Monetizing Jesus and the God gulf

Nicholas Kristof, in contrasting the life of the Rev. John Stott to other evangelical Christians, points out that Stott was very far from the preachers who monetize Jesus in preference to emulating him.  Stott was a scholar and did good works; he has much company in those qualities among other evangelicals still living.

Humanitarian-minded folk, some Christian, contribute to the "God gulf" by ascribing the distasteful qualities they perceive in some evangelical leaders to all who believe that way.

How much more good we could accomplish if religious and secular together would overcome the "God gulf."

Kristof, Evangelicals Without Blowhards, NYTimes, 7/31, SR 11.

Whaddya know?

From the founder of the world's largest hedge fund (with a return of 9 1/2% in 2008 when everybody else tanked):   "Our greatest power is that we know that we don't know and we are open to being wrong, and learning."
Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, quoted by J. Cassidy in the New Yorker,  7/25/11, p.58.

I think Bridgewater subscribes to  Rumsfield's 2d and 3d categories, but does the first exist for them?  The Secretary of Defense in 2002:   Known knowns - things we know;  Known unknowns - things we don't know; Unknown unknowns - things we don't know we don't know.


And does the famous Outside the Context Problem (OCP) in Bank's science fiction  Excession (1996) and
Taleb's analyses in Black Swan Theory (2007) fall only in the 3d category?

Life on the Farm

In a review of recent films about rural areas, Mike Hale, who grew up farming "on a quarter-section" in rural Iowa, evocatively remembers the "anomie and a sense of endlessly declining fortunes" that characterized life there.

So many times we stout-hearted, forward-looking folk rhapsodize about rural life.  We don't know or we don't remember that people leave for better opportunities not only monetarily, but also mentally.

Read his review NYTimes, Aug5, p.C1.

The Post-Literary Mind?

Nicholas Carr cites a blog post of Clay Shirky's:

Reverence for literary classics such as War and Peace and In Search of Time Lost is a  "side effect of living in an environment of impoverished access," before today's digital abundance.

(Edward Tenner, Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2010, v.34,#4, p.92.)

Is it so?
Is it a provocative pose of Shirky's?
In addition to all the other things the Internet is doing, Carr says, it may be helping to  create the post-literary mindset.

Give that man a medal!

D. R. Tucker, the conservative author and former climate skeptic, changed his mind publicly!

How many people do you know who ever change their minds?  especially on important political issues on which they have taken a public stand?  Zero, but really, almost zero, because now we have Tucker, who in "Confessions of a Climate Convert" published on FrumForum on April 19, 2011, and in an interview in Slate, recanted.

It started he says, when he read Morris P. Fiorina's book Disconnect: The Breakdown in Representation in American Politics (2009).  It continued when he read the irrefutable data in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  http://www.ipcc.ch/publications

"Holy shit, this is for real," was his reaction.
He didn't keep it to himself either, but took the honorable course and changed course.

Give the man credit!

Inconvenient Facts

"FACTS, HOWEVER, HAVE OFTEN SHOWN THEMSELVES RELUCTANT OF ACCEPTANCE...."

from Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock. Random House, 1962, p.83.

This is a wonderfully understated.

And in how many different contexts it applies -- choose any context to find examples -- and I'm not even talking about the implications of bald facts or the endless chatter of: is it really so?  can we measure it six ways?   is it true in all times and all places? ....

Eliot's app

Can't believe it!  There's a new iPad app of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land which includes his own reading of his famous poem.
The app also includes a video of Fiona Shaw, the actress, performing the poem, as well as other sundry related things.
Faber & Faber's Touch Press is the producer.

I knew a moment was coming when I would really want an iPad.

Bloomsday

It's only five days til Bloomsday -- June 16 -- when all of the action of Joyce's Ulysses took place in 1904.  People all over the world, not just in Dublin, re-enact part of the story, dress up as the characters, quote and disclaim, and visit, if they can, some of the famous sites of the famous story.  In NYC,  Symphony Space runs a marathon 13-hour reading which also has a five-hour broadcast on WNYC.  This year Dublin actress Eilin O'Dea joins the readers (but not as Molly). Others equally famous will read.

Isaiah Sheffer  calls the protagonist Leopold Bloom "the most famous Jewish character in literature."  Never thought of Bloom that way, but maybe. He's certainly in the running.

Pioneer Woman

Whatever else may be said about Ree Drummonds's blog Pioneer Woman, and much has been said, including a NewYorker profile on May 9 (p.26-31), it is a great blog technically with lots of disparate parts and pictures to follow.

I wonder if book-reading groups ever assign themselves a blog such as hers to follow, and then meet and comment on it, and possibly dissect it.  Such as assignment would be fun and welcome to the readers who can never finish a tome such as Ulysses  (grand though it is), and certainly never go back to it after the meeting.  In some cases, the critical thinking and analysis that goes into reading books can and should be brought to bear on reading a series of blog posts. Viz, well written?  true? complete? unique voice? shows development over time?  characterizations? etc. 
Somebody tell Oprah.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/

plus ca change...,?

Phil Caputo,
marine Vietnam vet,  reporter, and author of A Rumor of War (1977), among other good books, spoke at The Moth about the why? of getting shot in Beirut. He found Lebanon to be the worst among recent wars, and also observed that "Telex was the Twitter of its time."

maybe not a librarian

Edna O'Brien:  Life is a raging, storming sea which we're all in.

Who is influencing whom?

Dublin-born Colum McCann read one of Edna O'Brien's stories from her new Saints and Sinners at Symphony Space last night.  Her story conveyed exactly the same hard emotions as McCann's Everything in this Country Must, and it's about the same subject --  internecine troubles in Ireland.

Edna O'Brien of course has been writing for a long time.  Maybe neither writer influenced the other.   Maybe these hard stories are carried around in the hearts of the Irish and only occasionally written down in their full distress.

English not required

Times quotes U.S. Army's top recruiter that 9% of the population is propensed towards military service.