In God’s eyes, there are no assholes

Advertising poster outside the Evangelist Methodist church in Zurich.

On family history: Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love

Remember Joan Didion and her family history? Here is another American writer, a younger one, Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of the successful Eat, Pray, Love – a book about a year she spent in Rome, an Indian ashram, and Bali.

Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

(Author photo: thanks to  Steve Jurvetson!)

Myself, I know of no such exotic names among my ancestors. I always assume that, if I went digging into those old and musty parish records, I would find generations and generations of unassuming names such as Maria and Giovanna.

In fact, my only relative of any notoriety seems to have been the Blessed Giovanna Maria Bonomo, who lived in the 17th century. (For readers with a non-Catholic education: a “blessed” – “beatus” or “beata” in Latin – is someone on the third of the four steps required to be canonized as a Catholic saint: see Beatification). A Benedectine nun since the age of 15, Giovanna Bonomo seems to have been a mystic and a hothead: considered a madwoman, she was denied the Holy Communion by her confessor, and for several years was not allowed not meet visitors in the parlatory or write letters. Later in life, as her ecstasies subsided (or maybe as her prayers to go into ecstasy only at night, so that she may live a normal life during the day, were answered), she was readmitted to her convent’s rites, and once rehabilitated performed many deeds of charity. In her last decades, she was elected abbess and prioress. Her most important teaching to her sisters, apparently, was that sanctity consists not in doing great things, but in doing simple and common things with perfect patience and dedication.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a statue of her was erected in the town of Asiago, in a small square facing the home where she is said to have been born. Of course, a few years later, the town was practically razed to the ground in a furious bombing, during the senseless carnage of World War I. When I was a child, one could still buy postcards showing her statue, miracolously standing in the middle of the rubble of the surrounding houses, unscathed, save for the broken tip of a little finger.

To pray or not to pray

No, this is not a post about reactions to the financial meltdown. It’s about National Day of Prayer (thanks to Orientalia4all for an interesting post).

We Europeans, especially in countries with a better tradition of separation between church and state (French readers, anyone?), are always taken aback when we hear that American civil institutions explicitly endorse religious rituals, such as a “Judeo-Christian expression of the national observance”. It reminds us of other American amenities such as the Creation Museum. Yet, according to the official website of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a National Day of Prayer was first established by President Truman in 1952, after a joint Congressional resolution, and then signed into law with the official date of the first Thursday in May by President Reagan in 1988.

Last week, the Freedom of Religion Foundation sued President Bush and others over the law. It’ll be an interesting lawsuit.

I keep thinking that the post-apocalyptic world imagined by Neal Stephenson in Anathem, where learned people live in seclusion, do not use money and are resolutely atheist (while the rest of the world’s population is decidedly unlearned, shopaholic, and worships all sorts of gods and prophets), is not an improbable outcome.
For proof that religion and commerce these days are relentlessly intertwined, look no further than the home page of the National Day of Prayer Task Force site.

“The Goldilocks Enigma” vs. “The End of Mr. Y”

Yesterday I finished reading The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas and I started The Goldilocks Enigma (also published as Cosmic Jackpot in the US) by Paul Davies (thanks for your recommendations, readers).

The Goldilocks Enigma is essentially about modern physics. The End of Mr. Y has interesting detours into thought experiments, Victorian freak shows, homeopathy and Derrida.

The End of Mr. Y throws in a casual mention of the anthropic principle, while the protagonist interstitially picks an inner fight with the treatment of women in most religions. The Goldilocks Enigma starts off with a proper discussion of the anthropic principle, as set out in Brandon Carter’s 1960s paper: why do the laws of physics seem to be so finely tuned for the existence of life?

The End of Mr. Y has a character who is a lapsed theologian. The Goldilocks Enigma has a number of scientist characters who in spite of being supposedly atheists or agnostics, still find themselves drawn to the notion of the meaning of purpose of the universe, and ultimately to a concept of God.

The Goldilocks Enigma is vastly more scientifically rigorous than The End of Mr. Y, but contains a lot less trashy sex and no detours into self-destructive addictions.

The Goldilocks Enigma promises to discuss what the universe is made of. The End of Mr. Y sets out multiverses that are made of language. (And Thomas, I believe, has an essential insight here. Look all around you: your house, your street, your city would not exist if we did not have language. Without language, we’d live in caves and occasionally huddle around fires.)

The End of Mr. Y has a very cursory interlude on the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics: this makes me look forward to more of the real thing (to the extent you can do this without the maths, which I expect is not a lot) in The Goldilocks Enigma.

So, you see how it’s impossible for me to be loyal to either fiction or non-fiction.

Candidate Obama, are you closer to Mike Huckabee than we thought?

Europeans are generally baffled by the very American tradition of very public display of one’s faith, which makes it unthinkable that Americans would elect to the presidency someone who does not claim to believe in God, in divine justice, and in some sort of afterlife. I commented a few weeks ago on how Republican candidate Mitt Romney deflects questions about his religious affiliation, even if – in his tenure as governor – it seems to have led to not entirely sound policy choices.

This week, again reading Christopher Hitchens’s most recent crackpot alert column in Slate, I learned that Senator Barack Obama, a fine politician with a message of change, reconciliation and hope, is a member of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. “This bizarre outfit describes itself as “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” and speaks of “a chosen people” whose nature we are allowed to assume is “Afrocentric.” Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch [...] Nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.”

Obama, on the contrary, is being taken plenty seriously; yet, should he go on to earn a Democratic nomination, one hopes that “change” would not mean embracing creationism, and “reconciliation” would not be entrusted to such leaders as those of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Candidate Romney, voters need to know about your faith

Interesting article by Christopher Hitchens on Slate.com, discussing Mitt Romney’s success in deflecting all questions about his faith: journalists who cover Romney’s presidential campaign have been bamboozled into self-censoring every time that a question about Mormonism occurs to them, and Romney himself has said that such questions, were they to occur, would be “un-American”.

But the Mormon faith does have some grey areas that, to a reasonable observer, may appear, well, questionable. Romney’s family, Hitchens reports, “is, and has been for generations, part of the dynastic leadership of the mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith”: a church that, until 1978, was an officially racist organization. To this, I would add that Romney’s faith seems not to be extraneous to ineffective public policy decisions that Romney made as a governor of Massachussets, such as funding abstinence-only sex education in schools – a policy that was quickly overturned by his successor after a federal study found that “students in programs focusing solely on abstinence are just as likely to have sex as those not in such programs” (and, one imagines, have it much less safely).

American voters need to choose a leader they can trust. Or at least not mistrust any more than they mistrust their current President (a born-again Christian who is living proof that, well, anybody can get a second chance in America). Coming clean about the dark corners of one’s faith seems to be a prerequisite to even start building that trust.

Gerhard Richter and his amazing stained glass window for the Cologne cathedral

This is the stunning glass window commissioned by the authorities of the 13th-century Cologne cathedral to artist Gerhard Richter (read more about the technical background on Wired, also the source for the image; more pictures in the photo gallery on Der Spiegel). The original window had been destroyed in World War II and replaced in the 1950s by a nearly transparent piece of glass.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner has been critical of this work, and reportedly would have preferred a more traditionally figurative subject, for example with representations of saints or 20th century martyrs. He also apparently told a local newspaper that Richter’s window seemed more fit for a mosque. He did not show up for the unveiling of the work.

In centuries past, the church has always been a very smart investor in two commodities: real estate and art. The Catholic church in particular is one of the largest real estate owners worldwide – and, like it or not, the steward of a large chunk of the West’s artistic heritage. And the point is that, before it becomes heritage, all art is contemporary. The Sistine Chapel was scandalously weird too, once upon a time.

Smart mosque builders will be sure to follow the Cardinal’s advice and commission contemporary artists and architects to contribute their work. (A non-religious building, the Parisian Institut du Monde Arabe, designed by Jean Nouvel and Architecture-studio and opened in 1987, comes to mind as a trailblazer among academic and scientific institutions).

Christian churches have long entrenched themselves into their well-defended corner of contemporary cultural discourse, mounting their periodic attacks on the spectrum of modernity from scientific evidence (Creation Museums? please) to reproductive rights (see the nonsensical law governing IVF in Italy). If they can re-engage in a wider discussion with society mediated by contemporary art, which they have not done in a long time (except for the occasional private chapel by a modern master and a flurry of work by second-rate artists), that is not a bad step.

Oh, no! The world didn’t need a Creation Museum, really

I cringed as I skimmed the Salon article – read the full version if you can stand it.

Adam and Eve frolicking with the dinosaurs? Please.