Although I knew from the title that I probably wouldn't agree with a lot of this, I found it a very enjoyable read. It includes essays of varying lengths (the shortest is less than two pages, the longest 27), on the existence of God and ethical questions in general. On the more general questions, Russell is definitely a liberal, opposed to forced conformity and social hypocrisy, and his views are pretty close to mine. I particularly enjoyed a couple of historical pieces - a review of two books on medieval history and a sketch of the life of Thomas Paine.
On the existence of God, the most interesting of several pieces is a transcript of a radio debate between Russell and a Jesuit, where Russell clearly wins the argument about logical proofs, doesn't make as convincing a case on ethics, and has no answer to the question of religious experience. (The Jesuit misses a chance to push Russell on what I have always seen as the weakest point of his side of the argument, that science and logic are not in fact able to explain the whole of human experience; and the anti-God response tends to be to pretend that things which don't fall into the domain of science and logic don't need to be explained, which is then a tautology.)
I still prefer Russell's approach to that of, say, Richard Dawkins, because Russell seems to me to have a better grip of the problem: he quite rightly attacks dogmatic beliefs, be they Christian or Communist, held tyrannously by anyone, and advocates free thinking and debate; and one of his arguments against religion, in particular Christianity, is that it usually fosters and leads to this sort of tyranny. My own view is that it is a categorical error to blame this pattern of human behaviour, which is found and has been found among rulers of all religious backgrounds and of none, on religion per se. (There are also plenty of examples of states with a strong religious consciousness which none the less practice or practiced pluralism, but Russell discounts them as not being religious enough, which by his lights they aren't.)
The book finishes with a long (40 pages) description by the editor, Paul Edwards, of an incident where Russell was barred from taking up a professorship at the City College of New York as a result of an outrageous court judgement, combined with political machinations by (ultimately) Mayor LaGuardia. It is a depressing story, and illustrates that the American system is not always all that it is cracked up to be; but this is perhaps less newsworthy in 2008 than it was in 1940.
Rather sad to report that I'm not going to finish this, even though I agree with a lot of what the author is saying - particularly, that the right wing's capture of the religious high ground in the 2004 presidential election was both crucial and dishonest. But the style rather put me off - Wallis is preaching rather than analysing, and shows off about his own achievements rather too much. I got the message in the first couple of chapters, and don't really feel I need to read the rest - especially since the battle lines of 2008 are rather more blurry, but not really in line with Wallis's prescription.
This is the first Dalgliesh novel I've read - I have a feeling I did once get through An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, so not quite my first P.D. James. (Interestingly, the two books share the theme of the detective being called in to investigate the possible suicide of a young man by his distant, rich, estranged father.) I very much enjoyed it, especially in contrast to Little, Big which I was slogging through at the same time. Of course, the whole thing depends rather a lot on hidden coincidences and secrets (the bit about the consecrated wafer seemed particularly unlikely to me), but it is entertaining and I found the resolution at least psychologically consistent with what we knew of the characters.
The book is set in an obscure High Church Anglican seminary, and there is a certain amount of reflection on the current state of the Church of England - though perhaps it's more that she is doing a conscious (and at one point completely overt) riff on Trollope.
I have been thinking all week about last Monday's reading, Mark 9:14-29. It's one of Mark's irritatingly cryptic healing narratives, where the disciples are rebuked (with no apparent justification) by Jesus for their lack of faith. That wasn't the bit that grabbed me: what interested me was the description of the symptoms of the child with an evil spirit which "has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and becomes rigid."
Usually interpreters take this to be a case of epilepsy, but as the parent of two children who cannot speak due to autism, it seemed to me that this must also be a possibility. B in particular can get into such a fury with the universe that she pounds on walls or the floor, doing herself damage like the child in Mark's account who would throw himself into the fire or the water - actually both our girls will perfectly happily throw themselves into the water with no regard to their own safety, but for fun rather than in rage. I'm struck by the way in which the child goes into convulsions as soon as Jesus comes into view, just as an autistic person can get deeply upset by new people or new routines. (And I don't know a lot about epilepsy, but I had the impression that it doesn't usually go with speechlessness.)
Obviously it's a bit pointless to diagnose a medical condition reported at second or third hand several decades after it happened two millennia ago, and it is not the point of the story anyway. The point of the story is the cure that Jesus effects on the child, who lies there at first seeming to be dead; but Jesus lifts him up by the hand. The moral lesson is the slightly obscure question of the level of belief of the disciples, and the child's father; in the raising up of the child from apparent death, there is also a clear foreshadowing of Jesus' own coming resurrection, which indeed is made explicit a couple of verses later.
The bit about the child's hand seemed very familiar to me. Both our daughters will take your hand and move it towards whatever it is they want done - a door that they want to have opened, food to get out of the kitchen cupboard, a particular video or DVD to put on. And I found myself wondering to what extent the child was actually "cured". If B were as easy-going and generally happy as U, she could probably still be living with us; if she were suddenly to become as able as U (who is still very very disabled), we would see it as a major advance.
Yet if they were not autistic, they would be completely different people; it would be very different from, say, healing someone who cannot walk, or has been born blind, or has leprosy. Part of accepting our children's situation has been realising that it is a fundamental part of what they are; at a very early stage I became suspicious of snake-oil merchants offering "cures". Elizabeth Moon writes about this from the autistic person's own point of view in her Nebula-winning novel Speed of Dark, and Charlotte Moore gives the perspective of a mother and a younger brother in George and Sam; I quoted her best line when I reviewed her book, but here it is again:
These mysterious, impossible, enchanting beings will always be among us, unwitting yardsticks for our own moral behaviour, uncomprehending challengers of our definition of what it means to be human.Mark doesn't tell us that the child who Jesus encountered was completely "cured"; just that he went home quietly with his father and (by implication, though not explicitly) started to speak a little. I think any parent in a situation like ours would be profoundly grateful for even a small shift in that direction.
The Council of Nicæa is a relatively short audio play in the Big Finish range, by Caroline Symcox (who I last saw at MeCon). It brings the Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, his TV companion Peri Brown and new audio companion Erimem to the year 325 and the theological disputes over the nature of God at the eponymous Council. Supporting characters from history are the Emperor Constantine, his wife Fausta, and the competing theologians Athanasius and Arius.
The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons, is an early one of the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures, set pretty firmly in TV chronology between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror, bringing the First Doctor with companions Ian, Susan and Barbara to the village of Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, just in time for the infamous witch trials.
Both are stories in which there is no sfnal element in the historical context apart from the Doctor and his companions, and thus are very much rooted in the early traditions of the show. Both stories are a kind of response in Who terms to other writers - Symcox reacting against J. N. O. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, Lyons more favourably to Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Both of them feature a historical context where, essentially, the bad guys are the mainstream authority Christians and the listener/reader is invited to sympathise with the underdog (Arius and his followers/the accused "witches"). In both cases, the youngest of the Tardis crew (Erimem/Susan) is instrumental in trying to change history in the favour of the underdogs, in both cases (and this is hardly a spoiler) unsuccessfully.
Symcox takes more liberties with the setting (Arius is portrayed as a young man and Athanasius as somewhat older; in fact the reverse was the case), as she is writing a more standard Doctor Who story and also has less time to do it in (less than 100 minutes, compared to Lyons' 282 pages). As often with Who, the Doctor gains the confidence of the authorities rather implausibly rapidly, which then of course accelerates the amount of trouble he and his friends get into. The two key elements of the story are the didactic part, informing the average listener who is (safely) assumed to know very little of the Council of Nicæa, and the character development of Erimem, who sides with Arius partly out of national solidarity (Arius was from Alexandria, Erimem is an ancient Egyptian pricess) but more out of a sense of fair play. She pleads that because 325 is her future, she should not be accused of trying to change the past. It all worked rather well for me, certainly much better than The Church and the Crown, an earlier audio with a similar concept except that the Doctor intervenes to force history into our timeline.
Lyons makes the reader work harder; he has more characters to follow (not just four in the Tardis crew instead of three, but a large chunk of the population of Salem) and more background knowledge is assumed. He is also sticking closer to the historical sequence of events, though The Crucible is explicitly referenced, with the Doctor and crew taking in the first performance in Bristol in 1954, and the Doctor then returning with Rebecca Nurse to take it in again. Actually Lyons handles the possibility of changing history a bit less convincingly than Symcox, with even the Doctor rather un-Doctorishly seduced by the possibility of intervening to save lives. He also requires the Tardis to operate rather more accurately than we saw at this stage of the show's history. Balanced against this, there are a lot of pleasing references to the first few television stories. The narrative has its own drama, which carries the book in the end, but the Tardis crew rather end up with the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Anyway, I found it interesting to compare and contrast between the two approaches - same basic idea, but different format and different details.
( Easter reflection )
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liadnan has a very good take-down of Williams' remarks from the legal perspective. I'm going to take a brief look at the political side of it.But before I do that I'm going to step aside - about 400 miles to the west - and react to Belgian Waffle's comments on press coverage of Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism, echoing to an extent
stellanova's comments from some time ago (see also Ken MacLeod). There is indeed a bit of weirdness in English views on Catholicism - though I think BW is over-sensitive in reaction to the phrase "cradle Catholic" - the reason we don't use it in Ireland is because most of us are, unlike in England where there are quite a lot of converts who tend to be fairly visible. But this ties into a deeper weirdness (he said, in a completely unprejudiced way) in English views of religion in general.One of the big elements of culture shock for me when I first lived in England (two months working on an archaeological site in 1985, when I was 18) was to encounter people who actually took the Church of England seriously. Brought up on BBC news reports and sit-coms (and the 1982 Barchester mini-series), plus of course my Catholic education which informed me that the Reformation happened because of Luther's poor relationship with his father, it had never occurred to me that the Church of England was anything other than a much-mocked hangover of Henry VIII's infidelity.
Five years being educated at the second oldest college in Cambridge gave me a more rounded appreciation of the Anglican tradition. (The new Dean of the college, who started at the same time as we did and married me and Anne seven years later, had just been appointed as the immediate successor to one Rowan Williams.) Yet there's always this undercurrent of not quite knowing what the Church is for. "I don't know what I am, so I suppose I'm C of E" was the standard response to my Northern Irish enquiries about people's denominational identities.
And what I detect with Rowan Williams' statements is a failure to engage with the problem that Anglicanism has with itself. Of course, this is because the media cannot boil down his complex concepts into short sound-bites; but it is actually his job to do that for them, and if he does not make the message simple enough to understand, then perhaps it is not actually worth bothering to try. I'm not a huge fan of the current Pope, but at least his response to the Stupid Storm of eighteen months ago was to apologise; Rowan Williams' clarification is, sadly, as impenetrable as his original statements.
( getting there )
( Saturday: the big sights )
( Sunday: bits and pieces, and failure at the catacombs )
( food )
And so back home on Monday morning; have been writing this on the plane, while Anne gazed out the window at the Alps. Back to work tomorrow.
frankie_ecap rereads the Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey.roz_mcclure and friends have been staging a mega-Buffy readthrough.bradhicks has read Robin Lane Fox's 1986 book Pagans and Christians, about the sudden rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. (Hat-tip to communicator.)8) The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad and the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism, by Barnaby Rogerson
I picked up the second of these remaindered in Belfast last month, and realised that I had better read the first one as well so ordered t from Amazon. These are two breezily written, enthusiastic books about the early decades of Islam. In both cases, Rogerson spends a good third of the book getting to the starting point - the first gives us a detailed description of Arabia's geographical and political surroundings in the sixth century, before we get onto the meat of the Prophet's life, and the second recapitulates the narrative of the first book, though I felt it was still worth having bought both.
Rogerson is clearly a sympathiser, and this means that neither book can be considered particularly neutral. But that's perhaps not such a bad thing; I am more interested in finding out what the Prophet's followers believe than in getting the historical "facts", whatever they are. His narrative is complete enough that I did find myself taken aback at some points. Rogerson appears to expect us to be shocked that one of Muhammad's wives had previously been married to the Prophet's adopted son, but in fact while the circumstances are a bit murky this is a process that appears to have been consensual on both sides; I was much more taken aback by the fact that his marriage to Aisha took place when the latter was only nine. And whatever the record of later Muslim regimes for inter-religious tolerance (generally not bad, at least, alas, compared to many of their Christian contemporaries) the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Medina was surely not a good start.
My biggest disappointment, however, is that we don't really get under Muhammad's skin; Rogerson is too much in awe of him to make him seem like a human being. This may be unfair of me. The thing Muhammad is best known for, his experience of divine revelation, is a long way outside the range of experience for most of us, and it may well be impossible for a biographer - especially, I suspect, a sympathetic biographer - to make it comprehensible for the general reader. But I actually I felt I had got a better idea of his character from Gibbon.
In the second book, Rogerson's enthusiasm in the face of the facts is almost endearing. While the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Omar, seem to have indeed been gifted leaders - it was under Omar that the really big military conquests took place, culminating with Persia, the Holy Land and Egypt - the caliphate collapsed under the leadership of Uthman and Ali, and Rogerson's attempts to exalt Ali's reputation (as indeed it is exalted in both Shia and Sunni tradition) are difficult to sustain given his failure to keep his own regime together.
However. This was a very interesting pair of books for me, filling in a significant gap in my knowledge which I had previously only really read in much detail in chapters L and LI of Gibbon; who is also entertaining and partisan, of course (and truth be told somewhat better written).
9) The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin with an Introduction by Helen Waddell
The Desert Fathers are a long-time interest of Anne's, so I decided to sample them for myself. The Penguin collection edited by Benedicta Ward simply gives the complete text of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers compiled by Pelagius in the early fourth century; Helen Waddell has selected her favourite bits from that document, perhaps a third of it, and then added on various other texts, concluding with the Lives of St Pelagia the Harlot and St Mary the Harlot, which are about as exciting as you would expect. (If you really want to read them, there is another translation of St Pelagia here and here, with St Mary the Harlot starting a little way down the page here and ending here.)
Both of them are a fascinating insight into the lives and mentalities of the first Christian monastics - men and women who felt that they must go and live in the desert to get closer to God. Despite having been educated by nuns, and having a couple of friends who tried it and didn't stick with it, I've never given much thought to how people who have chosen that path actually think about it and express it to other people. There is surprisingly little in either set of writings that is particularly Christian, and I would suspect that you might get much the same set of sentiments from Buddhist monks or their equivalents elsewhere. There is an uneasy and sometimes consciously very funny tension running through the writings, between on the one hand being deeply devout and determined, and pulling up the other monks who are not trying hard enough; and on the other hand not showing off one's own piety. One is sometimes reminded of the Monty Python sketch about hermits, echoed in a recent episode of Doctor Who. But at the same time you can't help but be impressed with the seriousness and dedication with which these people tried to develop their understanding of their creator and themselves by cutting themselves off from the world.
Of the two books, Helen Waddell's is much the better. She's been on my radar screen for a while; although born in Japan and mainly famous for her contributions to mid-twentieth century literary London, she was brought up in Northern Ireland and left her papers to the Queen's University of Belfast Library. She has written a respectful yet witty introduction to each of the ten pieces, and a longer one for the book of the whole, bemoaning the fact that the reputation of the early Christian monastics has never recovered from being mocked viciously in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She complains that St Simeon Stylites, who lived on a pillar for thirty years, was not in fact a very important figure in Christian history: "His present reputation, vast as it is, dates largely from the eighteenth century, and balances delicately on a paragraph of Gibbon's prose." The Penguin edition is interesting for completeness, to see what Helen Waddell chose to leave out; but she got most of the good bits.
( honest to ∂³∑x² )
The diplomat said that he himself wasn't leaving until Monday, but his government confidently expected to be gone on Saturday; because Tony Blair was certainly not going to be late for his meeting with the Pope.
My friend grinned. "That's probably what it will take to bring the Poles around!" he quipped.
True or not, I just want to point to two interesting pieces on Blair's imminent embrace of Catholicism -
stellanova takes the Guardian to task for its knee-jerk anti-Catholicism, and Ken MacLeod does a hilarious piece on why Blair may not find conversion a smooth process.As for the EU Treaty, I can't get too excited about it. The crucial thing is that, if agreed, it unblocks the possible stalling of the enlargement process for the Balkan countries which could have been a problem if the constitutional impasse had run on. The re-dubbing of the Foreign Minister as High Representative only reflects his current title anyway. Still, it will be interesting to see if this slimmed down and very modest document can pass referendum in those countries where it is put to the popular test. Three of the last four ratification processes have brought largely unexpected surprises, and with 27 countries now in the mix, the chance of that happening again must be if anything greater.
And going back to the British Labour Party, and its new Deputy Leader - fascinating that Jon Cruddas, of whom literally the only thing I know is that he was a candidate in this election, came top on the first count but didn't make it to the end, with Harriet Harman, in second place for most of the process, pulling ahead on the final count to win by precisely the same margin as Denis Healey over Tony Benn in 1981. Benn's son Hilary was a candidate this time round, but did not do as well as his father twenty-six years before.
I'm so detached from British politics that I know little more about Alan Johnson than I do about Jon Cruddas, but I remember Harriet Harman well as winning a tough by-election for Labour in 1982 (defeating, if I remember, Dick Taverne). I had at least heard of Benn and Hain because their ministerial roles are relevant to my work and interests, and I have become aware of Hazel Blears due to the successful campaign of mockery against her mounted from certain parts of the blogosphere...
tnh points us to Terry Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, from the London Review of Books back in October. It won't surprise you that I am on Eagleton's side of this debate; since I'm up early due to B waking us at 5.30, I have been looking through the 'net for other reactions. Marilynne Robinson did a less polemical, longer, and more intellectual takedown of Dawkins for Harper's. Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, writing for The Times, defends Dawkins: Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton’s judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.Actually, that's not what Eagleton is saying; expressing opinions is fine. Everybody votes, but I would prefer to read a book on politics by someone who is professionally engaged in it rather than someone who just happens to have strong views. Most people in the world have formed their opinions on religion without reading Aquinas or even Dawkins first. But before you write a book-length essay debunking something, you should make the effort to understand it in its own terms; otherwise you run the risk of becoming polemical and cartooney, as Dawkins appears to have done (I haven't read his book or seen the TV series, and don't feel especially inclined to, based on what I've read from both supporters and opponents).
And this applies also to astrology. As it happens, I have studied astrology, and do know how to cast a horoscope; my M Phil dissertation was on a twelfth-century text by the little-known scholar Roger of Hereford. One of the best known astrologers and mathematicians of his age, he argued for a rigorous mathematical approach to the subject. As a result of my in depth research, I am even more convinced than I ever was that astrology is bunk; but also because I went to the trouble of getting into Roger's mind and trying to understand what he thought he was doing, I would like to feel that my views are better informed, maybe even more authoritative. I wrote this history of astrology for this encyclopedia many years ago, but the best analysis I have read is this book, taking it on its own terms and demonstrating its utter inconsistency.
Dawkins' failure to engage with religion and theology on similar terms is to his discredit.
αυτη απογραφη πρωτη εγενετο ηγεμονευοντος της συριας κυρηνιου
και επορευοντο παντες απογραφεσθαι εκαστος εις την εαυτου πολιν
ανεβη δε και ιωσηφ απο της γαλιλαιας εκ πολεως ναζαρεθ εις την ιουδαιαν εις πολιν δαυιδ ητις καλειται βηθλεεμ δια το ειναι αυτον εξ οικου και πατριας δαυιδ
απογραψασθαι συν μαριαμ τη εμνηστευμενη αυτω ουση εγκυω
εγενετο δε εν τω ειναι αυτους εκει επλησθησαν αι ημεραι του τεκειν αυτην
και ετεκεν τον υιον αυτης τον πρωτοτοκον και εσπαργανωσεν αυτον και ανεκλινεν αυτον εν φατνη διοτι ουκ ην αυτοις τοπος εν τω καταλυματι
και ποιμενες ησαν εν τη χωρα τη αυτη αγραυλουντες και φυλασσοντες φυλακας της νυκτος επι την ποιμνην αυτων
και αγγελος κυριου επεστη αυτοις και δοξα κυριου περιελαμψεν αυτους και εφοβηθησαν φοβον μεγαν
και ειπεν αυτοις ο αγγελος μη φοβεισθε ιδου γαρ ευαγγελιζομαι υμιν χαραν μεγαλην ητις εσται παντι τω λαω
οτι ετεχθη υμιν σημερον σωτηρ ος εστιν χριστος κυριος εν πολει δαυιδ
και τουτο υμιν το σημειον ευρησετε βρεφος εσπαργανωμενον και κειμενον εν φατνη
και εξαιφνης εγενετο συν τω αγγελω πληθος στρατιας ουρανιου αινουντων τον θεον και λεγοντων
δοξα εν υψιστοις θεω και επι γης ειρηνη εν ανθρωποις ευδοκιας
(Thanks to
tnh for inspiring me.)- Location:31.7,35.2
cassave, an old joke with a couple of new lines for me (especially the surrealism one):A somewhat rambling book by an elderly vicar attempting to follow the steps of Augustine from Rome to Canterbury in 597, written in 1995 in the hopes that many would try and follow the same route two years later for the 1400th anniversary. Lots of circumstantial detail about the late sixth century in Italy, France and England - gosh, I would like to read a proper biography of Brunhilda! - retold in a gentle High Anglican kind of way. Quite charming, but not very deep.
My first point is on the nature and character of the Pope himself. It is rather easy to forget that the Papacy, divinely inspired and sustained or not, is a human institution. (For a brilliant take on the Papal investiture as an inhuman institution, see here.) Stratfor, who are very heavily invested in the "clash of civilisations" paradigm, have a long piece about it asserting that:
he could have no doubt what the response, in today's politically charged environment, was going to be... each of the pope's public utterances are thoughtfully reviewed by his staff, and there is no question that anyone who read this speech before it was delivered would recognize the explosive nature of discussing anything about Islam in the current climate.Well, I'm not at all sure that that claim is true. Some of my reasons for doubt are public knowledge: the speech was actually made literally on the day the Pope's most senior official, Cardinal Sodano, resigned as Secretary of State, to be replaced by Cardinal Bertone. In normal times, I'm sure the Secretary of State may well be one of those who looks over speeches, if the Pope chooses to let anyone look over his drafts at all. But as he's clearing out his drawers, waiting for the new guy to come in, knowing only that this is a speech about the relationship between faith and reason at the Pope's former university - sounds on the face of it like one you can allow to find its own safe landing. Similarly, the Vatican's press officer for 22 years retired last July, and the new guy is noticeably still finding his feet (though dealt with the fallout from last week's speech about as well as one can in such a situation). So I think it is entirely credible that the Pope's advisers let this one through.
Did the Pope himself, as Stratfor put it, "recognise the explosive nature of discussing anything about Islam in the current climate"? I am inclined to doubt it, not least because it is precisely those explosive consequences for which he has subsequently expressed the greatest regret. (
scarletdemon objects that the effigies of the Pope being burnt in certain countries last week weren't half as good as the ones burnt every year in Lewes, Sussex.) An Australian Muslim commentator puts his finger on it: the Pope is by background an academic theologian, not a politician. I strongly suspect that he is largely insensitive to the social context of either his own remarks or of his source material. (pwilkinson points out why Manuel Palaeologos was a very poor choice of Christian writer to quote from, given what was actually happening in his lifetime.) Many scholars, whether in theology and philosophy, or in the hard sciences, tend to feel that the words of previous experts in their field are the only matter of importance, and the social context in which those words were wriiten irrelevant. My own critical academic formation, at the hands of Jim Bennett, Simon Schaffer and Peter Bowler, sensitised me to the sociology of knowledge agenda, that the theories are difficult to understand if separated from the theorists. Scholars in branches of learning that make particular claims of truth find it difficult to accept that the truths they discover might be in any way determined by the environment in which they are discovered.
I would very much expect that the Pope is among those who regard the sociology of knowledge as foolish and wrong-headed. For him, the debate between the emperor and the unnamed Persian scholar (the one named Islamic expert in his speech, Ibn Hazm, was several centuries earlier and several thousand km further west) was, until last weekend, an interesting and mildly funny detail in the history of the discourse between faith and reason, one he felt able to refer to as a shared joke with his former colleagues in Regensburg. I am quite certain that he does not regard it in that way now. Stratfor fall into the trap which we analysts of international politics often do, of over-analysis; in fact the Pope was just being genuinely thoughtless.
My second point is also based on my history of science days, and relates to the wider debate on the nature of religion. (On which topic
wwhyte has different thoughts.) Catholics are not in any position to accuse other religions of being violent, of course; but likewise, nobody should make the mistake of accusing Islam of being anti-rational. It's easy to forget in today's world that in the century after it became the seat of the Caliphate (AD 762) Baghdad was probably the prime centre of civilisation and learning in the world. In my own work on twelfth-century European scholars, I often felt a keen sense of frustration at their inability to grasp the concepts articulated by the Muslim scientists whose work they were trying to build on. There is a strong element of rationality in Islamic thought, and the mere fact that it doesn't excite either Western reporters or Muslim demonstrators shouldn't mean that the rest of us forget it. (There is also of course a strong pacifist mystic tradition which I have also encountered.)The most insightful post I've read on this - saving the best for last - is by
homais, who writes sanely of the "Stupid Storm" (with "stupid" to be understood as the first part of a compound noun, rather than as an adjective modifying "storm") around this and other issues. Go read it.( Ik geloof... )
The picture is of our local church, taken by Carolien.
Brian Scott was one of those charming academic figures I vaguely knew during my time at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1991 to 1996, a lecturer in Latin (finally given a personal chair as a consolation prize for being made to retire in 1995) who shared my interest in the twelfth century - indeed, he was best known for his work with F.X. Martin on Gerald of Wales' account of the Norman conquest of Ireland, and was also good enough to cast an expert eye over my still-unpublished work on Eleanor of Aquitaine. I suppose he is probably still alive, but it's unlikely we will meet again, so I use the past tense.
This very short book, published in 1976, is really a presentation of highlights from the life of St Malachy (1094-1148) written by his close friend St Bernard of Clairvaux. Malachy was responsible for bringing the Irish church into line with Roman practice; he was involved with much ecclesiastical intrigue and skullduggery between Downpatrick, Armagh, and Bangor, with reflections elsewhere in Ireland (especially Munster); and eventually died while visiting Clarivaux, rather as his eventual successor as Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Ó Fiaich, did in 1990.
The book is written for a popular (and pious Catholic) rather than academic audience (published by Veritas), but even so I was a bit surprised that there was no real discussion of whether the "reforms" were actually so badly needed; I guess 1976 predated a lot of the recent rise of interest in Celtic spirituality. I was even more surprised that, introducing the chapter on miracles, Scott writes of "that mysterious divine power which cannot be pinned down or defined, and which is still working today through men gifted with mysterious powers of healing and counselling." However I was much relieved that he completely writes off the "Prophecies of St Malachy" about future Popes as a renaissance forgery.
daegaer has collected lots on The Gospel of Judas.The judgement in the case known as The Da Vinci Code vs The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail is discussed by
liadnan here and major_clanger here. I skimmed the entire 71-page judgement and found it surprisingly badly presented - could have done with a lot more commas and better sentence structure. However there were some passages that caught my eye, ( such as: )As someone said, one wishes they could have both lost. Edited to add: See also in The Guardian, though they mysteriously omit to mention the judge's mocking of them as the Grauniad.
PS - this is my new icon for Belgian-related posts, though I know less appropriate in this case than in some others!
Picked this heavy hardback up for a fiver in Belfast in the summer. So little is known about the historical Pilate that Ann Wroe has bulked out the book considerably with stories told about him (the Copts seem to have had a lot). A couple of points I hadn't realised - the image of the emperor on Roman coins made them unacceptable for use in Temple rituals, which adds extra point to "Render unto Caesar" and also explains what the money-changers were doing at the Temple. But most of the book reflects on the stories we tell about ethics and political morality. "The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man." (A quote from a 1996 interview with Tony Blair.) All very thought-provoking, though I wish it had been a little shorter.
hfnuala:1) Your job seems to straddle the line between diplomacy, politics, thinktankery and NGO-ness. Where in those areas would you like to end up? ( answer )
2) Your kids are growing up going to Belgian schools (I think?). Will they be Belgian? ( answer )
3) What positives have you gained from being in fandom? ( answer )
4) Have you found your faith has helped with accepting your daughters' disabilities? ( answer )
5) Will you ever move back to NI? ( answer )
pickwick writes a passionate defence of blogging in general and livejournal in particular. Dead right. Having seen someone else's post a day or so ago about how they had not really talked to anyone at WorldCon, I had already been reminded of how fortunate I was to bump into her and mind_expander on the first evening, and how we then found ourselves eating dinner at the next table to Terry Pratchett. She concludes, "...does LJ give me enough benefits to justify the amount of time I spend on it? No - it gives me more." Indeed.( old school )
( work )
( flying princes )
( cooking )
I have a couple of eerie coincidences to share, but will leave that till tomorrow - I need to post a book review first.