ReligionDispatches.org

The failed attempt by a would-be Nigerian terrorist to bring down a Delta aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day must surely rank as the loudest non-explosion whose reverberations have quite literally been heard around the world. International travel over the next week was an adventure, to put it mildly. In Athens, everyone traveling to the United States was patted down and all carry-on items were unpacked and closely examined, without exception; travelers were not permitted to purchase liquids of any kind, even in the duty-free shops. These developments may soon become standard operating procedure.

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A matter of enormous significance slipped into the news a couple of weeks ago, though it was buried under the rubble in Port-au-Prince. Although in the short term it will be drowned out by the continued media fallout in Haiti, its historical reach may be a lot longer.

The media monster, Google, has announced that it may pull out of China, pending resolution of its recent decision no longer to permit the regulations and de facto censorship previously required by the current regime, a regime to which it had consented until now. This is a major about-face from the company's previous understanding of the dynamics of globalization. In short, Google attempted to go global by respecting the local rules in any country it entered. The idea seems to be that there is no universal set of standards or guidelines regarding search engines or any other form of commerce. There is no international law governing international markets. While it sounds odd to say that, this is the clear, if only implicit, implication in Google's previous policy.

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Cornel West is one of the few public intellectuals who consistently refers to Martin Luther King Jr. by remembering to include the suffix to his name. This appropriately distinguishes the man and his career from that of his father, another prominent preacher in Atlanta, and occupant of the selfsame pulpit that his son would make into a national icon. It was there, at that same pulpit (actually across the street from the original site of the Ebenezer Baptist Church) that Cornel West offered up his rousing sermon in honor of the King National Holiday.

West accomplished three things, any one of which would be worthy of accolade, but taken together, they created a daunting shadow of rhetorical magnitude.

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Like most televison viewers, I have been frozen into a sort of moral torpor by the realization of the magnitude of the devastation in Haiti. While the death toll estimates from the original quake are staggering, it is scarcely thinkable what is happening now. Given the appalling lack of infrastructure—relief planes unable to land at the overloaded airport, roads impassable or non-existent—some fortunate to have survived the original collapse may now remain trapped and unreachable. What they and their families, in Haiti or in the extensive Haitian diaspora, are contending with now is very difficult to imagine.

It is so bad that it invites the moralizing of nature, compelling many to conclude that what has been visited on this island is evil, not simply bad. Susan Neiman tells a compelling story about how, arguably for the first time in the Modern period, western people began to see natural disasters in moral terms. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did more than level a city and kill countless thousands of its inhabitants; it also toppled the carefully constructed Early Modern edifice: a belief in the goodness and orderliness of the natural world. As Nieman puts it, the eighteenth century invoked the name of Lisbon in much the way twentieth century people would invoke Auschwitz.

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I have commented in a previous post on Tim Tebow’s noteworthy decision, in the middle of last season, to display biblical verses on the field of black paint under his eyes. I was struck, at the time, by his decision to begin changing the verse each week. Throughout most of the 2008 season, the verse was always the same: Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” If this seems a bit theologically brazen, then so be it.

Tebow changed the verse, to the more familiar John 3:16, for the 2008 title game and since then he has selected a new verse for each contest. These verses began receiving attention from commentators by mid-season, prompting brief, and sometimes unintentionally comic, Bible readings to go along with game analysis and game summaries. I puzzled at the time over why I was troubled by this practice since, in fairness, it seems an entirely proper way for this deeply committed evangelical Christian to get people to read, and to discuss, portions of the Bible each week. In short, if this represents Tebow’s attempt to marry his professional practice to his Christian practice, then what is wrong with that?

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In his first book, published a the ripe age of 26, Nietzsche observed that “life is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.” He never retreated from that bold pronouncement, and scholars have speculated ever since about what precisely he meant to say.

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On one of those late night political roundtables that we seem to have exported worldwide, I heard a fascinating exchange about the strange tale of the recent assault on the Italian Prime Minister. The show was entitled "Blood of the Victor" and it displayed a rather jarring image unlike any I'd seen in the US. On US television, I'd seen one image endlessly repeated: the Prime Minister walking through a crowd, something flying past the camera, very fast, and then the Prime Minister falling backward as a crush of officials moved off-screen to apprehend the suspect.

I never saw the impact, and I certainly never saw the blood.

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The recent decision by US Attorney General, Eric Holder—that five Guantanamo detainees believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks will be brought to the US to be tried in a non-military court in lower Manhattan—has raised cries of outrage from many quarters. Here is yet another complex contemporary issue that does not seem to break down neatly according to the old logic of “liberal and conservative” politics.  

Some object to the decision not to try the five in military tribunals instead. Some object to the symbolism of bringing the men onto US soil. Others embrace the symbolism of trying the five in lower Manhattan, in the symbolic shadow of Ground Zero. Some worry that this cannot serve as anything other than a show-trial, whose outcome is already clear; the idea is that this decision would never have been rendered were the Attorney General in any doubt about the final outcome.

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There is a fine but important line to be drawn between reasonable disagreement and irresponsible name-calling. It is thus surprising when a commenter baber begins with name-calling in response to a claim by Karen Armstrong with which he might simply have chosen to disagree.

Here, then, is Armstrong’s claim, via Brian McGrath Davis’ review here on RD:

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A deeply fractious, but culturally very interesting, battle is brewing at the University of California at Berkeley, symbolic epicenter of left academic activism and California-style progressivism. It is a battle that offers a cautionary tale for our times.

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From the position of a wistful and quixotic leftism, the announcement by the Nobel Committee of its decision to award President Barack Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize created not so much ambivalence as dismay. And I have struggled with the meaning of the decision—interested less in having something new to say about it, and more in how to figure out how to feel about it, and how to discern its symbolic message, intended or not.

An obvious and immediate concern was that this award was tailor-made to serve the interests of the talk-show savvy political right.

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The brouhaha stirred up by the President's sudden decision to travel to Copenhagen in order to lobby for Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games should not really be surprising. Each and every President faces the challenge of remembering where they came from, politically speaking, even as they make the transition to a global stage. Bush's long periods back in Crawford, Texas, are but the most recent example of the ways in which a president tries to shore up his or her power base "back home," while at the same time loosening those same ties, lest their leadership seem overly partisan and geographically narrow.

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The main topic on last weekend's round of talk shows and political roundtables was whether there is a meaningful analogy to be drawn between the US experience in Vietnam and current debates over our policy in Afghanistan and its somewhat dubious future. There are no such things as perfect analogies, of course, but suggestive connections there surely are.

Most of them received a helpful airing.

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The Christian Century recently asked a group of distinguished culture commentators how they get their news, focusing on what they read and how they read when their topic is religion.

Mark Silk—a wonderfully thoughtful and creative analyst of religion in the news, especially the new media outlets that proliferate, and professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College—walked us through his day in an interesting, provocative, and remarkably recognizable way.

He reads two newspapers at home in the morning:

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Philip Clayton’s wonderful essay on the troubled relationship between religion and science represents one of those superlative and subtle interventions for which I have come to rely on him. Sly and suggestive, stunning in its breezy historical range, Clayton’s essay offers us, in the end, a fairly simple message about the urgent need for thoughtful and creative dialogue, across the disciplines. I will return to that second idea—creativity—in a moment. I also want to locate the academic study of Religion more explicitly within the Humanities, for reasons that I hope to explain below.

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On Wednesday evening, the President of the United States of America addressed a joint session of Congress; there is no more solemn setting, and it was, and remains, a legitimate question as to whether this was the right venue for this speech. I am not convinced that it was, for reasons that will take time to explain.

Presidents very rarely do this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it only once—to declare war on Japan. Lyndon Johnson did so, after the assassination of President Kennedy. George W. Bush did so, after the 9/11 attacks. And perhaps most tellingly, Bill Clinton did so to speak about health care reform. It was not an auspicious setting for an intractable public debate.

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I belong to a food co-op; I have for several years. It's wonderful institution and I genuinely like visiting the place, as I do (at a minimum) several times a week. It's invitingly New-Agey, has wonderful organic and Fair Trade products, and several delicious items I can't seem to find anywhere else.

The thing is, I can't imagine going there for health-care, excepting certain herbal remedies they carry.

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Mark Seal published the fourth in his series of “The Madoff Chronicles” for Vanity Fair magazine this month; this time he turns his attention to the still-mysterious figure of Ruth Madoff, wife to the criminal du jour. It makes for strange reading.

The question, of course, is as obvious and inescapable as it is unanswerable: what did she know and when did she know (or suspect) it?

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The swirl of debate on this Sunday's morning talk-shows hinged, predictably enough, on two questions. First, has the fracas at so many town hall meetings held recently to discuss various health care reform proposals been orchestrated by Republican and other elites, or is it a real grassroots outpouring of outrage and raw political emotion?

And second, what degree of responsibility do Republican leaders like Sarah Palin bear for correcting egregious and alarmist references to governmental "death panels," and in what way might they be held accountable for repeating such deliberate errors of fact and distorting others?

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was asked point-blank whether Sarah Palin was correct in her original assertion about the existence of such "death panels," or whether her Republican colleagues from Alaska who roundly condemned the statement, and condemned her for making it., were more on the mark Astonishingly, if not surprisingly, Hatch sidestepped the question and refused to answer it.

"Many different people have many different opinions about this," he opined.

Astonishing.

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Yes, there are times when the wildest idea, the most obviously impossible scheme, becomes so strongly planted in one’s mind that one begins to regard it as something quite realizeable. Moreover, if that thought is combined with a powerful and passionate desire, at certain moments it will loom as something fateful, inevitable, predestined, as something that cannot fail to happen. Perhaps this feeling is due to a combination of premonition, enormous strength of will, and intoxication with one’s own fantasy, or perhaps something else—I don’t know.

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler,

Like Dostoevsky, George W. Bush was an inveterate gambler. And while it is a dangerous game to blame all of our current troubles on the grossest gambles of a previous administration, the debts in this case are fairly obvious ones. President Obama, and the nation, now bear the staggering costs of two wars, an ideological commitment to deregulation and an almost staggering faith in the power of free markets.

It is easy to forget the way Bush’s career began. He managed to lose 20 million dollars on the surest of sure things: Texas oil. His father’s friends paid the notes when they came due. So he rolled the dice again, on a long-shot this time, and won big, unseating his well-loved opponent as governor of Texas. And thus was a gambling career born.

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There are bars you never forget, places the sheer memory of which can get you through the long winter months… or trying weeks at work. The Veggera Beach Bar on the northern coast of Corfu, in a small seaside resort called Acharavi, is that place for me. A great deal of human energy has been expended there over many years simply to create an atmosphere in which you will feel instantly happy and at home.

No, not at home. Better than that. So that you will feel like you are in paradise.

Such utopias are rare. And the kind of utopians who devote themselves to their sustenance and care are rarer still. I had the supreme good fortune of meeting one such utopian, an old and dear personal friend, for cocktails at the Veggera, as the Ionian sun drifted lazily into the sea. It was the sort of scene before which words fail, sinking happily into the silence of that same sea.

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Greenwich Village has a rare beauty in the early summer, when the days tend to be breezy and nights are still cool. I have never seen the place better kept, each and every park and thoroughfare brilliantly manicured with flowers and spices positively exploding into an orgiastic display of midsummer colors. Most all of the storefronts were painted in rainbow patterns that beautifully set off the gardens. It was the summer solstice. And it is the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots that symbolically announced the birth of a gay rights movement in the United States, rights for a community that would no longer be ignored. Quite suddenly, coming out of the closet meant hitting the streets.

Admittedly, I was simply strolling on a sleepy late Monday morning; no doubt there are parades and concerts and lectures associated with the anniversary (billboards announced a week-long observance, ending on June 28th). But as I wandered the streets and tried to imagine the tumult forty years earlier, I wondered what it all had meant, and what had been achieved.

On a progressive note, nearly every storefront was participating in this commemoration; solidarity with an aggrieved community is the surest sign of social progress. But in addition to the tourists taking pictures of various shop windows and their common refrain—“Be Proud”—there were the predictable offhand street-smart remarks and muttering from out-of-town visitors, reading the signs and placards aloud in effected voices dripping with irony, or ill-disguised contempt.

What had it all meant? What had been achieved?

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Kathryn Lofton’s luminous essay on the ritual form of the wedding announcement helped me to understand what has perplexed and fascinated me so about reportage of the Madoff scandal. The issue is one of tone, finding the right tone for a wedding announcement, or for a meditation on a scandal of such colossal proportions.

Lofton captures the melancholic heart of the thing—if it were not so, then why should death play such a prominent part in the very ceremony from which we should most wish to protect it? “Til death do us part,” we say, reminding ourselves in the very moment of joining that we are committing ourselves equally to an inevitable parting.

How should we look upon the smiling faces, the desperate notes, the brief snippets of biography, the inspiring hopes, the sense of infinite possibility? Lofton invites us into an almost terrifying honesty: when we gaze upon such pictures, we cannot help but imagine the whole thing unraveling, as fully half of these unions will, statistically speaking. As Susan Sontag noted long ago, photography has always enjoyed a special intimacy with catastrophe.

So I return to Vanity Fair, and its attempts to put a human face on the Bernie Madoff saga.

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Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Bernie Madoff saga plays longer and better in New York than anywhere else in the world. The sleek New York-based monthly, Vanity Fair, has devoted three months now to an ongoing series it calls "The Madoff Chronicles." And in June it published its biggest scoop of to date: the personal story of Madoff's longtime secretary (she was hired in 1984), Eleanor Squillari.

The article begins with a jolt, even before it moves into Squillari's own story. "In writing about Bernard Madoff for Vanity Fair's April issue, I frequently heard his victims refer to him as another Hitler, who decimated his largely Jewish clientele by stealing their money in the biggest Ponzi scheme in history."

Madoff and Hitler. Seven billion dollars and six million souls. It just doesn't add up. In fact, it's a shocking claim. Yet the connection has a seductive appeal, and once you've heard it you can't stop thinking about it.

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A recent essay on the death penalty I wrote for RD was picked up recently by Rod Parsley on his website, and recommended to his confessedly Christian readership, in part I take it, as an example of how not to argue from the Bible.

I was, and remain, grateful for his careful reading of the piece, and for his judicious reflection on specifically Christian reasons to oppose the death penalty—primarily the fundamental, and really quite moving, idea that no human soul is irredeemable, and that even in prison, redemption happens.

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