163. It's been a while

Previous - 162. Becoming Wise

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Sorry to leave you hanging if you were at all interested in Becoming Wise. This pause was not planned.

Becoming Wise

p162 Western Christianity lost some of the cleansing power of mystery when it became a bedfellow with empire and later, again, in its headlock with science. I sensed a discomfort in my grandfather at his own large and active mind, a nervous reluctance to acknowledge things the Bible did not or could not explain. For they might be delivered over to science's godless certainties, and then they were lost to the faithful forever...

p163 As this century opened, physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers were no longer pushing mystery out, but welcoming it back in...

p226  Shane Claybourne claims that "spittin' image" is shorthand for "the spirit and image." I like that. But does it really work if no one remembers that's what it means?


What I'm getting in all this is that Tippett -- even more perhaps than Lamott -- sees faith as a tribal human characteristic. It's something that binds groups together, often in opposition with other groups. The Amish and Ultra Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Arab women are like the tribal peoples who wear neck-rings or lip-plates. The fashions they use to distinguish themselves from others are arbitrary -- as are all fashions. What is important is that they adhere to the tribal fashion.

The tricky part when it comes to religion is, how to you sell the fashion to the young of the tribe without making judgements against outsiders? Can you say, "This is completely meaningless and stupid but it's this thing we do"?

And beyond that, can you say, Our religion and our God is this wonderful thing we've made up and we're better for believing it, but, you know, don't try to peek behind the curtains?


And she never does even touch on the problem of evil. To be fair, the kind of faith described in the previous paragraph doesn't require confronting that problem. Religion is simply one of the ways we deal with the evil we run into. If your God is pretend you can sidestep so many tiresome meta-ethical problems. 

She does talk very briefly about people who were recent victims of evil, secular martyrs. (Secular in that they didn't suffer and die for their faith, exactly.) Still, I don't think -- in a book like this -- you can just pass over evil without comment. 

Dostoevsky was not arguing for a pretend God, so he, through Ivan Karamazov, spent a great deal of time talking about evil. But did he come up with a neat explanation or justification? Didn't he just leave it at mystery? Both Dostoevsky and Tippett I think hope the problem will go away when people get in touch with their inner vulnerability. To which Michel Foucault says, "Ha!" Or to stick to The Brothers Karamazov, Pavel, de Sade's stand-in (or the straw-man representing de Sade), says, "Ha!" 

Martha Grimes mysteries

Here's something I can't explain, when I put back the books on my "featured fiction" shelf, there wasn't room for them all. I had to pick a title to remove and noticed a Richard Jury mystery, The Lamorna Wink that I didn't remember. I'm reading it now and I really don't think I've read it before. I'm around a third into it and so far Jury has not really been in it, it's all about Melrose Plant. 

In every Jury mystery Grimes has to visit her characters in Northants and in London, and we just wrapped our short visit to London where everyone, including Cyril the cat, are mostly just waiting for Jury to reappear. 

I'm not complaining, I was wondering when we would see Cyril, and it was nice to finally get some crucial backstory on Melrose. There's a murder and a disappeared person and we still haven't a clue what Jury is doing in Ireland. All that is fine, I'm reading slowly and just enjoying going where Grimes wants to take me. 
 

Photo update

Time passes. Here's how Salesforce Tower has progressed,

Before.

Now.

And here's how the work on the Van Ness BRT is coming along. The median is entirely removed and paved over except where the few trees are being preserved. It looks pretty silly,

Before.

Now.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

I'm still not sure how best to deal with this book. This is why I have not been posting for a while now. I want to build up a backlog so I can post regularly once I start up again, but wasn't sure how much detail I wanted to get into. 

This book is building up and cross-pollinating in a way that I'm not even sure is conscious to the author. Either he is being very stealthy about bringing up some interesting theological concepts, or he is accidentally bumping into things that I see connections between but he doesn't. The smart thing would be to wait until I've read it all and then go back and blog as I make a second pass through the material... so that's off the table.

I'm going to go ahead and post what I have as I complete my first pass with the understanding that I will be coming back to some of this later. My other problem is that Christian minutia relating to Augustine and Jansen (that I have so little interest in parsing) seems to be as central to this as are the more interesting (to me) religious ideas of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And if I can paraphrase Clausewitz, this book could be viewed as The Magic Mountain's "regieren" by other means. And with Brooks arguing Naphtha's position. 

Again, I can't tell how conscious the author is of all this. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky would be appalled by some of the people presented as exemplars. Though this would be less true of Naphtha. (I'm almost at the end now and am even more puzzled by Brooks's actual position. Either he's oblivious or using misdirection to prevent us from seeing what he's actually arguing for.)

In any event, I can promise you a return of the Port Royal gang, or at least some of their core ideas, yet another questioning of the secular, bourgeois world order, another pass at George Eliot, and some great stuff about Montaigne -- who keeps popping up, or rather who has occasionally shouted something or other from off-stage, but now can finally take a bow.

Next - 164. The Road to Character