Hey, I did a Book
Well, alright not me, but I did edit a book with a bunch of crack authors and thinkers called, God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy. It’s starting to make the round and reviews should appear in short order, but I’ll “toot a little horn” and say a bit about what I think its contribution to the conversation might be.
In the conclusion Jonathan and I write that there are 3 basic contributions that our authors make. We call these religion’s pastness, thickness and potency (with lots of requisite shout-outs to Alasdair MacIntyre). The book, in a broad sense, is about contesting what we mean by religion, broadening and deepening its often narrowly Westphalian definition. In this the book shares a lot of resonance with my (other) favourite book of 2010: William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence. Religion, argues Cavanaugh, is an invented concept. The invention of religion is the twin birth of the modern state, settled in the modern creation myth of the Wars of Religion and, in international relations, the peace of Westphalia (1648). Religion as a discrete phenomenon, separable in analytical and political terms from other pursuits, like the economic or the legal, was unintelligible prior to this point. Religio, the Latin term, is more about custom and ritual than it is about transcendence. So the first act of the invention of religion is what Charles Taylor would call a disembedding, the disenchantment of the world and the anthropocentric shift.
The problem in foreign policy is not that we haven’t found religion, it’s that we’re unjustifiably confident about what religion is. Our modern demarcations have too easily parsed religion from nonreligion, a social imaginary (in Taylor’s words) that exists nowhere outside of the modern world. This makes major problems for policy. And it makes major problems for religion. And that, after all, is why we publish books.
Words
In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine was a fascinating piece on our mother tongues and how they shape our perception of the world.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
The article goes on to talk about languages which use egocentric coordinates (left, right, behind, etc.) as opposed to geographic languages, which operate almost exclusively on the north/south/east/west standard.
I mentioned this to my students today in freshman composition because we were talking about what it means to use precise language, and how that changes from language to language. I have three non-native speakers of English in the class, all of whom grew up speaking languages which have gendered nouns (and they say English is much easier in that regard because it’s harder to make mistakes). It also reminds me of what Bible translators used to say about the difficulty of, say, translating the concept of “whiter than snow” in tiny coastal towns in Papua New Guinea.
If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend the recent RadioLab episode about Words, which addresses some of these questions in completely fascinating ways (for instance, exploring how comprehension seems to grow as language grows – and they’ve been able to watch it in deaf populations).
A Most Unpleasant Commute
I just read this in The Economist and felt somehow the misery of Chinese drivers. Apparently, there was one traffic jam this summer on a road to Beijing that was 100km long and lasted nine days – D-A-Y-S. Not hours. Days. 24 hours x 9 = AAAAHHHHH!!!!! How can you endure that?
It would be horrid to have to live with vacation-length grid lock. Do you camp out? Start eating the chickens you’re hauling? Grab a few tents from the Canadian/Chinese Tire dry-van you’re pulling and make the best of it? It’s hard to consider all the human necessities that would be part of that calculus of suffering. Perhaps people are more prepared than we would be.
The book version would we worth reading – Nine Day Commute: Life Along China’s Longest Temporary Parking Lot. The agony would be having to live through it first.
Praying in class
Leading on from Richard Mouw’s recent, short piece: faculty at Christian institutions, do you pray before class begins?
I have come to think that the lesson here was more important than we took it to be in those days. His prayers in the first class created a mood. They offered spiritual reassurance. They provided the students with a spiritual context in which to understand his overall intentions. The story suggests to me that we need to pay much more careful attention to the topic of the relationship of prayer to learning.
Sleeping in Public
You don’t read much about sleeping in public these days but I think it’s a topic worthy of contemplation by the After Hours circle. The piece that sparked this was my recent (and ongoing) reading of A Pattern Language. The section in question reflects on the merits of being able to take a nap in your favourite public space.
Trust figures into the equation – do you trust people around you enough to be able to nod off for a bit. In a workplace, sleeping is frowned on. At Cardus, that is mostly the case because of what might happen to you while you are resting. It is unlikely that anyone here would be able to resist the opportunity of seeing a fellow colleague completely defenseless. Aside from that, the idea of being able to sleep in public is worthy of policy reflection. It shouldn’t be discouraged and is the sign of a healthy community.
There may be exceptions.
I’m not at all ashamed to say that on Canada Day I napped on Parliament Hill. Nothing wrong with that. I consider it a sign of my commitment as a citizen and an assurance that Canada, as a country, is doing just fine. As the driver who was on the road at 5 a.m. while the rest of the family slept in the van, it seemed very sensible that I prepare for the long drive home.
The twist was that Michelle, Charae and Dylan were being crushed in the Queen-fan crowd about that time. They had been missing for two hours after leaving our spot on the Hill to go find coffee and snacks. I had done all I could to find them without abandoning Brittany and Mackenna but without success (there are a lot of people around there on Canada Day). Having dispensed with those duties as far as I was able, napping seemed the appropriate next step.
Thinking I was worried sick about their long absence, Michelle, Charae and Dylan were shocked to spy me napping from their perch a block or so away. Michelle had experienced a certain amount of distress in the crowd, was helped by a paramedic, and was recovering when they spotted me from their elevated viewpoint. Charae used her digital zoom to capture the fact (I have not included the photo for obvious reasons – it would support her budding paparazzi tendencies). I’m all for napping in public, but there may be certain moments when it is deemed questionable. One of those moments, apparently, is when your family is in danger from rabid royalty hounds.
Have you any stories of napping and the relative merits or detriments thereof? Should a National Day of Napping be called?
The Perils of Being Cool
My friend Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity finally came out (in the interest of full disclosure, I blurbed the book). I know a colleague who is using it in his class this fall, and I was delighted to read it and see what a fine, serious, but not too self-conscious job Brett did of examining, dissecting, and evaluating a very specific trend in Christianity. (Along with others, I suspect the trend is hitting its end, but Brett’s book also does a pretty good job of explaining why that won’t actually dawn on folks for a while.)
Brett had a bit in the Wall Street Journal about the perils of “cool” churches and why folks like him (and me) are scared off or turned off by them:
‘How can we stop the oil gusher?” may have been the question of the summer for most Americans. Yet for many evangelical pastors and leaders, the leaking well is nothing compared to the threat posed by an ongoing gusher of a different sort: Young people pouring out of their churches, never to return.
As a 27-year-old evangelical myself, I understand the concern. My peers, many of whom grew up in the church, are losing interest in the Christian establishment.
Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.
Statistics like these have created something of a mania in recent years, as baby-boomer evangelical leaders frantically assess what they have done wrong (why didn’t megachurches work to attract youth in the long term?) and scramble to figure out a plan to keep young members engaged in the life of the church.
Increasingly, the “plan” has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called “the emerging church”—a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too “let’s rethink everything” radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it—to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it “cool”—remains.
I recommend the book to you!
Poorest in Hamilton Die 21 Years Earlier
This past spring, The Hamilton Spectator released Code Red, a study on the health outcomes of the City of Hamilton by census tract. The shocking news is that the life expectancy between the highest and lowest census tract averages came out at 21 years. That’s just plain disturbing.
Vats of ink, gazillions of bits, and a roar of conversations have all been dedicated to probing urban poverty. Rather than succumb to the paralysis of despair, I have devised some questions to guide my reading, writing, and activities in pursuit of answering what my responsibility is when the problem isn’t ‘over there’ but is right here, in neighbourhoods that I drive through regularly.
Here are some of my growing and evolving roster:
What public investment of money yields the greatest long-term societal benefit?
What are the key institutions that can change the dynamics of systemic urban poverty in our cities?
What can average citizens do to raise the floor of poverty in Hamilton or the equivalent in their city?
What has been done in the past that doesn’t work?
What are the hopeful ideas and practices that we need to build on?
We drove through many cities on our summer road trip, passing observers of the plenty and scarcity that North American cities represent. These and other questions were along for the ride. What do you think we should do?
City Museum – St. Louis
I had never heard of it when we arrived in St. Louis a few days ago on vacation. But after we had toured the massive St. Louis Arch, Michelle noted that one of the brochure’s she picked up had flagged City Museum (CM) as a must-see. We did so.
It turns out you don’t just ‘see’ CM – you experience it. And once you’ve experienced it, a kind of imprinting seems to work on you, like an embedded chip or something. CM is a strange place. When you arrive, they don’t give you a map of the place with a list of things to do. Instead, you start wandering around trying to figure out exactly what you’ve let yourself and your kids in for. You wouldn’t be surprised if Tim Burton walked past or Willie Wonka himself appeared suddenly.
CM is nothing like the McDonald’s-style danger-sanitized kinds of playgrounds that surround us. Want to know what current legal contours are surrounding children and public spaces? Don’t bother cracking a book – just look at playgrounds. They may be colourful but most of them are as boring as a B-grade reality show (or any reality show, for that matter).
Are you afraid of heights? CM will scare you with a dangling school bus and passenger door that opens, wire ‘tunnels’ six stories in the air, and wire cages that you climb inside balanced precariously on the edge of the 10-storey roof. Are you claustraphobic? CM will push your limits with tunnels under the floor, a labyrinth cave area with tiny passages, and twisty wire-cage climbing spaces. You can’t quite get the sense of height in this photo we took but if you look close, you’ll see kids looking out of the bus door (there is a wire barrier so your kid won’t go flying out but it does little to ease the sense of hazard you instinctively feel).
Founder, Bob Cassilly, wanted a place where you would be pushed slightly off-balance, where things would verge on the edge of control. CM is a massive art installation you get to climb in, on and around. Here’s a quote from a land use website:
At times integrating elements of the factory (like the spiral shoe slide that runs through it) into the spaces, at other times boring holes through it, or slicing rooms into smaller and smaller spaces, it is an architect-less architecture of accretion, excavation, and evolution. Each environment is an expository riff on form and materials, materials that were found and repurposed, clustered and flayed, from industrial remnants, to parts of other buildings, to fully formed period environments. Tight spaces shaped like dinosaur guts, galleries of gargoyles, aquariums, monstrous mosaics, plazas, stalagmites, chutes, slides, caves, chambers, mezzanines.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we left. The idea of re-purposing a post-industrial landscape has intrigued me for a long time. Many cities, including Hamilton, have spaces ideally suited for novelty and creative re-development. City building isn’t about starting from scratch – you have to work with what you have, mix it up, add some new, re-think some old.
And there is more good news. Cassilly is working on Cementland – a 54 acre abandoned cement factory that is being prepared for more craziness, including water, pitch-black caves, and more high-in-the-sky terror. I’ll definitely be visiting.
Get Low
I haven’t seen a lot of movies this summer – haven’t even seen Inception yet, as of when I’m writing this – but one I saw a few months ago just came out this weekend, and I wanted to recommend it to you: Get Low.
But instead of writing about it, I’ll just point you to my review, and you might find my editor’s interview with Robert Duvall interesting as well.
When you read this, I’ll be at the Glen in a writing workshop. But I’ll be back in a week!
The Blind Contessa’s New Machine
The book was strikingly pink so, I admit, I didn’t immediately move to pick it up. I was directed toward it, misleadingly I might add, on the pretense that it was “science fictiony.” It is not science fictiony. At least not by any definition that would satisfy its awkward denizens.
Ideas? Post 
