnitude, or even, say, a tenth of this magnitude, had hit Disney World, which, if Wikipedia is to be believed, gets somewhere upwards of thirty million visitors per annum and has been closed a couple times due to close brushes with hurricanes (they were especially nervous about Hurricane Floyd in 1999). Disney World attracts as visitors middle-class family from all over thecountry. Imagine how that would play in the papers. Instead of being portrayed as exotic and different, we would no doubt be treated to visions of how Disney World is a tiny microcosm of America, and how the people trapped there and in danger of their lives could be any of us. I don't know. My point isn't to call the media racist, or the government, or anyone else. And I've been kind of rattled by the Black Congressional Caucus's (if I remember right) lashing out at people for using the word "refugee." But it's easy to imagine how the blackness, the poverty, and the otherness of Louisiana make it more possible for TV viewers around the country to distance themselves emotionally from the catastrophe. Sure, they're writing checks. But if all those faces on the screen were white, what would the response have been like?
Last Thursday, Bush told Good Morning America that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate [he meant anticipate] a serious storm, but these levees got breached." Maybe Bush didn't know this, but as is well established by now, this is just, pardon me, a bunch of bullshit. This is a scenario that had been talked about for years. See this link. The title and subtitle pretty much sum it up: "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming. In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war." Sure, it's Blumenthal, and he's biased, but ... come on. In addition, the whole line about the Federal government's hands being tied is nonsense, given the stipulations in the DHS's own planning (link to PDF at DHS site; excerpts here).

There was a remark about a related phenomenon on NPR earlier today to the effect that we live in a democracy, and democracies don't deal well with contingency planning. People would rather not vote for, and elected officials would rather not ask for, a tax increase to protect against a disaster that may or may not ever come about. Especially to protect someone else who is probably poor, dark-skinned, and far away, and therefore easier to blame for his or her own problems. This isn't about blame; it's something we all, as good citizens committed to democracy, ought to ponder.
And then, of course, it had to happen: "Hurricane Katrina has put an end to the annual celebration of sin." Repent America, LifeSite, and Agape Press have all pointed out how Katrina has helped put an end to the wickedness of New Orleans (homosexuality and abortion in particular). Michael Brown, of SpiritDaily.com, writes that "The very name 'Katrina' means pure and that is what is now in progress."

Filed in: politics katrina musings

Survived the first 48 hours of the fall semester

2005-08-30T23:59:00.000-04:00

Okay ... each of my classes has met once, and there's been substantive discussion in each ... nothing catastrophic has happened yet.

I wonder, has anyone ever written a book on "time management for academics" (besides Robert Boice ... who, by the way, apparently identifies himself as a Buddhist?) I need one. I'm so damn disorganized ...

Filed in: personal dysfunction

Freshblog: Tagging with BlogThis!

2005-08-30T08:26:00.000-04:00

From Freshblog: a bookmarklet for automatically adding del.icio.us tags to Blogger posts made via the BlogThis window. This post is a test of the method.

It doesn't automate the process of posting to del.icio.us, but even though I don't know any Javascript, I think I might be able to combine it with the method I'm using now to automate that as well. I'll post something here if I figure it out.

Freshblog: Tagging with BlogThis!:

If you want to add technorati tags your posts in blogthis!, this bookmarklet is the tool for you!!!

Here's two other versions of the bookmarklet that are integrated with del.icio.us. Both include the rel="tag" attribute that enables tag search services to identify the links as tags. The first points to an individual's del.icio.us account (in this case, mine) & is useful for generating the technorati / del.icio.us combo tags that are the crucial tool for the categories method used here.

Filed in: blogging, tools

Divers musings

2005-08-28T19:04:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow's the start of fall classes, and while I'm nowhere near as stressed as I have been in past semesters, I feel quite unprepared for the upcoming months and remorseful over what I failed to accomplish over the summer break. For some reason this poem has been on my mind:

Poem for the Old Year

January. The archer aims at himself.
His target is the eye of a fish. River
is frozen. Field rises in mists of lost
desire and steams the sealed sky open.
Fish be ruby-weeping. Fish be nailed
through scale onto door of silver birch.
Over the mountain beaten boy searches
for his teeth inside a clump of brambles.
The sound of thorns through his skin
is mercy. The sound of a beautiful fish
being nailed to a door is mercy, mercy.
Nobody knows the origin of music,
or who wind pitches for between rock
and rock like a bronco heart kicking
in its cage. Breeze seduces bow. Bow
abandons arrow. Boy finds shelter
in thicket and hears music of his breath
through ugly, twisted thistles. Come
home. It's time to begin again. A boy
is nailed to the door and a fish is aimed
at an archer, mountain is weeping rubies
onto frozen river while wind grinds
two new teeth. Who are you
inside the music of another's suffering?
When I was a nail I loved only
the hammer. When I was a breeze I died
on a door. When I was a fish
I swam without knowing not yet, or last
breath, or shore.
From Tessa Rumsey, Assembling the Shepherd (Athens [GA]: U of Georgia P, 1999), p. 55.

While I'm at it, here's another one I keep thinking about, this one by Denise Levertov.

What Harbinger?

Glitter of grey
oarstrokes over
the waveless, dark
secretive water.
A boat is moving
toward me
slowly, but who
is rowing and what
it brings I can't
yet see.
From Denise Levertov, Sands of the Well (NY: New Directions, 1996), p. 3.

Nothing much else to report. I have to revise syllabi tonight. I feel strangely warmed, err, that is, I feel strangely calm. Tomorrow the shit really hits the fan, though.

The two other things that have been on my mind lately, in the way of contemporary events, are intelligent design and Cindy Sheehan. Oh, and also Pat Robertson, but he's just kind of a blowhard that doesn't merit a lot of thought. (Though if you're interested in a closer look at his career -- which is actually much stranger than I thought -- the place to go is Christianity Today's weblog entry on the subject.)

About intelligent design: why is no one talking about the class component of the issue (educated pinheads versus reg'lar folks)? It seems disingenuous to pretend that this debate is actually happening on the merits of the ideas. It's a turf battle about who gets to control (primarily) the schools, it seems to me. This quotation, from George Wallace, is on point here:

"[Americans are] fed up ... with strutting pseudo-intellectuals lording over them, writing guidelines, ... telling them they have not got enough sense to know what is best for their children or sense enough to run their own schools and hospitals and local domestic institutions."
(Qtd. from Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (an incredible book), p. 38.

The statistic that two-thirds of Americans, or thereabouts, believes that the human race was divinely created gets tossed around a lot, which makes me think, so what? (Polls also suggest that a majority believes that if you drop a weight out of a moving car, it will travel either straight down or in the opposite direction to the car ... but we don't teach that in physics class.) The appeal to popular belief betrays a lack of understanding of what education is about, as does the recent spate of attempts to introduce "student bills of rights" (essentially attempts to ensure that students hear the views they like). No sense of the notion of an ongoing educated discourse, of the value of academic disciplines, or of the power of argument to change minds.

Also: why is no one talking about the problem that design, chance, etc. are concepts pertaining to a will -- which is explicitly not an idea that has any meaning within the language framework of the natural sciences. ID advocates seem to want to have it both ways: on the one hand, arguing that their position is "scientific"; on the other, arguing that "materialism" is the problem ... but materialistic assumptions form the foundation for the scientific discourse they claim to be participating in! In other words, as soon as you introduce the language of design, you are talking about teleology and about a controlling, non-observable will ... and thus you have ceased to speak the language of science and have entered the realm of metaphysics. IDers claim to be talking about science and not religion, but philosophically speaking, the concept of "design" itself has no meaning in scientific language, as science attempts to explain observable phenomena in terms of other observable phenomena. Consciousness, intelligence, and especially will don't fit the bill in this context.

Re Cindy Sheehan ... I find myself pretty uncomfortable with the idea that she possesses an inherent moral authority due to her son's death. What impresses me even more is the level of viciousness and rage that her protest seems to evoke. Driving over crosses; calling her names; ... it's all so brutal, really, on all sides, and it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about regular people who have suffered unimaginable (for most of us) loss.

Filed in: literature musings politics religion intelligent design

Ishiguro and Sebald at Searchblog

2005-08-23T01:48:00.000-04:00

"Two złotys (fifty cents) for a shit and one złoty (twenty-five cents) for a piss."

W at Searchblog discusses Sebald and Ishiguro. Makes me remember reading The Unconsoled with H in the Hotel Castex in Paris. Probably the only really romantic thing I've ever done in my life, at least in any kind of conventional sense. And I still feel like I ought to be able to incorporate The Rings of Saturn into my own work somehow ... Sebald does such a great job at describing a version of reality in which everything is invested, not so much with meaning as with what I always call meaningfulness. His images aren't so much symbols as they are freighted with a kind of charge of uncanniness. It's like he's constantly negotiating the boundary between a dream-world in which everything means something but you never know what, on the one hand, and a world in which destruction, or better, decay and deterorioration is everywhere, and you have to fight to keep things from slipping into total shrieking absurdity. And pain ... he always seems to hold pain at a genteel distance somehow. Very German. I still want to read his Zürich lectures on "Air War and Literature" one of these days...

Filed in: literature blogging

Z hardly ever cries, but ...

2005-08-23T00:32:00.000-04:00

... sometimes he does, and it's cute. Is it perverse of me to say so? I think as he starts to realize the power he has over his parents it'll stop being cute and start getting more whiny and fussy. So, I decided to document the cuteness. I only let him cry for about three minutes while I took these photos, then I picked him up and comforted him. That's not mean, is it?

Click on the arrows to move forward and backward; click on the big image to see larger views and more pictures (this little doodad shows less than half of them). Image hosting courtesy of Imageshack.

Filed in: parenting image

Riddle me this: What is the difference ...

2005-08-22T22:25:00.000-04:00

... between this sign ...

(Exhibit A)

... and this one?

(Exhibit B)

Oh, I know what you're thinking. "The difference is that one of them is a bunch of ideological, propagandistic bullshit, and the other one is a bona fide expression of goodwill!" (And if you did think that, I wouldn't know which one you thought was which!) Well, maybe. But I think there's something else going on, which is kind of interesting from the point of view of political rhetoric.
Continued ... click below on "Post Page" to view the rest.

Ever since the war in Iraq began, I've been fascinated by the difference between these two slogans, which you can see all over the place (admittedly, in semi-rural PA, the top image, the one I've labelled "image A," is a lot more common). The phrases are almost identical: "come home" versus "bring them home." But the rhetorical differences are immense. I'm sure there is not asingle reader who could come across either of these two signs (and understand that they were referring to Iraq), and not be able to guess with high accuracy where the sign's owner stands politically with regard to the war and the present administration's policies more generally. Sign A individually or collectively "addresses" the troops, fictitiously, and sign B, just as fictitiously of course, "addresses" the commanders and political leaders responsible for the war. By "fictitiously" I simply mean that the soldiers and leaders in question will probably never see the signs or flags; the people that are going to read them and think about their messages are neighbors, passers-by, ordinary citizens. The imperative form — the commanding tone, as in "bring!" or "come!" — is assumed for purely rhetorical purposes, i.e. to convince the reader of some idea — not to convince them to "bring the troops home" or "come home" themselves. This is obvious, of course, though in my experience people don't tend to think about it, because naturally no one reading the signs is likely to have the power to carry out either command. (On a side note, this makes such slogans different from, say, "Eat at the Liberty Diner" or "Vote No on Proposition Three," where there is a clear, obvious, and direct connection between the message and the hoped-for action on the part of the recipient. People driving or walking by might really go to the Liberty for lunch or think about voting No on the referendum.)

Anyhow, what's interesting about this, I think, is that the first one, the "supportive" or "non-opposition" one (for lack of a better word), sign A, phrases its injunction in a way that pretends — I don't know how else to put it — that the troops actually have a choice as to whether or not they "come home soon," where of course we all know that they don't — there are probably many of them who'd like to come home tomorrow, but they don't actually have that option open to them right now. The "opposition" one, sign B, suggests by its phrasing that there is someone who has the power to bring the troops home — someone in power who can make the choice to determine whether and how long our troops remain engaged. Sign A, in fact, obscures the fact that there is a power differential between the troops themselves, who are not really in much of a position to make significant decisions about their own deployment or survival, and the actual decisionmakers, who could, if they wished, remove ever American serviceman and -woman from the Middle East in a matter of days.

In doing so, sign A also touchingly ascribes a kind of agency to the individual troops that they may or may not have (subjectively speaking; of course, I've never been in combat, thank God, and so I can't even guess what it feels like to be deployed in hostile or dangerous territory). The sign seems to send the message, "We are thinking about you as people, not simply as powerless cogs in a geopolitical machine; take care of yourself, be safe, and get back here quickly." The implication is that the war itself, which is the reason they're there, just sort of happened; no one chose war, it was simply inevitable, the result of vast political and historical forces that none of us can really understand or control. It simply comes about from time to time that our young men and women must march off to defend our freedoms (think of the lyrics to the Hamilton Haven song at the beginning of Robert Altman's Nashville: "I pray my sons won't go to war, but if they must, they must"). So there's a kind of double fiction: wars just happen, on the one hand, sort of like diseases of history; on the other hand, our troops who are over there fighting are there because of their own sense of honor, dignity, and duty to country (essentially, because they decided to go), not because they were ordered to (and, if they disagree with the order, they would face serious consequences were they to act on that disagreement).

I'm tapped out for the night. I'm signing off. If you made it this far, have a look at these two recent images from Iraq:

Via Americablog. Click on the image for a larger view. Look closely at the inscription on the tank's barrel.

This one's just kind of amusing.

Filed in: politics image exegesis

Anne Lamott

2005-08-21T23:00:00.000-04:00

I've been looking for a text to use in the Christianity section of my upcoming world religions course, and I settled on Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. I've read Bird by Bird and parts of Operating Instructions (her obligatory book on motherhood, subtitled A Journal of my Son's First Year) and was usually, I have to say, pretty underwhelmed. My overriding impression was that she was flippant and trivializing in her attitude towards human foibles, and — this is somehow connected, but I'm not sure what the connection is — that she threw around contemporary popular cultural references in a blithe, name-dropping manner that annoyed me. (This was a style quirk in Operating Instructions that really got on my nerves. A sentence pattern that seemed to keep cropping up, or maybe I just noticed it in an exaggerated way, was: "He or she did X like Y," where X is some action verb — the particular passage I'm thinking of is something like "lunged at my breast," talking about her infant son — and Y is some famous person, like maybe a baseball player, that I've never heard of.)

This time, though, I feel like I finally got her writing a little more directly. Maybe this is because of my buzzardish nature, but what got me was the unmistakable suffering she portrays in the book. She describes going through a long, miserable, self-destructive phase, characterized by addiction and dead-end romances, which I can definitely identify with. I've seen this kind of writing before, and I guess what always bothered me about it, and Lamott is not an exception here, is that she makes it sound fun. For one thing, she lives in the Bay Area; for another, she is constantly eating good food; and for another — and this is the point that actually seemed important to me — she seems to be talking about being sad and depressed, but she is apparently never lonely; she seems constantly surrounded by bosom friends! People are always around to talk to her, to call her on the phone, to bring her meals, etc. This has the effect on me of reminding me of my own experience of depression, which was largely, on a subjective level, an experience of feeling entirely cut off from people. Writing like Lamott's can have the unfortunate effect on me of making me think, "Man, I am much more fucked than I thought; here's a person writing about depression who goes to parties, gets laid, and is surrounded by fun people! I must be a different kind of depressed person, the uncool kind, the kind no-one likes..."

So, her self-depiction as addicted and addled and headed for destruction wasn't the part that got me. I think it was the flash-forward description of her father's death. She recalls the day, the afternoon before she and her family would learn that he had a brain tumor that would kill him in two years, and in recalling it she quickly spins out the events of the succeeding two years — the swift, hideous, and brutal deterioration of her father's mind and body — in a way that opens up this window into the grievous depths of human doom and loss. As you read, you imagine what the family must have experienced, and what they still must experience in memory, and it's horrible and sad — and it has a sort of revelatory force, since this — watching your father's mind stop working and his face become covered with tumorous growths — is the ground that faith has to grow in. I think this is actually the most moving element of the book, the depiction of sickness — maybe the depiction specifically of cancer —, rather than her depiction of the fucked-up nature of human social life, which comes across as fairly whimsical and goofy even at its worst.

I think when I first picked up the book I had been hoping for something like Annie Dillard or Flannery O'Connor, two of my favorite writers. This is obviously totally different. She aims for the sort of Harlequin-esque side of Christianity. You can see the influence of California-style Zen in her writing. It reminds me of the story:

Somebody asked Lao Tse, "Where is the Great Matter?" He said, "It's in the dirt." He said, "Such a thing as that?" Lao Tse said, "It's in the ants." He said, "So small a thing as that, teacher?" "It's in the piss and the shit!" Lao Tse said.

(I know this as a Buddhist story ... but never mind.) Similarly, for Lamott, that's where Christ is to be found — in the least dignified and most degraded parts of our lives. She uses the word "Jesus" a lot, and describes Jesus "sitting on his haunches" in the corner of her room after a particularly rough night of carousing. Grace, for Lamott, enters into our lives in grossest acts: the pissing, shitting, puking, zit-popping, menstruating, cussing, being drunk, being fat, being beaten up for no reason, falling down, bleeding, fucking in dirty motels, getting abortions, getting sick, going insane, getting cancer, and dying. Not in grand mystery, not in flashes of the numinous or uncanny, and not in revelation.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's quite powerful in her work. I'm also not sure how all it's going to work out in the classroom. I'm going to have to do some thinking about how to use it. However, a highly personal, well-written, and emotionally jarring book can never be too bad, I hope.

Filed in: literature religion musings

Green bags for vegetables

2005-08-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

It sounds hokey, I know, but these bags really work. $4.99 for ten reusable bags, and worth every penny.

Filed in: food cooljunk

More messing around with del.icio.us categories

2005-08-17T23:38:00.000-04:00

Have been trying to jerry rig something together to automate the process of posting to del.icio.us. Made all the changes called for here. This post is a test ... if it works, it'll be cool. Will report back in an update.

Update

It seems to work, though I'm not sure about it yet. The first time I tried it, it didn't populate the del.icio.us post form with the tag values, but the second time, it did. If you want the details, keep reading.

Continued ... click below on "Post Page" to view the rest.

Basically, what the hack does is this: you install the Greasemonkey script to automatically prompt you for tags when creating a new post at the Blogger site. (For this to work, you need the Greasemonkey extension installed. And for Greasemonkey to work, you have to be using Firefox.) Then you go to the somniloquy site and follow the instructions there. They are complicated. I changed things a bit as well. His instructions allowed any visitor to tag his posts. I don't care about any visitor — I figure most people who are using del.icio.us already have their own taglist, and besides, I mainly care about my own convenience. So, where his instructions call for this:

window.open("http://del.icio.us/post?url="+postlink+"&title="+posttitle+"&tags="+fc.value);

I changed it to this:

window.open("http://del.icio.us/strangelywarmed?url="+ encodeURIComponent(postlink) + "&title=" + posttitle + "&tags=" + fc.value);

so as to post only to my own account, meaning I have to be logged in. That's what the little [T] link below does. It's only useful to me, really. To be honest, I have no idea what the "encodeURIComponent" does.

So, what this means is, I write my post, append my tags, publish it, then click the little [T] link under the post, and it is automatically categorized at del.icio.us. And that's that.

Primary credit for this technique goes to John at Freshblog. Without his post, the links there, and his other hints, I never would have gotten this figured out. Thanks!

Filed in: blogging del.icio.us hacks

Expandable post summaries, revisited

2005-08-17T12:06:00.000-04:00

Posted to: blogging, css, hacks

The strategy I was using to make the post summaries expandable, it turns out, doesn't work on IE6. I fooled around with this for a while, and have settled on an uglier, less satisfying, but simpler (and universally workable, knock on wood) solution. Each entry has a link at the bottom to the "post page" (the permalink). When I'm going to display only a summary on the mmain page, the summary will be followed by the line, "Continued ... click below on 'Post Page' to view the rest." You should see this below. If you want to read the technical details, click it; otherwise, just be aware that if you read something interesting that ends with "Continued...," then click the small, italicized link below to the "Post Page" to read the whole thing.

Continued ... click below on "Post Page" to view the rest.

My original technique, which I got here, relies on "advanced" CSS, namely adjacent sibling selectors. The part that disappears in the main page is wrapped in conditionally formatted span tags with class="fullpost", which have the display: inline property on the item pages but the display: none property on the main page. This was followed by a line wrapped in span tags with class="more". This class does not display on item pages or on the main page, except when immediately preceded by the fullpost class. In other words it looked like this:

.more {

display: none;

}

.fullpost + .more {

display: inline;

}

This worked fine, except that IE6 does not recognize that line with the plus sign in it. Frustrating.
The problem with the current solution, of course, is that the "Continued" indicator doesn't disappear in the post page, which is irritating, and that the "Post Page" link can't be made to disappear for posts that don't need it, which is also irritating. I tried using conditional formatting but for some reason it didn't work, and now I'm fed up with experimenting. Plus, I've wasted pretty much the whole morning fooling with this, and I really have actual work to do.

Update:

I'm not sure what I was doing wrong, but I think I at least managed to fix that first problem by just sort of tidying up the code.

Food and moral education

2005-08-17T00:27:00.000-04:00

Posted to: food, musings, autobiography

Our local community supported farm

The other day I got to thinking about how my attitudes towards what I feed myself have changed since I left home at age 18. It's not about tastes in food... it's a moral issue. I began by discovering the complexity and richness of truly good food and the artistry of culinary traditions. Then, as I was exposed to new influences, I started thinking that maybe connoisseurship was not the point of eating; the point had more to do with nourishment, balance, and healthy living. Finally, as I enter middle age and try to feel out my place in a community, I've begun thinking more and more about food as a political and economic issue for Americans to take seriously. This is a long post, so brace yourself. Click "read more" below to see the whole thing.

Continued ... go to the Post Page to view the rest.

When I was in college, I dated a young lady who, it must be said, came from a family with a lot more money than mine. She enjoyed eating well. She grew up on Long Island and was accustomed to eating in nice Manhattan restaurants, shopping at upscale, boutiquey markets like Balducci's (which I see has moved uptown and been acquired by a chain -- eheu!), and generally believing herself to be a connoisseur of the gourmet sensibility (what German people call a Kenner or a Feinschmecker). Anyhow, I picked this up pretty quickly, even though I couldn't afford it. I bought whole coho salmon and cooked them according to recipes in The New Basics Cookbook. I learned how to poach chicken breasts in créme fraîche with fresh tarragon. I discovered that Gewürztraminer goes nicely with nouvelle Chinese style cooking. All this went along with a kind of fake boho existence in furnished sublets, one of which was actually on Jane Street in the West Village, around the corner from Benny's Burritos.

So then I graduated from college, and I moved into my own place along with an old friend in Somerville, Massachusetts. That was the end of life as a decadent New York college student without responsiblities or expenses other than entertainment. Now I started the gritty life of a doctoral student in religious studies, constantly broke, constantly overworked, hard-up, alienated and intellectually overheated.

My moral education in eating continued.

My college girlfriend had taught me to care about what I ate, because to eat well was a mindful, refined way of enjoying and appreciating embodied life. To eat well was a life-affirming experience. It was also more: good food was an art form and could actually give you something to think about. (If you don't believe this, check out the latest Mark Burnett-ripoff reality show on Fox.) Plus, it afforded considerable opportunities for snobbishness.

My college romance ended in a blaze of angst and I began dating again. I had one graduate-school girlfriend. This affair didn't last long, but it was serious and intense. She also came from money -- more than me, anyhow. But she was kind of hippyish -- lived alone in a shabby Allston apartment, ate vegetarian, practiced yoga from time to time (she'd lived in India for half a year once), got stoned a couple times a year, and kept several adopted stray cats. She also had an attitude towards what she ate that was totally new to me. She shopped for her food at Whole Foods Market, which in those days (early nineties) was a totally different affair -- no private labels yet. She showed me that it was possible to make a reasonably good soup out of kale, tofu, potatoes and soy sauce, and without a cookbook, even. And if the kale was a little past its prime, you could refresh it by putting it in a sinkful of cold tap water for ten minutes. It was cool! And more importantly, it was healthy. From the short time I spent with her, I realized that what you put into your body matters in ways that have nothing to do with enjoyment or pleasure. You can a kind of right living and physical harmony via your eating habits: one obvious rule is don't let your nourishment depend on killing. This means no meat, but strictly applied it also means no pesticides, and even more strictly it means live simply, resourcefully, consciously, and cleanly -- picking up your trash and stewarding the world around you. But it's not just about your attitude towards the external world. Eating right also means living in balance, and, I figured, if I was able to do this I'd be able to relate to my own body in a new way, caring for it just like I might care for any other vulnerable creature that I found myself responsible for.

Finally -- and this is the last stage of the story -- I finished graduate school too, got married, became gainfully employed in my chosen profession, moved to a small town, took out a mortgage, got to know my next-door neighbors, and -- now, most shockingly -- became a father. Over the course of the last couple of years my political sensibilities have been become increasingly galvanized. That is to say, everything around me started to look political in a new way. I give Russell McCutcheon a certain amount of credit for this. I'm surprised, now, thinking it over, how much influence he's had on my way of thinking. I see structures of power and authority at work everywhere, even shaping the habitual ways I think about my own life. And at the same time, I'm starting to think that we, as a society, are heading in a very bad direction. Most recently, this article, which sounds mainly familiar themes of environmental decline, economic collapse, political corruption -- generally, it says we are completely fucked -- struck a chord. So did some of Sterling Newberry's essays in the "American Thermidor" series (see this one for starters). All this stuff sounds like it could be written by total crackpots, but it is starting to look more and more convincing to me: oil is getting more expensive, the atmosphere is heating up, the international scene is getting increasingly chaotic, and American political discourse gets shriller, nastier, more dishonest, and more bizarrely out-of-touch every year.

With all this in mind, the basic questions of how to live out a vision of a sustainable society take on greater significance. This is probably the main reason why I joined our local CSA. Nourishment, shelter, transportation, health... I imagine that by the time Z. is grown up, these things could look very different from what they do today.

That's all I have for tonight. Sleep tight.

What I have learned about tomatoes

2005-08-16T23:43:00.000-04:00

Posted to: growing, tomatoes, notetoself, food

So, my tomatoes didn't die, but they're not exactly thriving either. Things to keep in mind for next summer:

Number one lesson: staking them is important. I thought this was, err, optional and didn't do it until the plants were already pretty big. They started looking much healthier when I did. They also have big, dense rootballs and need plenty of space. (See #4 below.)
Sucker them properly. I got lazy about this. (Suckering is cutting or pinching back the little new stems that emerge out of the bigger ones.) I got big, bushy plants instead of tall, viny ones.
Since I seem to have this weird desire (I don't exactly understand it either) to grow tomatoes in pots and not in the ground (a couple reasons: nostalgia for my old upper Manhattan fantasy of growing a container garden on my fire escape, for one thing; the amount of work it would take to build a raised bed, for another) ... they need plenty of water. Seriously, people told me it was easy to drown tomatoes. Turned out not to be true. These plants have been seriously thirsty. I was worried about overwatering, but when I threw caution to the wind and started watering them four or five times a week, they started growing a lot faster.
Get bigger pots.
Research organic fertilizers and use them. This Agway retailer a couple of towns away might have something. Should probably also check Mike McGrath's website.
Figure out where the sun actually falls around the house so I can know where to put the pots.
The yellow ones taste the best so far (unfortunately the name of the variety has actually washed off the little plastic tag so I have no idea what kind it is, but it's little—like a large cherry tomato—, bright yellow, and sweet) but Mister Stripey, for which I have high hopes, hasn't yet produced a ripe fruit for comparison. (See this page for photos and capsule reviews of heirloom and other varieties.)

The beetles pretty much killed the basil, but everything else is doing pretty well. I'll post a picture tomorrow if I can remember.

Aesthetics of blogging, inspiration from Elliot Erwitt

2005-08-16T01:30:00.000-04:00

Posted to: image, blogging, musings

Selections from PhotoQuotes.com.

"You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy." (From More Joy of Photography.)
"It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture." (From Interviews with Master Photographers.)
"Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment." (No source given.)

Early in Personal Exposures, in the introductory material, Erwitt reproduced a number of his contact sheets and some street photography that he hadn't included in his exhibitions (if I'm remembering right; I probably read this fifteen years ago and haven't seen the book since then). One of the photos that's burned into my memory is of a young-looking man in clerical attire. It was obvious that the photographer had surprised him by walking straight up to him and taking his picture, and he looked vaguely irritated; his face suggested that he had something to hide, somehow. It was a perfect shot and it made a huge impression on me. The contact sheets showed how Erwitt did his work (at least some of it): he walked down the street, shooting a picture every few feet. A five- or six-block stroll could produce a hundred exposures. In a way, this gives me the same kind of feeling that blogging does: it reflects an almost obsessive need to collect, sort, and process the random impressions of daily life in America. It's that whole "suburban frontier" thing... I don't simply understand what's going on around me in "this big, wild, rowdy country, full of whores and prizefighters" (that's Cheever on Bellow in a journal entry or letter, I forget which, reproduced here -- search for "Cheever"). For more American photographers who "document the social landscape," as people used to say ... look at the Amazon.com links below.

And of course the grand master, Lee Friedlander ... too many monographs to show, but check out this image and the others in the series.

I want one of these

2005-08-14T23:54:00.000-04:00

Posted to: cooljunk

Check out the Livedrunk wristband from decadent Belgium. It's grey and glows in the dark (they claim). Unfortunately not obtainable in the US yet. Too bad, since I already have a blue Quaker "Wage Peace" wristband and a generic-purple-lefty "Never Surrender" one and gosh darn it no one seems to think us liberals have a sense of humor. Those plastic wristbands fascinate me. They're like understated buttons since, in order to know what the message is, either you already have to know what the color means, or you must ask the wearer (or peer uncomfortably closely at his/her wrist) to understand the message. Why do people (including me) think it's cool to wear them but not cool to wear buttons (or even to put a bumper sticker on your car)?

Two new features added to the blog

2005-08-14T22:23:00.000-04:00

Posted to: blogging, hacks

I have incorporated two new features into the blog: first, expandable post summaries (which I remarked on earlier - permalink). This hack comes from Mentoliptus. It's in Spanish, and I was pleased I could decipher it. (It has a link to Google's translation service so you can read it in English, but the translation is incomprehensible -- the Spanish was easier. "Bitacora," which I assume means "blog," is translated as "binnacle.") The other feature is to add del.icio.us categories to posts. This one comes most proximately from pace_tua via a link from FreshBlog. I've fiddled with it a bit, and the version I'm using now as I type is from Ted Ernst. This is sort of a test post for that hack, so we'll see if it works. Tags should appear above, under the post title, in the "link" field.

Why Coldplay are so cool

2005-08-13T11:38:00.000-04:00

Posted to: music, musings, coldplay

Last weekend, my wife and I went with some friends to hear Coldplay perform in Camden, NJ. It was awesome, if a little surreal. The concert was in the Tweeter Center, and the name already makes the whole thing seem a little ridiculous. The building looks a lot like a minor league baseball stadium.

Tweeter Center, Camden NJ

But anyhow, the concert was great. The music was good, and the lighting and video effects were simple but really well done. And Chris Martin, well, according to Rolling Stone magazine, he's the frontman for "the nicest guys in rock." How can you lose?

Anyhow ... I got to thinking about the significance of Coldplay as a kind of cultural phenomenon. I'm not exactly an aficionado -- I only own one album, the masterful and poignant A Rush of Blood to the Head, but I love it. It's a little mysterious to me how Coldplay appeals to so many young people. Their lyrics are kind of glum and mournful without being affected -- they're not brooding and tormented in a cool way.

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I always feel as though there's an almost Christian valorization of self-sacrifice floating around in their songwriting style. The melodies have a soaring lyricism, and the harmonies are profound and complex but never jarring. The rhythmic motifs are penetrating, sometimes suggesting a kind of deeply-felt but tightly-contained rage (think of the pounding chords that open the refrain of "Politik" -- sample can be heard at AMG, registration req'd.).
So what is it about this music that people find so compelling? It's not exciting in a typical sense; it's never sexy or frenetic. It has an almost classical, highly crafted feel, with the primary emphasis on songwriting and ensemble playing rather than on the performance persona. In this sense, their presentation is very different from U2, which Audioscrobbler ranks second (after Radiohead) in similarity to Coldplay. U2 affects a rock-and-roll pose laced with manifestoes and macho bluster, while Coldplay -- at least as far as I can tell -- projects a thoroughly self-effacing, constantly questioning, quiet style.

I don't know the answer. I do suspect, though, that something about it has to do with a peculiar mood that permeates the music. All the song lyrics feature a first-person narrator. They are also heavily subjective and emotional in content -- they're not dramatic monologues like the songs on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, for example. They're more like arias. My hypothesis is that the appeal of Coldplay has something in common with the appeal of The Matrix. If you take a look at Coldplay's lyrics (a list organized by album can be found here), you'll see a fascination with complexity, with systems, and especially with the kind of existential dilemma (forgive me for sounding cliché) of the individual facing down a system he or she does not really understand and reduced to a cipher. The narrators in Coldplay's songs have no bodies -- they aren't physical or sexual, even when they talk about love. They seem to consist simply of raw thought and emotion floating free in a world of constant flux. Information, goods and power stream from one point to another, responding to invisible forces, and not only does the individual feel powerless against this system, he does not even really understand the role he plays in it. This seems to shed light on their choice of "cause" as well, namely, fair trade rather than free trade. (In the original Matrix movie, one of the many tensions between the fantasy world and the "real" world aboard the Nebuchadnezzar is that in reality individuals are androgynous in appearance and physically weak. Their real, embodied selves are paradoxically bodiless -- the implication being, in terms of cultural critique, that our bodies today are verging towards the virtual and imaginary; something we construct, inhabit and consume, rather than something we are.) As I see it, their sensibility is best summed up in two lines from "Clocks":

Am I part of the cure

Or am I part of the disease?

Okay, so maybe I am getting carried away reading such profundities into pop music, but I find the fact that this stuff is so popular truly fascinating. So this is my speculative shot at explaining what people are responding to in it, maybe without completely realizing it.

Update (Sunday morning 8/14/05)

Back in June the NYT ran a fairly nasty critique of Coldplay's new album, X&Y. Via Bloglines I see that this article spawned a lot of conversation online, some of it actually pretty intelligent. I guess it's kind of stupid of me to write up a long post about Coldplay when they released a new album ten weeks ago that I've never heard. Oh well, I'm nice like that.

Test of expandable post summaries

2005-08-13T10:35:00.000-04:00

Posted to: blogging, hacks

I'm trying to add a new feature to the blog, namely "expandable post summaries." Click on the "More" link to view the full post on its own page.

Continued ... click below on "Post Page" to view the rest.

The disadvantage of this method is that the "More" link appears at the bottom of every post, even short posts that don't need summaries. The other thing is that, so far, I can't get it to work. Maybe the fact that I use so many CSS tags in my posts screws it up somehow.

How we got our baby to sleep through the night

2005-08-07T01:49:00.000-04:00

Posted to: parenting, howto

I was putting Z to bed the other night and got to thinking how lucky we are that the kid is now sleeping without any problems whatsoever, knock on wood. He is six months old, so this is basically "normal" -- meaning that, biologically and developmentally speaking, all six-month-olds should be able to go seven hours or so at night without waking up to eat -- but it doesn't go without saying. I have friends whose babies started sleeping ten hours at a stretch when they were ten weeks old, then suddenly at six months started torturing their parents by waking up every ninety minutes during the night. If you've never experienced this, it's agony.

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The title of this post is a little deceptive, because I don't really feel like we knew what we were doing. Early on, Zeke slept irregularly at night, wouldn't nap consistently, and had what I now think is a pretty mild case of colic. It was rough on all of us. The reason I think I can take some of the credit is because back in May, when I started staying home with him, I decided that I was going to deal with the nap situation decisively. I'd read in Marc Weissbluth's book and in the Baby Whisperer that "good sleep begets good sleep." In other words, the better rested your baby is, the better he or she will sleep at night. This has the counterintuitive consequence that putting your baby to bed earlier will sometimes mean he will sleep later in the morning. I can't vouch for that one definitively, though I attest that putting our baby to sleep later at night did not mean he slept later in the morning. The point though is that in order to get him sleeping well at night, he has to take good naps in the day. This made intuitive sense to me.

So, I started reading everything I could on naps. The upshot was that I did several things:

Move him from a co-sleeping arrangement to a crib. He actually seemed to like the crib better, which surprised me. Emotionally, this was toughest on my wife, who was just going back to work and really missed the nighttime closeness. I know family bed and co-sleeping advocates make a convincing case, but this really seemed to work better for Z.
Put him down for naps during the day as soon as he started to appear sleepy. Anticipate that he would get sleepy after having been awake for ninety to 120 minutes, and have everything prepared.

Put him down awake. The point is that he needs to learn to go to sleep by himself. My strategy was to catch him as he started to get sleepy, wind him down and relax him, and then as he was really getting ready to nod off, lay him in his crib and let him finish the process on his own. He had gotten used to sucking his thumb by this point, so that helped. This was probably the toughest part. I spent a lot of time putting him down, letting him start to fuss and cry, then picking him up and trying to calm him again, then putting him down before he fell asleep ... and then repeating the process over and over again.

Creepy lovey from Carter's

Give him a "lovey," as Brazelton calls it. His is a fairly creepy (I think) little thing, but it works, so who cares. Someone gave it to us. It's a white teddy bear head sewn onto a white blanket with the inscription "If they could just stay little" (photo at right). It's made by Carter's and similar products are available here. Brazelton says babies should choose a lovey, but Z didn't; we presented him with this and he seemed to like it. Now, every time we put him to bed in his crib, we lay out the lovey to his right, and he immediately rolls over on his right side, sticks his thumb in his mouth, and flops the other hand on top of the bear head. It's cute.

Receiving blanket from Under the Nile

Swaddle tightly from the waist down. They say six months is too old for swaddling, but I am loath to stop doing it. He's so active, though, that he can wriggle out of the swaddle whenever he decides to, so maybe it's no big deal. For this you want to use a big receiving blanket. The best ones I've been able to find (also hand-me-downs) are from Miniwear, but I couldn't find any links. These are big lightweight cotton, so they are OK for hot weather, and they have the right kind of surface texture for good swaddling. They are about 36" square or bigger. Another good one is from Under the Nile. Very expensive ($34) organic cotton, and a little on the warm side for summer, but nice.
Develop a completely consistent and predictable bedtime routine. Ours doesn't vary much between daytime naps and nighttime sleep. It goes like this:
- First, a diaper change (if necessary). Use plenty of A&D ointment.
- Second, dim the lights and close the shades.
- Third, if it is nighttime, read three books, at least one of which is very familiar: Goodnight Moon, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, or an old favorite of mine, Black and White, a great, rhythmical poem about sleeping, dreaming, and friendship from 1963 (it's out of print). If it is daytime, move on to the next step.
- Sing a lullaby. The one I always use is an old traditional American one:
Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,

Go to sleepy little baby.

When you wake, you shall take

All the pretty little ponies.

Blacks and bays, dapples and grays,

All the pretty little ponies.
- Then, while singing, swaddle him tightly.
- Pat his back and walk him around the room until he begins to look ready to drop off.
- Lay him in bed with his eyes open. Stand there alternately singing, shushing, and patting or stroking him until he is at the very edge of sleep, then back off and let him fall asleep.

There are lots of books you can buy on this subject, which testifies to inexperienced parents' feelings of desperation and helplessness. I bought or was given several: Marc Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, Ferber's classic Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, the newer, attachment-parenting-oriented The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley (we actually bought this one), Dr. Sears's Nighttime Parenting (all attachment, all the time -- advocates co-sleeping, endorsed by La Leche League Int'l.), plus the ever-popular Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp, which focuses more on soothing strategies for newborns (under three months), with the famous five S's (swaddling, shushing, side-holding, swinging, and sucking, in that order). Tracy Hogg, author of Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems, has a great deal of advice about sleep, too. What consistently interests me about this is that it always seems to come down to a question of strictness on the one hand versus nurturance on the other. If you can't stand to hear your child cry and want to "rescue" him, you'll find Pantley and Sears appealing. If you think your child has to learn independence, you'll go with Ferber, Weissbluth, and Hogg. My personal reactions to the books are: I didn't find Ferber or Sears particularly useful. Weissbluth was extremely informative about the science of infant sleep and its relation to development, and he convinced me that naps were paramount -- which is borne out by my experience to date. Hogg has solid practical strategies for "working on" (especially lengthening) naps and a great deal of common sense advice about general practices around sleeping. And Pantley offers some comfort to stressed, tired parents who don't want to believe that more crying (a la Ferber) is the only answer to their problems. Of course, there's scads of advice online too. The best (probably because I agree with him, mostly) blog posting I came across in my journeys was from Glennlog, but there must be others.

Some tips to remember:

He is in the process of learning to sleep on his own. He will wake up; we all do. The biggest challenge for him is how to fall back to sleep without your intervention (feeding, rocking, etc.) You will need to learn to distinguish between the cries you hear while he sleeps: some mean "I'm awake and am not going back to sleep," but most don't require you do rush in and "rescue" him. Unless you're positive that he's in pain or something, give him the opportunity (at least a minute or two) to calm himself and to go back to sleep.

At three months, Z would only take naps if cradled in someone's arms. He napped quite well under these circumstances, but obviously this wasn't a workable long-term arrangement. Sometimes he could fall asleep while being held and then be put down, but then when he woke up, he would be inconsolable. The challenge was getting him to accept being put down to sleep in a crib by himself without having that frighten him to the point where he became agitated and unable to calm himself. This took a lot of patience. Be prepared for this to be the toughest transition with regard to sleep.

Similarly, he used to wake up after only 45 minutes every single time. You could literally set your watch by it, no joke. I started swooping in at 45 minutes and instantly beginning to shush him all over again, as if the nap were just beginning. After a week or so of this, he began waking up at 45 minutes, fussing for a few minutes, then falling asleep again on his own. Now he usually sleeps in multiples of 45 minutes -- naps usually last either 45, 90, or 135 minutes.

He actually seemed to like his crib a lot, considerably better than co-sleeping, though he loves to cuddle. Don't assume that your baby will hate his crib and that you are imposing a hardship on him by putting him in there; that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Getting a 20-pound baby swaddled can be tricky. I worked out a trick for laying out the swaddling blanket with one hand while holding Z with the other: grab two adjacent corners of the blanket bunched together with one hand, lay the blanket down so that it makes a diagonal line across a matress, then separate the corners and spread the whole thing out. Hard to describe. If I were smarter, I would just lay out the swaddling blanket every time he woke up from a nap in preparation for the next one.

Let's see if this works - new CSS photo thumbnail experiment

2005-08-03T00:35:00.000-04:00

Posted to: image, hacks

Below is a rather crude experiment, though I think it is still good enough for the label. I pasted together a small CSS thumbnail gallery with rollovers. The general gallery concept is taken from a page by Stu Nicholls. The rollovers are cribbed from this page at WellStyled. I know the ultimate result is not pretty (if it even works on Blogspot -- let's see if they allow full-scale inline CSS stylesheets) but I really wanted to try it out. The photos are from my neighborhood immediately after a rainstorm.

Social software for busy academics, and two interesting articles

2005-07-19T23:39:00.000-04:00

Posted to: academe, religion, theory, musings, tools
This seems like it might be a great tool. It collects your reading list online and makes it public. You can even make an RSS feed out of it, which I will most certainly do. Visit to see my current reading list -- the the first three items on it, anyhow, as I've only just begun to post things -- or go to CiteULike.org to set up your own list. This may well replace my Amazon.com wish list as a tool for storing names of books I'd like to get to. I'd post my wish list URL here so you can all buy me a present, but for privacy reasons I guess I'd better not.

Anyhow, two of the items on the list are articles from the most recent Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, which, if I had any brains, discipline, and/or cojones, I would have already submitted a paper to at the beginning of the summer. One is an odd but interesting cognitive psychology article by Joseph Bulbulia of the University of Wellington, NZ. The title is, "Are There Any Religions?" He argues, essentially, that the answer is no, counterintuitive though it may seem. Apparently he is drawing on the logic of Chomskyan linguistics, which also claims that "there are not any languages" -- rather, there is only highly structured, canalized linguistic cognition, which takes different phenotypic forms in its various context. Religion, like language, is an evolutionary adaptation -- in the form of a psychic buffer against despair.

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This implies of course that religion is a "fiction," as well as implying that the realistic, reasonable response to the world as experienced would be despair. Both of these ideas, as I am constantly trying to point out to people, are essentially theological claims. They also suggest that maybe Jesse Ventura was on to something when he remarked that "[o]rganized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business." The best site I could find for background on this was here. Ventura went on to explain to Tim Russert that "being weak-minded is not necessarily a detriment ... It just means that you have a weakness and, therefore, you go to organized religion to help strengthen yourself." Which is precisely Bulbulia's point, if I understand it correctly.

The other article is tougher and it's something I need to take more seriously. I don't have the title right in front of me, but it is by a guy named Christopher Brittain (here is some basic biographical information). The title is the kind of thing that always grabs me, referring to Talal Asad and "the secular as a tragic category." His basic point is that Talal Asad (particularly in Genealogies of Religion and in Formations of the Secular) makes several mistakes in his critique of "the secular" as a contemporary Western category. From my perspective, the two most important critiques are as follows.

Asad's historicization is too shallow, i.e., he relies on superficial, cliché understandings of the early modern period, or as Brittain puts it in his abstract, "[the religious/secular distinction] is simply the product of the distinctive history of post-Reformation Western Europe." This is just not saying enough and reflects a lack of attention to the historical uniqueness of the early modern situation.

Asad's critique is too simplistic, relying upon an unrealistically univalent conception of religious identity. Asad's proposal (mostly from Formations, which admittedly I have never read) to allow religious voices into the public sphere doesn't take seriously the pressures and conflicts of present-day religious diversity and mutually incompatible exclusivisms. In fact if Brittain's presentation of Asad's ideas is fair and generous, which I probably shouldn't assume, Asad's view sounds a lot like, say, Stephen L. Carter's. But there must be more to it than this. I am going to have to reread this more carefully.

The "tragic" part of the argument comes from this second point. In Brittain's view, the concept of the "secular" references an ideal of rule-goverened public discourse that can never be fully achieved, and it speaks to conceptions about mutual respect and willingness to negotiate open solutions. This, he concedes, can't ever scceed entirely, and this is where Walter Benjamin's conception of "tragedy" enters the picture. But I'm stopping there. That's it for now. 'Night.

Read this post...

2005-07-19T03:15:00.000-04:00

... from SAFspace. Another discussion of terrorism and Islam. Compelling. Also includes a brilliant (ha! ha!) comment by yours truly, if Safiyyah decides not to squelch it!

On the other hand, you have posts like this one from GetReligion. Seems like everyone is trying to figure out what the genuine, authentic heart of Islam really is.

Lately I've been observing that, given the kinds of blogs I read (many of which, like GetReligion, are about religion from a more-or-less neutral perspective, but which are heavily tinged with some kind of Christianity), much of the discussion seems to center around two themes:

Is Islam good or bad?
Is homosexuality OK? (Much meaty discussion on this at Habakkuk's Watchpost in recent weeks. Also the previously referenced comment from ThinkBlog.)

I'm not sure what to make of that pattern.

One more comment related to that Santorum post

2005-07-19T01:58:00.000-04:00

This isn't about Santorum. I was just thinking a little more about the odd fellow-feeling between Santorum and other religious conservatives. If you go to the publisher's page for his book, you'll see endorsements, for example, from Laura Schlessinger (Jewish) and James Dobson (evangelical Protestant). This reminds me of ThinkBlog's post from April on the election of Benedict XVI, the new pope. He writes that

That [i.e., Ratzinger's conservatism] [i]s fantastic. It's high time we had somebody with enough sense to know that the Bible is the unchanging Word of God... See, I used to think that ... every chance we got we should try to embrace each other, Catholics and Protestants, as one in the faith. And you know, we should. But when it gets down to brass tacks, there are things that we don't agree on theologically, and ... we don't need to concede to one another where we really disagree..... In an age when it's so unpopular to be a conservative Christian who believes in moral absolutes, I'm delighted to see a pope elected who's willing to call black, black and white, white.

He seems to be celebrating those very theological differences that, a couple of centuries ago, would have been seen as both vitally important and, for many people, insuperably divisive. This is rhetorically an interesting move. Whereas, in relatively recent history, someone with what I assume to be his theological convictions would have condemned Benedict XVI in the strongest terms for being committed to doctrinal error, ThinkBlog's author, who I think is called Michael, praises him, in essence, for being committed to something.

Actually, on second thought, that's wrong -- not what ThinkBlog's author is doing at all. He's saying that he admires B16 for his commitment to particular theological and moral values: the inerrancy of Scripture, and "moral absolutes," which could be a number of different thinks (he may be thinking of, say, the sinfulness of homosexual acts, based on an earlier post, but presumably this is not someone who sees Christian morality as primarily sexual morality -- seems too intelligent for that, and too careful a reader of Augustine).

Err ... it's even more complex than that, it seems to me. If I understand right, while doing this he is also deriding theological liberals who seem to disregard or efface theological variances between Christian groups. But seen another way, ThinkBlog's author is doing the same thing. He is not trying to argue that the differences are nonexistent or insignificant, the way theological liberals do; rather, he is saying that they pose no obstacle to mutual admiration and to a certain kind of fellowship. For me, though, it's not entirely obvious what the difference is. I'm sure there is a difference, but I don't really see exactly what it is. Maybe someone will explain it to me. Maybe I'm just too tired. It's late. How do the rest of you bloggers out there keep this from becoming a life-engulfing habit, anyhow?

Update

In my addled state, I pinged the wrong trackback URI for ThinkBlog. Sorry, O blogosphere. Hope I haven't just committed some kind of deadly breach of blogger netiquette.

More on Billy Graham

2005-07-19T01:23:00.000-04:00

Re that next-to-last post, on the Billy Graham photo ... I got my first hostile comment, from a guy named Greg. I actually got one slightly hostile one before, but I'm not counting that; someone named Amy apparently discovered my blog by doing a Technorati search for "abortion", read this whole long post (or: permalink) from earlier, and informed me I needed to "get out of my comfort zone" and confront the reality of abortion ... no mention of anything else I'd said ... That comment disappeared with the changeover to Haloscan and I didn't insert a mention of it.

Anyhow, though, Greg's criticism has more substance, though I think he misses my point. He says:

Gestures of exaltation, wearing baseball caps, and standing on stubbly ground suggest, how did you say it, "hickishness"? ... It is common to raise one's hands in joy in Christianity, especially when in prayer or song... I give your analysis of the photo a 3 out of 10, for broad, laughable, and somewhat bigotted [sic] thought patterns.

There was more, but this is the main point. Okay, so maybe I was reading into the photo, but Greg's reponse suggests to me the difficulty of actually talking about representations of religion in a serious way. Greg was apparently unable to see that my point had nothing to do with what the people in the photograph were doing; my comment had to do with what the photographer (or editor) chose as a representative image -- namely something that, surprise!, confirms all sorts of stereotypes about evangelical Christians.

Example of stadium shot, from BGEA publicity

After all, the editor could have chosen to include a photo of Graham's service in Madison Square Garden, which would have prominently included people in suits and ties. Or they could have included a stadium shot, indicating the sheer numbers of people who showed up for the event. I mean, hell, they could have chosen to include an image of Bibleman, who appeared on Saturday, June 25, at 10 a.m. with Graham.

Bibleman

Instead, the editors chose to include the image I clipped below, plus the one at the top of this post, which if I didn't know better I would have guessed was shot in Africa. Whoever selected these photos is playing directly into some very old, very prevalent stereotypes about evangelicals, right down to the racial segregation. It looks like an old-time camp meeting, which Billy Graham events definitely are not.

The point here, and what I think is interesting about Greg's comment, is that it suggests that for many people religion is not something you can actually discuss. You can discuss religious beliefs, ideas, individuals, organizations or practices in isolation perhaps, but when you start talking about the amorphous concept "religion" (in terms of, say, "styles of religiosity") people begin to take sides. Greg apparently couldn't understand that I wasn't saying anything either positive or negative about Graham's followers. He assumed that I was attacking them and chose to adopt a defensive, insulted, indignant stance. I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's interesting.

Still wondering about that camera angle, though. Someone out there must know better than me.

How to store tomatoes

2005-07-19T00:27:00.000-04:00

Grape tomatoes (these are Santa Sweets)

According to this document (PDF) from the Michigan State extension office, the best way to store tomatoes is as follows:

Handle gently to avoid bruising.
If tomatoes need to ripen, place them
in a loosely closed paper bag at room
temperature. Check daily.
If a tomato develops any mold, throw
it away.
When tomatoes are ripe, they can be
served immediately, or stored in the
refrigerator. Ripe tomatoes will usually
keep 2-3 days under refrigeration. For
best flavor, bring tomatoes to room
temperature before serving.

However, eHow says:

Store ripe tomatoes in a cool place - around 55 degrees F. Stored this way, they should keep for five days. Avoid refrigerating tomatoes.... Temperatures below 50 F (like in your refrigerator) begin to destroy tomato flavor and texture.

And this thread on recipelink.com has some promising suggestions:

Cut tomatoes into chunks and freeze them on a cookie sheet, then package them in small quantities
Purée them in a food processor or blender, then freeze in single-serving packages
Freeze them whole after blanching them
Borrow someone's dehydrator and dry them in slices
Make a big batch of pasta sauce and freeze that

Needless to say, I am trying to avoid thinking about canning anything. This may all be wishful thinking; we'll have to see how the tomatoes do.

Billy Graham crusade photograph

2005-07-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

Posted to: religion, image, musings

Scene from Billy Graham crusade, in Queens, NY

I just came across this image in a rather roundabout way. It was reproduced in an article in Le Figaro, via Watching America, but the image URL suggests it was clipped from the Yahoo news site. Whatever. I find it pretty fascinating in terms of the message it sends. Look at the camera angle. What does the photographer intend to convey by shooting them from below? And while it seems pretty clear that everyone in the photograph is wearing the same T-shirt, presumably something commemorating the "crusade" that Graham is leading, doesn't it also appear that they are all wearing more or less the same pants? There's a kind of odd casual "uniform" look that they all seem to have. And that's not even to mention the poses. One suspects that the photographer circulated through the crowd for a while searching for a shot like this. The shot shows a high level of emotionalism, the setting (a stubbly, dirty field) suggests some kind of white-trash Southern wasteland rather than New York City, and the baseball hats and expansive gestures also convey an exaggerated sense of hickishness. Looks very carefully composed to me. But seriously, I don't know what to make of the angle of the shot. It's highly conventional; you see this everywhere in images of people praying. Why?

Santorum the Catholic vs. Santorum the "religious right's" "leading light"

2005-07-14T03:25:00.000-04:00

So, I've been thinking some more about that last post and how obnoxious it was. I have no love for Santorum, but that was kind of over the top. I think there's some real reflection to be done about Santorum's significance, however. I'm struck by the fact that no one ever seems to discuss the fact (to my limited knowledge, anyhow) that Santorum has become a de facto champion of the religious right, but that at the same time he is a Catholic, a hard-core one to boot, who publicly praises Opus Dei. Time magazine named Santorum one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America (cover article here; you have to pay to get to the content); then the New York Times profiled him (ditto). GetReligion's Douglas Leblanc discusses this perceptively, but doesn't talk about the ramifications of this for understanding shifts in American ways of thinking about religion. As far as I can tell, the Revealer hasn't really dealt with this, nor has the Evangelical Outpost. There's also a fantastic discussion of the NYT Magazine's photography of Santorum at BAGNewsNotes. Anywhere else I should look?

This is interesting, of course, because if I understand correctly it was not long ago that evangelical Christians, and American Protestants more generally, tended to be deeply suspicious of Catholics. Think of the somewhat cartoonish, paranoid hostility towards JFK when he was campaigning for president; as the cliché goes, people feared he would take his orders from Rome. And even just last year when Kerry was running, it wasn't some generic Christianity but rather his Catholicism that people were talking about. Related to this point, it's ironic that less than fifty years after the first JFK, Kerry found himself getting into political trouble for not taking his orders, dogmatically speaking, from Rome. This just got lumped together with the whole "flip-flopping" thing. The public discourse has changed since Kennedy: the rhetoric now focuses on the value of sticking to authentic convictions than they worry about divided loyalties. It's my impression that the political climate these days is such that "divided loyalties" is a nearly insupportable concept. Look at the way conflict-of-interest arguments about lobbying and regulation get brushed off. My sense is that people feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the political, economic, and cultural world they find themselves in, and in reaction they seem to crave simplicity and black-and-white thinking to such an extent that they ignore complexity. Thus the attraction of the confident, manly, truthful, ever-authentic, stick-to-your-guns, "sometimes wrong, never in doubt" persona that Bush and his handlers have projected so successfully.

How this relates to Santorum: to me it seems we have a case of strange bedfellows. Just poking around on Technorati, I see that Santorum is sometimes even carelessly labelled an "evangelical Christian." I'm hypothesizing here, but it seems to me Santorum's appeal is similar to Bush's, except that his demeanor is a little too unctuous to have Dubya's jes'-folks charisma. He believes in absolutely absolute values and he is not embarrassed about it. He offers a vision of the old-fashioned cherished tradition. Here's a quotation from his new book, It Takes a Family, via MyDD:

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them really don't need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do... And for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home.

Elsewhere in the book:

"[The family] has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders' war on the traditional family and radical feminism's mysogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect."

And:

"The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GED's move up the economic ladder is just wrong."

You get the idea. (Last two quotations taken from Capitol Buzz.) More on the book at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (And for an amusing anecdote, see this quick account of an exchange between Santorum and Hillary Clinton.)

Anyhow, the point here is that there's basically nothing here for socially conservative evangelical Protestants to disagree with. There's the emphasis on traditionalism; on strongly-held (and forthrightly confessed) dogmatic convictions and moral absolutes; the quasi-19th-c.-nationalism (which not to say, sappy pseudo-patriotism). But the Vatican surely would object to the notion of American religious exceptionalism, which seems pretty prevalent among the hard religious right these days. (See the Wake Up America site for an example of this kind of thing, chosen more or less at random via a Google search. You can also Google 2 Chronicles 7:14 and America for more. I just wonder if this is a problem at all.

My maiun point, though, has to do with the peculiar conceptualization of "religiousness" (for lack of a better term) that allows Santorum and, let's just say, James Dobson to act as close allies. They don't share a liturgy, an ecclesiology, or really even a creed, but they share an opposition to permissive, indulgent, and (they claim) novel understandings of family and community life, exemplified by their stances on abortion and gay marriage, and they also share a notion of faith that is exclusive, interioristic, subjectivistic, belief- and conviction-centered (I wonder what Santorum thinks of the idea of being born again, i.e. the certitudo salutis), and absolute... Which I think reflects very important trends in the broader popular understanding of what the essence of religion really consists of.

Latin for bigot, cont'd.

2005-07-13T10:30:00.000-04:00

Previously I cited Rick Santorum's article from 2002 in Catholic Online. Now he's back on record explaining why the culture of liberal, permissive, college-ridden Boston corrupted the celibate clergy of the Archdiocese into porking little boys.
His comment, from an interview published in the Boston Globe: "If you have a world view that ... affirms alternative views of sexuality, that can lead to a lot of people taking it the wrong way." Barney Frank's response: "This is one of those people who claims to have had eye contact with a blind woman."

2005-07-12T23:37:00.000-04:00

Cocklefighting, a game where you have cockles and they fight

No comment. I must have wasted an hour with this bullshit this afternoon (in between wasting most of the rest of my day doiong other random junk). It really is, as Internet magazine says, "Strangely alluring." I mean, I don't even like video games. Seriously.

2005-07-12T22:44:00.000-04:00

I have mad 5k1775

I must have too much time on my hands; I taught myself enough CSS in the last couple hours to create a whole new link style for links to reference sources (like this). I also learned how to make the pointer change into a wicked cool crosshair when mousing over things like buttons. Try this one.

"Academic freedom" (the Orwellian kind) comes to Pennsyvania

2005-07-11T23:47:00.000-04:00

From the Phillyist:

Last Wednesday, Republicans in the state legislature of the fine Commonwealth in which I live passed a resolution to protect students from the "proselytizing" of professors (presumably like me, except that I teach at a non-"state-related" institution and for the moment am safe). Here's a snippet from the House GOP's press release:

"Students attending our state-owned and state-related institutions should be free to express their thoughts and ideas as their professors teach them to think critically," said the resolution's sponsor, Rep. Gibson Armstrong (R-Lancaster). "There is a national trend toward indoctrination, rather than education. The committee will take a look at what is happening in our college classrooms to ensure that Pennsylvania does not have a problem in this area.... Free speech is vital to our way of life. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the college campus. Therefore, students, parents and instructors, should ensure that professors do not take advantage of the special trust relationship they have with their students to advocate their own personally-held philosophies."

For a photo, check out this great shot of the righteous state rep from Lancaster. He's the youngish one with the red tie speaking forthrightly into the microphone, in defense of tolerance, free speech and what he calls "diversity of thought." In March, Armstrong editorialized in a piece for the Commonwealth Foundation (whose motto, ironically, is "Limited Government, Unlimited Opportunity"):

"[I]nstitutes of higher learning across America get straight A’s when it comes to cultivating diversity of race, skin color, ethnicity and gender. However, according to recent studies by the New York Times and the Washington Times, most of them deserve an F when it comes to promoting diversity of thought, or providing for students’ academic freedom."

As far as I can tell, the only media to have picked this up are more or less local: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which is skeptical) and the York Dispatch (which is generally laudatory).

My impression is that this resolution takes most of its inspiration from the "Academic Bill of Rights," which is anti-affirmative action activist David Horowitz's baby. (This is off-topic, but out of curiosity, I went to check out Horowitz's publication, FrontPage magazine. Turns out it was featuring a symposium devoted to refuting "the myth of heterosexual AIDS." The participants were lionized for "speaking truth to gay power" which "dominate[s] the media culture" by contradicting the so-called "Big Lie," namely, that old-fashioned, Republican, heterosexual boinking can spread HIV. But tucked in there I found this gem: "[T]he late Andrea Dworkin and her ilk were keen to vilify intercourse... as well as to dampen its quality and intimacy via condom promotion." Wow!)

Anyhow, here is SAF's "Pennsylvania Victory Letter," and reproduced below is a un-edited quotation from the "Academic Bill of Rights."

Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.

Note the combination of good old-fashioned positivism in point #3 with the superficial invocation of postmodern-type thinking in point #4. Something for everybody.

The GOP press release concludes:

"Armstrong has heard from numerous students who were singled out because they held a different political or religious view than their professor, as well as incidents where professors allegedly used class time to talk about personal views not germane to the course."

No more stories about Zeke during class time, or they'll call the thought police on me ... using, no doubt, this form.

Aside from the predictable condemnations from AAUP and elsewhere, this sorry business has also been mentioned at Blue. Probably elsewhere as well, but at the moment I don't have the energy to poke around for it.

ThinkBlog

2005-07-11T22:28:00.000-04:00

ThinkBlog: "philosophy :: psychology :: theology :: technology"
Who is this guy, or gal? He or she is a freaking genius, no lie.

Update, after reading a little more: a little scary, though.

2005-07-10T21:19:00.000-04:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

In the process, all previous comments seem to have been erased. Sorry to everyone who left a comment before.

More ruminations: religion and privacy

2005-07-10T03:12:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been working through four books more or less simultaneously: first, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nationby Russell McCutcheon (I mentioned this earlier; my review of this is now officially late); second, in connection with a student's ongoing research project, Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill; third, out of purely personal interest, They Only Look Dead by E.J. Dionne (I snaked this off an old roommate when he was getting ready to throw it out, and it's been sitting on my shelf for probably almost ten years); and fourth, even more random, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. One might wonder what ties all four of these books together, and in a way the connection is kind of strained, but I think there is one. (On the other hand, if you were a seriously rabid conservative, you might see a fairly direct connection between progressive politics -- that's Dionne -- terrorism -- that's Stern -- and fairy tales -- Bettelheim.) There are some interesting links, though, and I wanted to write about them a little bit before going to bed.

So, I read McCutcheon's most recent work a while ago, and because I am a lazy son-of-a-bitch, I have not yet sat down to write my review. Now, though, reflecting on it in tranquility, one thing really sticks out, namely that McCutcheon is not really that interested in what most of us think of as religion. This isn't a bad thing, of course. I like the fact that Russell is increasingly bending the disciplinary boundaries of what religious studies can and ought to be. And I think that with each new book his work gets more sweeping, and, in a way, more honest -- at least in the sense that he is tipping his hand more and more about his real underlying interests and preoccupations. A trite way of summing up what the book is about would be to say that he is not interested in religion, but in 'religion'. As I believe McCutcheon quotes Foucault as saying, "the quotation marks are of a certain importance." He's entirely uninterested in religion qua essence (indeed, he rejects any notion that religion qua essence might even exist; religion is purely a taxon, a classificatory strategy employed by human beings to organize their social experiences), and interested only in "religion" as an artificial conception that we use for dividing up the world. His question is not so much, what is religion, as it is, why would anyone want to call something "religion" (or "religious") anyhow? The weird thing for the reader (that is, for me) is, of course, that as soon as you start asking that particular question, all hell breaks loose, conceptually speaking, and you begin tripping all over your own thinking. I say all this by way of preface.

The point being, though, primarily, that McCutcheon seems to me most interested in all concepts that have to do with our current, very slippery notion of interiority. He follows Chomsky (I think) in believing that modern society is atomizing and isolating, and that the historical construction of the private self is something that, rather than being innocuous or even "natural" and inevitable, rather serves the interests of the nation-state fairly directly. I'm struck by the way in which he makes the turn in this book to media criticism. He talks about television, celebrity politics, and sports an awful lot. Anyhow, he believes, if I'm not mistaken, that the idea that there is an intrinsic separation between public and private is a highly effective mechanism of social control. (Stated this way, I'm not sure this is such a controversial thesis after all.)

In other words, the public/private distinction is the key issue. In my own research, this comes up most clearly in one particular archival source that I came across in the Dresden privy archive: the letter to the senate of Magdeburg from Duke Maurice's diplomats, telling them to relinquish their stubborn resistance to the Duke and Emperor and to drop the pretence of having a religious justification for their actions, since "the true word of God is preserved, miraculously, in human hearts, while in all other matters we must be obedient to the proper authorities." This is a good example in which political resistance is effectively denatured, rhetorically at least, by the discursive creation of a distinction between public and private spheres of human activity -- and then by relegating the resistance to the latter. It's OK to resist the king, as long as that resistance is confined to a carefully delineated sphere in which it will be practically ineffective (i.e., it's OK to about the ruler, as long as you don't act on those thoughts). This way of thinking is so deeply ingrained into the American consciousness that we tend to accept it as second nature, but any brief excursion into medieval political thought will show that things weren't always this way -- indeed, spend enough time looking at medieval thinking and our way of doing things starts to seem very counterintuitive and even disingenuous.

It should be pretty clear then how this connects with the notion of religion. Religiously-justified resistance to authority, if you accept this version of the public-private distinction, becomes ipso facto irrational, because the religious sphere is defined as private and interior (and by extension, for most of us, pure and timeless) while the world of political action is public, rule-goverened, conventional, contingent, messy, and ever-changing. McCutcheon likes to cite Burton Mack's concept of a "myth of innocence" in this connection -- this being another idea that I need to research a little more thoroughly.

This past spring I corresponded very briefly with a doctoral candidate at Syracuse who is working on a similar set of issues in his dissertation. He outlined a key piece of his argument to me as follows (I'm changing it around a lot, making it more abstract):

On the one hand, "liberal" advocates of "tolerance" (especially, but not only, religious tolerance) want to extend rights to all members of a society
On the other hand, adherents of certain highly particularistic religious communities -- let's just say, conservative Christians -- would oppose such a move, e.g. if it were seen as offering approval to acts they found morally repugnant or religiously objectionable, such as abortion, or homosexual acts.
The liberal rejoinder is typically that religious conservatives ought to refrain from imposing their religious values on the rest of society. In practice, this means that they are free to think what they want privately about abortion or homosexuality, but, as citizens and political agents, they should refrain from acting publicly on the basis of those beliefs.
My correspondent points out that there's a certain inconsistency here: liberals want gay people to be able to act publicly on the basis of their gay identity, but want religious conservatives to repress (keep private) the objectionable aspects of their religious identity.

Personally, I have no problem with asking religious conservatives to do this ... I've always liked that bumper sticker that says, "Against Abortion? Don't Have One," which implicitly argues: let people decide privately how they're going to run their lives. However, I don't see a compelling response to this guy's argument. It suggests that the public/private distinction, at least in this context, is tendentious and artificial, and it is effectively used to camouflage various arbitrary preferences enshrined in the form of principle.

A couple comments on Dionne and Stern. I've never read much Dionne before, but he kind of blows me away as a very perspicacious observer of American electoral politics. (It kind of reminds me of one of the best political/cultural memoirs I've ever read, namely the inexplicably out-of-print In the New World by Lawrence Wright. I can't comment on it now -- but read it. It's great.) Dionne fits into this set of problems I'm thinking about because he begins his book by musing on the great American confusion of public and private. In other words, where McCutcheon lambastes contemporary (not exclusively, but typically, North American) ways of thinking for postulating an arbitrary and disingenuous public/private distinction, Dionne pegs the collapse of much of contemporary American poltical life on people's failure to distinguish the public and private spheres. He even cites de Tocqueville to back him up! I guess a Democracy in America reference is de rigueur if you want to be a reflective American political commentator. He's thinking of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in particular, where the government was practically brought to a standstill by the president's sexual capers (giving rise, incidentally, to the organization "Censure and Move On," now better known as MoveOn.org).

What I've been wondering is, can McCutcheon and Dionne both be right? The superficial answer is, of course they can, because they are talking about such very different things. In fact they may even agree, finally. Dionne says that political culture in the U.S. depends on the public/private distinction, while McCutcheon says that the public/private distinction (which I will abbreviate as P/PD from now on) serves particular political purposes. But on another level, their orientations are at variance with one another -- McCutcheon seems to think that the P/PD is a somewhat sinister tool for preserving the status quo, while Dionne thinks it is a good thing, necessary for keeping people from confusing important issues with trivialities. McCutcheon would probably take issue with Dionne for seeming to propose that there is an absolute, ultimate difference between the kind of political issue represented by welfare reform or U.S. policy towards Somalia, on the one hand, and the kind of political issue involved in the question of whether or not Clinton put a cigar in Lewinsky's nether regions or whether he spooged on her dress, on the other. One might argue that if you are a conservative Christian, the latter kind of question is more fundamentally important than the former, or even that they're basically the same, since they both involve character, integrity, and moral choice.

Hell, I've been working on this post for days, and it's already way too long. I'm going to bed, it's nearly two a.m. But I have to say one thing about Stern's . McCutcheon takes Stern to task, briefly, for implying a highly normative view of religion. Stern starts out her book by saying that we have to empathize with the terrorists if we ever plan on understanding, and thus preventing, terrorism. A reasonable position if you ask me. But the question then remains: how do you empathize with a terrorist, or with anyone for that matter? Can you actually get inside someone else's head? It would seem that the answer, even for Stern, is ultimately no, because -- at least this is what my student tells me, I haven't gotten to the end yet -- she ends up concluding that while terrorists are motivated at a primary level by suffering and pain, their most heinous actions are largely determined by the manipulative distortions of charismatic leaders, who "use" religion for their own nefarious ends. Use religion. This is an important idea. Were the leaders of the Crusades using religion? I think the answer is definitely no -- they were acting on genuine religious conviction, even if it's a kind of conviction we find reprehensible. Stern seems to take us through a whirlwind journey of interviews and meetings and adventures, only to bring us back to where we started: the process of getting inside someone else's "private" beliefs leads to the conclusion that those beliefs are simply mistaken!

Finally, there's Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. I got all fascinated by this because he has a chapter called "The Child's Need for Magic" or something along those lines. In his view, it's a big mistake to think that children should be exposed to what he rather sneeringly refers to as "modern, realistic" stories. Fairy tales are better because the magical element speaks directly to the child's level of development. If children need magic, then maybe adults need something like magic in order to be sane, too. This is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious of McCutcheon's, Bruce Lincoln's, and J.Z. Smith's skeptical, debunking stance towards the "dominant paradigm" (i.e. Eliade) in religious studies. Peter Homans takes a different tack, seeing religious studies psychoanalytically as a form of "mourning" for a lost world of secure certainties and organic wholeness. The fact that this lost world may never have existed is irrelevant, of course -- the point is to approach religious people, not to mention the benighted scholars who do this kind of work, with a certain degree of compassion, rather than hostility).

The London bombings - observations on Muslim reactions in the blogosphere

2005-07-09T13:04:00.000-04:00

Some links to recent posts:

Tarek Fatah and Muqtedar Khan at MuslimWakeUp!: "Oh God, please, let it not be a Muslim."
SAFspace
Ethnically Incorrect
AnthroGal
Mere Islam (also see the posts that follow, and the associated links, one good one of which is from Zaid Shakir)

I don't know my way around the Islamic blogosphere very well yet, but I am starting to follow a couple of excellent weblogs and find their anguished reactions to the recent London bombings very moving. In particular Mere Muslim's comments are striking to me because they move past sadness, confusion, or simple rejection and into anger and religious argument. He lashes out at his co-religionists who refuse to acknowledge the presence of violent extremism in contemporary Islam and who insist on taking refuge in conspiracy theories (i.e., blame Mossad or whatever). Safiyyah's palpable grief is extremely powerful as well.

What I find particularly interesting about this, in the context of the stuff I've been thinking about recently, is the whole "hijacking of religion" rhetoric. Interesting to note that the first use of this rhetoric in the context of contemporary jihadi terrorism, to my knowledge, comes from our own arch-foundationalist of arch-foundationalists, Dubya himself (or, that is, his speechwriters). Most of these responses depend on a normative view of what true Islam really entails. W.C. Smith argues that we should not characterize someone else's religion in terms that an adherent of that religion would reject. But the whole "hijacking" discourse shows the emptiness of that argument, because within any tradition you can find fundamental, violent disagreements between adherents about what the true core of the religion ought to be.

Funny how no one ever talks about the 'hijacking" of Christianity in reference to the Oklahoma City bombings, the Christian Identity movement, or the shootings of abortion-clinic staff. It's an unspoken assumption among most observers that those people are true deviants and that their actions do not reflect on the fundamental character of the Christian tradition. One wants to suggest that there simply is no such thing as the fundamental character of any religious tradition. For a very different point of view, though, see R. Scott Appleby's The Ambivalence of the Sacred, which to my mind is the most sophisticated presentation to date of the idea that a normative religious tradition exists and is fundamentally nonviolent. If you are not familiar with the book, I recommend it highly.

Update

See also this interview with broadcaster Jamal Dajani (via the al-Musharaka weblog).

Jamal Dajani, director of Middle Eastern programming at Link TV (www.linktv.org), monitored Arab news programming, online newspapers and Web sites from Paris on July 7, the day of the London bombings.

Key excerpts:

Arab media is condemning these attacks... [T]he focus is that no place on earth is immune from terrorists, especially ones who are willing to kill or be killed.... The name "Al Qaeda" is now used by Islamist terrorists worldwide who have no connection, or a very loose one, to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. The term "Al Qaeda" now is similar to the term "mafia" -- the U.S. mafia, Israeli mafia, Russian mafia and so on.

There's a general consensus here: The sympathy earned by the U.S. after 9/11 was squandered with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the occupation of Iraq and Baghdad, the ancient capital of the Islamic empire. This generates animosity toward the West.... As long as the United States and Britain are occupying Iraq, more attacks will happen. It is a matter of time. The terrorists are taking full advantage of the situation.

Update #2

From Mas'ud Ahmed Khan's page:

How is it that someone who considers his or herself Muslim will perpetrate such an act and initiate the invocation "In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful", when what they are doing is the antithesis of graciousness and mercy? In fact, these people should use the invocation "In the Name of Al-Qa'ida (or any other such group), most disgraceful, most unmerciful". Graciousness and Mercy permeate Islam; everything in Islam is geared toward Mercy, Compassion and Graciousness and yet these diabolical individuals oppose this and we know that the Shaytan opposes what is good.

Al-Qa'ida are a political movement that uses the language and icons of religion for rhetorical purposes and to misguide and ensnare those who do not know their religion or those who feel disenfranchised and oppressed. Al-Qa'ida articulates religio-political rhetoric in a manner that polarises the world totally. It is similar in its rhetoric and polarisation to the current Bush regime. The world is not black and white, it is a spectrum of colours. We do not accept the Manichean "you are either with us or against us" principle that both Al-Qa'ida and our politicians use.

Update #3

I guess I wasn't the only person thinking about this. See Global Voices Online for a quick roundup of Muslim bloggers' reactions to the bombings and a number of links to promising blogs.

Update #4

Global Voices Online has another post on the same topic. There is a very moving post from Zaid Hassan (via Global Voices) here.

Update #5

Global Voices Online continues to post new contributions on the same topic. Here's a new one at Muslim WakeUp!, by Chicago physician Hesham A. Hassaballa. Excerpt: "The suffering of Muslims around the world pains me very deeply, and the way to end that suffering is to work to end injustice across the globe. But, I have to take us back to the word of God: 'Never let the hatred of a people toward you move you to commit injustice.' Our faith does not allow us to ever say, 'yeah, but'."

Fighting Japanese beetles

2005-07-09T11:24:00.000-04:00

The advice of WHYY's Mike McGrath...

Japanese beetles are eating my plants -- the basil, especially, but I think also the tomatoes. I'm as new to container gardening (or any kind of gardening) as I am to blogging. Anyone have any good ideas?

The consensus seems to be: use a paste or spray made with garlic and hot peppers, or use a shop-vac (which I don't have) to get the bugs off the leaves. The most intriguing solution, though I am not going to try it, is to gather up as many of the bugs as you can, put them into a pint of water mixed with a little detergent and oil, put the whole mess in a blender, strain the resulting slurry through a sieve, and spray the liquid on your plants. I'd need a spare blender for that.

On top of the bug problem, we had an enormous rainstorm the other day that left a big pot of herbs completely waterlogged. I don't know why it didn't drain. The result was basically a giant dish of mud and rapidly rotting plants. I had to dig them all up, lay them out to dry, and then re-pot them in the night last night. I have no idea whether they'll survive.

In the second photo, you can see the insect damage. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view.

Technical note on Feedburner atom feed

2005-07-06T21:41:00.000-04:00

I've changed the Feedburner settings so that Flickr photos and Bloglines clippings are no longer spliced into the feed. If you simply must have access to those postings, click here for Flickr or here for Bloglines.

Billy Graham, the "lion" of faith, retires

2005-07-05T15:07:00.000-04:00

Excerpted from the Dallas Fort-Worth Star-Telegram from last week. The article was called "A lion in winter" -- it's about Billy Graham.

The 86-year-old Graham has never shied away from calling his work a crusade, even after geopolitics made the use of the term inadvisable. His was an expedition taken for a declared religious purpose. "My one purpose in life," he said, "is to help people find a personal relationship with God, which, I believe, comes through knowing Christ." The purity of his message and the simplicity of his own life ... stand out as refreshing in an age when the overarching message of far too many evangelical figures is money and not the Messiah.
... A weekly radio program and newspaper column, TV specials, books, Web site and video production house allowed Graham to spread his message of light and love to all corners of the globe. A confidant and influential adviser to presidents, Graham was friendly with Richard Nixon but could not keep the nation's leader from walking a dark path that led to Watergate.
... Even those who do not share Graham's theology admire his powerful preaching and the passion he brought to the great commission. [emphasis added]

Not to pick on the Star-Telegram or anything, but this is a perfect example of the privatization rhetoric of religion in action. Note, gentle reader, the following:

The reporter clearly reveres Graham for his gravitas and moral dignity but doesn't quite want to say so in so many words. He also subtly praises Graham for his willingness to stick to traditional ways of describing the world even when they had gone out of fashion ("crusade").
The reporter says nothing whatsoever about the actual content of Graham's beliefs, theology, or preaching. (I've excerpted here, but you can take my word for it ... or not.) Instead, he focuses on the "power" and "passion" of Graham's religious style.
Emphasis is laid on two things, which (to me at least), make an odd combination: (a) the otherworldliness of Graham's lifestyle (ascetic, non-materialistic "simplicity"), and (b) the enormous influence he managed to wield in this world (an "advisor to presidents"), though he failed to keep Tricky Dick on the straight path.

As it turns out, anyone can be an admirer of Billy Graham, even if you disagree with his (unnamed and unexplored) beliefs. You just have to get into that piercing gaze, the shock of white hair, the moral passion, the depth of feeling, the world-rejection (sort of) ... etc.

This post courtesy of the Christianity Today weblog. Also see Jeff Sharlet on the same topic.

A blog post referencing J.Z. Smith

2005-07-04T02:02:00.000-04:00

Obviously, I'm new to the world of blogging, but even after such a relatively short period of looking around, it's still a great relief and pleasure to find someone quoting Smith's essay from Critical Terms for Religious Studies, even without much in the way of comment. See Habakkuk's Watchpost: Religion as a second-order generalized concept. Presumably this is a Chicago grad student, or something like that.

Tongue protrusion in infants

2005-07-02T13:44:00.000-04:00

This tongue business is new. My wife says I've inadvertently taught him that it means "hello" and thus given him a "bad" "baby sign."

Overheard in New York

2005-07-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

This one was so funny, I started cracking up in my office. This one too.

Zeke chows down

2005-06-29T16:12:00.000-04:00

Zeke chows down
Originally uploaded by myroblyte.

Here's Zeke eating some rice cereal. It's his third time trying solid foods. Couldn't resist.

Have Faith, Dieters - Newsweek Health Beat - MSNBC.com

2005-06-29T15:15:00.000-04:00

Lose weight through prayer
From an interview posted at MSNBC.com with Marc David, an author who claims to teach weightloss techniques that incorporate spirituality.

"Q. Is a certain faith more metabolically effective than others?
"A. Any faith you have [is fine] as long as it’s inspiring you and as long as it opens you up to a greater reality. When we invite that in, our life begins to relax more. Oftentimes we bring our life stresses to a meal. We bring the stress of relationships, the stress of work, the stress of 'Who am I?' and 'What am I doing here?' and 'I’m not good enough.' For many of us, a spiritual connection to the divine helps us be in the world in a relaxed and present way. That inner peace affects the body, it creates a different metabolism, which is at the very least a relaxation response."

This is a good example of that sort of popular logic that sees religions as primarily subjective and therefore broadly equivalent to one another. In other words, religion -- actually, "spirituality" is probably the more appropriate word in this context -- is good because it makes you feel good, by putting you in tune with yourself and with "the divine."
The thing is, of course, Marc David may well be right about the power of faith to make you healthier. In fact, I'm not posting this because it's ridiculous. It's a little silly to make religion serve the same purpose as the South Beach Diet or whatever, but in principle, I don't see any reason to laugh at the idea that being religious may help you live a more balanced and healthier life. The point here is the idea that all religions are equally capable of fulfilling this function, according to the interviewee, and more importantly, that the interview presents this notion as if it were a piece of self-evident common sense. This is significant because of what it says about common-sense notions of religion: the particularities of doctrine, liturgy, ritual, even communal identity are basically irrelevant and constitute a sort of external "shell" of tradition, while what really matters is the interior core, the "spiritual feelings," the "connection with the divine," the "inner peace," presence, and even relaxation.

Cf. Max Müller's definition of religion:

"The living kernel of religion can be found, I believe, in almost every creed, however much the husk may vary. And think what that means! It means that above and beneath and behind all religions there is one eternal, one universal religion, a religion to which every man, whether black, or white, or yellow, or red, belongs or may belong."

Rick Santorum knows whose fault it is

2005-06-28T10:37:00.000-04:00

One of my honorable Senators, Rick Santorum, has just published a column in which he blames academia and the media for the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic church. Everyone's quoting this, according to Blogdex, but I just can't resist ...

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

Actually, the interesting thing about this article is the way in which Santorum praises the emergent alliance between the Vatican (and presumably the cardinalate) and new lay movements, viz. "Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenate, Focolare, Regnum Christi, Communion and Liberation." The salient point here, as I see it, is a peculiar kind of ecclesiastical anti-intellectualism. Catholicism is being destroyed from within by its liberalizing and relativizing seminaries and the priests they train. Santorum continues:

"The laity across America is also demanding faithful Catholic schools and colleges.... A renewed, united effort of clergy and laity will transform the Church. That this does not already occur belies the greatest systemic failure of the Church in America where so many cradle Catholics have left the Church or go 'unchurched' because of exposure to uninspired, watered down versions of our faith by those with deficient seminary training. In light of recent events, the laity must guide them back.

We as the Church, the people of God, cannot and should not leave the mission of the Church to the clergy alone, nor should our role be limited to overseeing priestly training and conduct. The laity must assist the whole Church in America reclaim our nominally Catholic colleges, schools, hospitals and social welfare agencies for the sake of our souls.... Many Catholic social service agencies, while serving the human needs, have been co-opted by a secular culture." [emphasis added]

It creeps, and leaps, and slides and glides across the floor

2005-06-27T01:18:00.000-04:00

The Blobfest is on its way. Third weekend in July. Some photos from 2003 can be seen at the Blob's official site. Video is here courtesy of the Reading Eagle. And to top it off, a teeny weeny picture featuring yours truly. I'm the guy in the khaki pants. I understand a larger version of this photo was featured in this month's AAA member magazine.

Using GIS in studying contemporary American religion

2005-06-27T00:18:00.000-04:00

Brent Hecht, a student at Macalester College, used a GIS application (apparently something he has been developing) to map the popularity of contemporary Christian rock, as shown by the location of concert venues, and to draw some tentative conclusions (probably very tentative) about how various different denominations feel about it. Click to view an eight-page PDF of the project, presented at NITLE (where I just attended a seminar). I don't know if you can really trust the conclusions, but it's cool! Seriously. He is also apparently working on a free GIS software project (called Mapalester). A real macher.

Another depressing peak-oil related piece

2005-06-26T18:02:00.000-04:00

The most recent TomDispatch references a book written by an "oil industry insider" who basically says that Saudi Arabia's oil production will soon begin declining, a prediction which contradicts the substantial and sustained increase forecasted by the Dept. of Energy. I've read probably five or six very convincing pieces along these same lines over the past six months or so. It's ominous. By the time Zeke is in college, life in the U.S. may be very different -- no cheap airfares, no big-box stores, super-expensive gas, crumbling suburbia... along with many other, equally apocalyptic-sounding changes, no doubt. See the excerpt from James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency posted by Rolling Stone magazine.

Self-portrait with Zeke

2005-06-26T14:58:00.000-04:00

Self-portrait with Zeke.
It's so damn hot that none of us can do anything but sit around, complain, and wish the old wiring in this house could handle an air conditioner.

The Power Team - musclemen for Jesus!

2005-06-26T03:35:00.000-04:00

East Valley Tribune | Daily Arizona news for Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale
All I can say is, whoa, dude. Also check out their official site here. These guys are for hire and can help you build your congregation by busting bricks with their heads! And besides, they have serious official endorsements from Tom Ridge and Jeb Bush! I would not want to mess with them, ever, no way.

And if you were to want to buy some kickass Christian punk (sort of) merchandise, check this awesome pink-on-black T-shirt.

"76 More Taliban turned to piles of smoking meat! 178 in 4 days!"

2005-06-26T01:48:00.000-04:00

Kofi Girls (conservative discussion board)
It's 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday night. My wife and infant son are sleeping. I ought to go to bed, but it's hot, and I feel like I ought to be doing something productive. Well, that's not going to happen.

Somehow on nights like this I can't resist browsing the conservative weblogs. Even for the conservative blogosphere, though, this kind of bloodthirstiness is kind of bizarre. It's creepy, obviously, but more than that -- it's so creepy as to be nearly incomprehensible. And to top it off, a few posts down, the conversation topic switches to ESPN and baseball.

This kind of thing seems more or less like a less articulate version of Ann Coulter. Why the hell can't I quit reading it? It turns my stomach, but it kind of fascinates me at the same time. It's not like reading evangelical Christian stuff, because there's no happy ending, no redemption, no point as far as I can tell besides venting rage.

The other thing this reminds me of is how a long time back I came across an article refuting the notion that the internet would somehow "bring people together." Remember when they used to say that? They did, believe it or not. This article -- I wonder if I will someday turn it up again, I think it might have been in Harper's -- basically said that no, the Internet is a great way for people to go out there and connect up with others who think exactly like them. Instead of dealing with neighbors and coworkers who have a variety of views, people can retreat into a virtual universe, give themselves names like "RoadKill" and "Beano" (I'm quoting from this particular discussion board, which is called "UN-American -- Kofi Girls forum" -- I think it's also labelled as ), and exchange nasty little quips with one another about how stupid people are who disagree with them. On this forum, Democrats are described as "mass murderers" and "baby killers," and another post claims to have found one hundred Democratic bulletin board postings dating from 9-11 saying that the U.S. "deserved what we got," announcing a plan to indentify all the posters and compile information on them into "a database." Another guy (I'll stop, I swear, this is sick) plans to "find as many [Democratic anti-U.S. postings from the day of the attacks] as I can then I'm going to send them to every Senator and Rep and every News outlet I can find."

Phew, O.K., I'm done. Back to Russell McCutcheon and Stephen L. Carter.

Some ideas for projects in religious studies

2005-06-24T14:09:00.000-04:00

I've got a couple of projects on deck at the moment. I am supposed to be working on a new article, for one thing, which is going to combine my last couple of conference presentations into a single major essay. Other than that, I have two book reviews due -- one for Thomas Kaufmann's Das Ende der Reformation and another one for Russell McCutcheon's newest book, a small paperback called Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation.

These are both important books, and yesterday while driving back from the Charlestown Farm Center with my bag full of organic greens, turnips, and other vegetables, I was thinking about McCutcheon's ideas and how they might play out in a broad variety of contexts. McCutcheon's book, Critics Not Caretakers, levels some pretty harsh criticism at Stephen L. Carter's popular Culture of Disbelief, mainly for his apparent inability to think past conventional notions of what religion might actually mean -- the idea, as McCutcheon would be likely to put it, that what religion is is entirely self-evident and not to be questioned.