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The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

I’d guess we have 12-18 months until the population develops herd immunity to ‘viral’ headlines. http://t.co/x2GLKF6K8i

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) December 7, 2013

The tweet above is a small moment of hope in a sea of upworthiness.

Meanwhile, I cannot get Derek Walcott’s equation of poetry and prayer out of my mind. Nor Jay Parini’s understanding of Jesus as a sacral moment in the meeting between East and West. Alice Quinn gave us, in another sharp take on the power of poetry, the shards of Emily Dickinson’s genius – on little scraps of paper.

Four more: the Zionist reading of Bambi; the mystery of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew, so dear to Pope Francis; the struggles of the forgotten lower-middle-class; why high IQ kids turn out to be more likely to try drugs in later life; and Daniel Mendelsohn on the critical virtues of the emails students write to explain why their paper is late.

The most popular post was Smart People Get Wasted More; followed by Meep Meep Watch.

See you in the morning.

“The Thing That Used To Be Conservatism”

Mark Shea takes on Fox News, Limbaugh and Drudge in their ignorant, stupid, malevolent attacks on Pope Francis. It’s a rocking rant.

Who’s Afraid Of The Truth?

Allow me to recommend Jim Fallows’ latest post on freedom of speech and Max Blumenthal’s grueling book about the extremist elements in contemporary Israel, Goliath. The core point is that, whatever you believe about the arguments of the book, or of its author, it remains a powerfully reported account of actual people currently living in Israel, their attitudes and beliefs. You might imagine that Blumenthal’s selection of racist, extremist elements in Israeli culture obscures a larger truth, as we noted recently. But, even then, it is still a lesser truth that should be engaged, not ignored. He marshalls facts. He talks to people directly. The idea that a book that delves into such empirical questions must somehow be repudiated or ignored is a deeply illiberal idea.

Jim argues:

[Blumenthal] has found a group of people he identifies as extremists in Israel—extreme in their belief that Arabs have no place in their society, extreme in their hostility especially to recent non-Jewish African refugees, extreme in their seeming rejection of the liberal-democratic vision of Israel’s future. He says: These people are coming, and they’re taking Israeli politics with them. As he put it in a recent interview with Salon, the book is “an unvarnished view of Israel at its most extreme.” Again, the power of his book is not that Blumenthal disagrees with these groups. Obviously he does. It comes from what he shows.

To see for yourself, just watch a few minutes of the video Blumenthal and his associates made a few months ago, about recent anti-African-immigration movements. The narration obviously disapproves of the anti-immigrant activists, but that doesn’t matter. The power of the video comes from letting these people talk, starting a minute or so in.

I don’t know how you can watch the video above without thinking of previous attempts in human history – a “cancer on our body!” – to demonize, persecute and expel marginal minorities in defense of a racially homogeneous country. Period. In a particularly glaring twist, the New York Times commissioned the video then simply refused to air it.

Now I know I can be tedious about this kind of thing, and one shouldn’t engage a book merely because some want it branded anathema. But nonfiction is at its most urgent when forcing us to confront uncomfortable reality.

You can and should criticize that reality for being untrue, or deceptive, or simply false. But not engaging it at all on empirical grounds is a sign of fear, not wisdom. That was my argument for airing “The Bell Curve” a couple of decades ago; it’s my argument for presenting Steve Jimenez’s reporting on the tragedy of Matthew Shepard on the Dish. It’s why my instinctive response to those who want a book ruled out of the discourse, is to read it as a human being or air it as an editor.

It’s staggering to me that the New York Times, for example, has not reviewed (even critically) either Goliath or The Book of Matt. Why not? Either because they are cowards or because they genuinely believe that examining arguments that undermine core factions or lobbies – gay or Jewish – is somehow offensive in itself. Neither of these is a good argument. Both sustain denial.

A Spiritual Metamorphosis

 

Aeon captions the above short film, “Unusual Choices”:

In this gentle and honest portrait, Buddhist nun Ani Chudrun explains what led her away from a life of celebrity, drugs and materialism to one of reflection, compassion and ritual. Shot at Ani’s home in a forest in Sussex, the film shows how one person can radically transform their life in the search for meaning.

The Constraints On Defending Christianity

In the midst of a review of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, Alan Jacobs relays the story of a summer he spent teaching a course called “Practical Apologetics” to a group of Christian pastors in Africa. When they spurned his advice on how to reach out to Muslims, he realized there was something missing from his suggestions – as Jacobs puts it, there was “a human dimension to this enterprise that I had failed to take into account”:

Would-be apologists cannot think only of the needs of their audience; they must think also of their own limitations. Those limitations may be intellectual: as Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the 17th century, “Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.” They overrate their own intellectual capabilities, and embarrass not just themselves but the faith they had planned to defend.

But equally important are emotional or spiritual limitations. ‘I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist,” [C.S.] Lewis wrote in 1945, when he was at the apex of his career as defender of the faith. “No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.” The key word in that second sentence is “successfully”: the greatest spiritual danger presents itself not to the one who has manifestly failed (in Milton’s phrase) “to justify God’s ways to man,” but to the one who succeeds, or thinks he succeeds. And the greatest danger is not even pride: it is the discovery that a doctrine put into cold print, or into one’s own (fallen, fallible) mouth, loses much of its reality and power.

Patting Mankind On The Back

David Deutsch reflects on Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), which he calls “the finest television documentary series ever made”:

Bronowski saw the purpose of art as being the same as that of science: to give meaning and order to our experience by revealing hidden structure beneath the appearances. … Though he expressed it with characteristic understatement, his was a message of rebellion, a bold attempt to correct one of the great misconceptions of modern times and single-handedly to redirect the great river of intellectual history.

The misconception might—if its perniciousness were generally acknowledged—be called antihumanism: the pattern of ideas that disparages the human species, jeers at its claims to superiority over other species, or to any special entitlement, glories in its cosmic insignificance, and reinterprets its advent as nothing special and its subsequent progress as mostly illusory or fraudulent—and thus in all these senses, denies its ascent. Antihuman ideas would have seemed wicked or insane to the great majority of thinkers since the Enlightenment at least. But during Bronowski’s lifetime, many of them had become mainstream, to the extent of being taken for granted in academic and everyday discourse. So Bronowski’s rebellion is already there in his title: The Ascent of Man. He says that it refers to the “brilliant sequence of cultural peaks”—such as the invention of stone tools, agriculture, cities, and modern science—by which humans have learned how “not to accept the environment but to change it,” thereby improving our lives. And that this progress, despite continual setbacks, has been cumulative for as long as our species has existed.

Face Of The Day

Jordan G. Teicher captions the above picture by Giles Price:

Nearly 9 million people were mobilized to serve in Britain’s military during World War I. By the time photographer Giles Price started seeking veterans of the war in 2005, there were just 23 left. … His series, “The Old Guard,” features portraits of the last 12 veterans of the war, which broke out 100 years ago next summer. At the project’s start, Price wrote letters to each of the veterans requesting to take their photo. Thus commenced a race against time. “I was 20 minutes from taking one sitter when the home rang me to say he had passed that morning. He was 106,” Price said.

Price built a small studio in each of the homes he visited and used a studio flash to light the portraits. He shot the centenarians looking upward and ahead, in an effort to place less emphasis on their extreme age and more on the pride and dignity they retained over the years. “The gaze was one of reflection, be that the war, long life, or anything that we associate with time and memories,” Price said.

(Photo of Henry Allingham, 110, by Giles Price, whose Kickstarter project is here)

What Is Catholic Literature?

In the midst of a searching rumination on the current state of Catholic writing, Dana Gioia offers a description:

Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.) John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, for example, presents a huge cast of characters, lost souls or reprobates all, who, pursuing their assorted vices and delusions, hilariously stumble toward grace and provisional redemption. The same dark comic vision pervades the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, and Muriel Spark. Ron Hansen’s Atticus begins with the investigation of a murder. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is full of resentment, violence, and anger. “Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine,” she observed, and violence is “strangely capable” of returning her characters “to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace.” When Mary Karr titled her poetry collection Sinners Welcome, she could have been describing the Catholic literary tradition.

Much of Gioia’s essay grapples with the decline of Catholic art and literature from its heyday in the mid-20th century. One reason he cites for the current impoverishment? A growing obsession with politics:

What absorbs the Catholic intellectual media is politics, conducted mostly in secular terms—a dreary battle of right versus left for the soul of the American Church. If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it’s probably time to shutter up the chapel. If the universal Church isn’t capacious enough to contain a breadth of political opinion, then the faith has shriveled into something unrecognizably paltry. If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time to render everything up to Caesar.

Wallace Stevens remarked that “God and the imagination are one.” It is folly to turn over either to a political party, even your own. If American Catholicism has become mundane enough to be consumed by party politics, perhaps it’s because the Church has lost its imagination and creativity.

Recent Dish on denominational prose here.

Why Pray For Rain?

Helen Plotkin unpacks the Jewish prayer “Grant dew and rain for a blessing upon the face of the earth”:

[S]ometimes rain is not just rain. All over the Jewish sources, from the Bible to the Talmud to the prayer book, rain stands in for a more general earthward flow of divine nurture. Talking about rainfall is a way of talking about the relationship between God and humanity. When one is in good shape, so is the other. In fact, water is a major plot-driver of the Bible. Sometimes the narrative suspense comes from a scarcity of water, and sometimes it comes from being overwhelmed by too much water.

How she connects the prayer to contemporary America:

In our own era, Americans have farmed like the Pharaoh. We have used the power of technology to irrigate land without rain, making tomatoes and cantaloupes available year round. We have even relied on the labor of sojourners, people who live apart from those they serve in conditions that the served would never tolerate for themselves, people who are needed but whose growing power gives rise to fear.

And we have been forced to remember that life on earth actually does teeter between deluge and drought. Our focus on power over balance has not protected us from the danger of either kind of water crisis. In these circumstances, the prayer for rain is a powerful offering. The tradition teaches us to read it metaphorically, as an expression of longing for spiritual nourishment, challenging us to live in a way that allows God’s gaze to fall upon us for a blessing. And we can read it more literally as well: May we learn to live in a way that nurtures balance. May our interactions with the natural world leave us neither parched nor drowned. May the rains in their season bring bounty and blessing.

(Image of rain via Yuliya Libkina)

Savior And Savant

How Jay Parini, author of, Jesus: The Human Face of God, understands the man Christians worship:

In my view, he was a kind of religious genius born in a fertile place and time: on the Silk Road, when Hellenistic ideas about body and soul had begun to take root in the Middle East, and when the winds of eastern mysticism—with the idea of karma, for instance—blew in from Persia and farther afield. Jesus grasped these concepts, and weaved them into his teaching, overturning traditional Jewish assumptions though building on some of them as well. The Sermon on the Mount offers a unique blend of western and eastern thought, summarizing his ideas. Here he puts forward his radical notions about nonviolent resistance to evil. In the gospels, he spoke in challenging aphorisms and parables. As he walked and taught in Galilee, he modeled behavior that shocked those in who met him.

By his death and crucifixion, he modeled suffering and death as well as life. He understood that his life was symbolic, even mythical. And by his resurrection—which was not the Great Resuscitation but a kind of magical transformation into a new form of life, eternal life, he offered humanity hope.

In an excerpt from his book, Parini elaborates on the significance of the resurrection, noting that when Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene, she didn’t recognize him:

Nobody recognized Jesus at first — a point of huge significance, as it underscores the difficult and mysterious nature of the Resurrection, which defies all norms and defeats rationalization.

The embodied spirit of the Messiah returning from the dead was not exactly the same person who died but some altered version of Jesus, transmogrified more than restored to his former state. In reality, the manifestation of Jesus after his death beggars the imagination: he acquired a spiritual body, as we read in I Corinthians 15:44: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” There is a subtle teaching here: We should not expect to recognize Jesus at first, even as he wakens within us.

In August, Parini spoke to Ron Charles about how his account differs from Reza Aslan’s controversy-stirring Zealot:

While expressing admiration for Aslan as a writer, Parini takes issue with Aslan’s thesis in “Zealot” that Jesus was a “politically conscious Jewish revolutionary” who advocated overthrowing the Roman Empire. “The core of the Jesus message is what has made him relevant for 20 centuries,” Parini said. “That message — embodied in the Sermon on the Mount — is one of passive resistance to violence. Turn the other cheek. It’s the essence of Christianity. One has to cherry-pick a few odd remarks by Jesus, then read them out of context while ignoring the vast bulk of the Gospels to think Jesus was a zealot, and then — if he were — would anyone care about yet another violent rebel from Galilee, most of whom are now forgotten?”

(Image of Persian Jesus (Isa) miniature of the Sermon on the Mount, date unknown, via Wikimedia Commons)