andersoj.org oddments

Take a moment and listen to this installment of NPR’s “This I Believe” by Dierdre Sullivan. Click on the “Listen” button next to Ms. Sullivan’s name on the NPR page to hear a RealAudio stream, or read the transcript. –JA

Enough with this “virtual world” nonsense. I love to see it when folks use the internet to push people back into the real world in new ways. Here are a couple of services I’ve recently discovered and taken great pleasure in:

The first is LibraryThing, a simple mechanism for listing the contents of your personal library online. By making use of open APIs provided by Amazon.com, Library of Congress, and others, they make it quite simple to add items to your collection, “tag” them into categories, and share with others.

Second: Commit random acts of literacy! Read & Release at BookCrossing!. The BookCrossing service provides an way of building community by sharing books. As a member, you are encouraged to place a simple bookplate with a numerical ID into books you leave laying around in bus stations and doctor’s offices. When someone picks up one of these books, they are implored to read, make a journal entry online for the book, and pass it along to a friend or stranger. I’ve just had my first release caught by a VT student, and it’s oddly thrilling… An old NPR interview.

–JA

Recently our adult Sunday School class at Blacksburg Presbyterian has been reading and discussing Jonathan Sacks’ book, The Dignity of Difference. Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and Dignity is an excellent and challenging book I can recommend to anyone who takes seriously the role of religion in public life, and is troubled by the new challenges offered by globalization and related trends.

In the last few days, I have had the pleasure of digging into Sacks’ newest book, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility. This is a prophetic book and should be read as such by the faithful in any of the Abrahamic traditions. I offer here a brief excerpt (boldface mine) from the opening chaper (p. 9 in the US Hardback edition):

Why [have I written this book] now? Partly because I am troubled by the face that religion often shows to the postmodern world. Too often it appears on the news, and lodges in the mind, as extremism, violence and agression. Tobe sure, religion is not the cause of conflict in the Balkans, the Middle East or elsewhere. Instead it forms the fault-line along which sides divide. But that in itself is serious. When political conflict is religionized, it is absolutized. What in politics are virtues — compromise, the willingness to listen to both sides and settle for less than one would wish in an ideal world — are, in religion, vices. Religion can therefore act not as a form of conflict-resolution, but, rather, conflict-intensification. This work is my personal protest against suicide-bombers, religiously motivated terrorists and preachers of hate of whatever faith. The religios imperative to which I have tried to give voice in these pages is the one that says: create, do not destroy, for it is my world you are destroying, my creatures you are killing. The only force equal to a fundamentalism of hate is a counter-fundamentalism of love.

To this I add a further concern about religion generally. The prophets warned against a rift between the holy and the good, our duties to God and to our fellow human beings. It still exists today. There are those for whom serving God means turning inward — to the soul, the house of worship and the life of ritual and prayer. There are others for whom social justice has become a substitute for religious observance or God. The result, as I put it later in the book, is like a cerebral lesion between the two hemispheres of the brain. The message of the Hebrew Bible is that serving God and serving our fellow human beings are inseparably linked, and the split between the two impoverishes both. Unless the holy leads us outward toward the good, and good leads us back, for renewal, to the holy, the creative energies of faith run dry. For six days, so the first chapter of Genesis tells us, God created a universe and pronounced it good. On the seventh day he made a stillness in the turning world and declared it holy. Unless we reconnect the holy and the good we do less than justice to the unity that is the hallmark of the monotheistic imagination.

Stern stuff, and sensible. I’ll post more about Sacks’ book as I complete more of it. –JA

If you are trying to reach me at andersoj@andersoj.org, I’m sorry. My service provider seems to be having email problems.

Please use andersoj.jsa@gmail.com as a backup if you need to reach me.

Update: I am adding some additional contact information to the “finding-andersoj” page linked in the sidebar. The URL for this page is: http://andersoj.org/oddments/secure/.

Update @ 1400: Sitelutions is working on this and they are befuddled. I’m sorry.

Update @ 1411: The trouble was traced down to an upgrade of their site-management software, cPanel. An upgrade was pushed earlier today which apparently tweaked the virus protection scheme which is attached to the mailserver. As a result, inbound email is reported to outside servers (i.e., all of you) as delivered, but is sitting somewhere in a mysterious antivirus queue and is never delivered to me. They are off looking for my errant email now. If you think you sent me a message today and I didn’t respond, please resend.

–JA

The New York Times has the following article: When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation (soul-sucking registration required) on the environmentalist lobby’s newest ally in congress: Christian Evangelicals. Blink Blink. –JA

The Very Rev. Sam Lloyd, formerly of Trinity Church Boston and now the Dean of the National Cathedral recently gave an excellent sermon on a uniquely unsentimental, Christian concept of love. For those so inclined, the Cathedral also provides a RealAudio stream of the message. An excerpt:

A few years ago I read an account by a Chicago lawyer named Thomas Geoghegan describing his first encounter with a soup kitchen. He was overwhelmed by the unpleasant smells and the terrible shape the men were in, but most of all he was disturbed because he had expected to love the poor and to be filled with a warm glow, and he wasn’t.

And so he complained to his priest friend, who replied, “You’re not down there for self-actualization.” But Geoghegan protested, “I didn’t feel any love for them.” The priest replied,

So what?…The church says nothing about that…Look, these nuns [who run the kitchen] aren’t liberals. They are conservative…They don’t care about “love” in our modern, interpersonal way. We, the liberals, want love: we go to soup kitchens to be loved. The nuns go there to feed people. That’s it. Give them something to eat.

It’s that cool, clear, unsentimental love that you find in people whose lives are given to loving.

Lloyd is an artist. –JA

A look back at The Culture of Narcissism:
The Overpraised American by Christine Rosen - Policy Review 133. Via Mars Hill Audio. –JA

NPR : Should the Hyphen Stay in E-Mail?
–JA