andersoj.org oddments

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

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

I recently completed Dave Smith’s To Be of Use: Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work, and enjoyed it. More to come… –JA

Ken Myers recently gave the three lectures to a group of faculty and graduate students at Vanderbilt University, under the auspices of the Humanitas Project. The link above provides a PDF transcript of Myers’ lecture, Faithful Stewards or Terrestrial Gods? Christianity and the Chief End of Science and an mp3 audio stream of Word Made Flesh, Flesh Made Whole: The Embodied Character of Salvation and the Basis of Bioethics. Myers is the host of one of my favorite periodicals, the Mars Hill Audio Journal. –JA (more…)

Bill Moyers recently delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Austin, TX. They have posted a transcript as well as a full-length mp3 of the speech. Perhaps I’ve had my head in the sand, but this segment of the speech on changes at Corporation for Public Broadcasting really caught me off guard. I’ll try to dig up some more references for this and post them below; meanwhile read on for an excerpt from Moyer’s speech… (more…)

On 16 October 2005, Blacksburg Presbyterian will be hosting speaker Holmes Rolston, Distinguished University Professor from Colorado State University. As a part of BPC’s Peacemaking Sunday events, Professor Rolston will be delivering the sermon as well as joining in a variety of less formal discussions. The theme will be Christian engagement with environmental challenges.

Rolston is a Templeton award winner (2003) and a Gifford Lecturer (topic: “Genes, Genesis, and God”). Those of you with google accounts can read the full text of the book online.

–JA

I was quite taken with the little sidebar in this week’s Economist:

…When cruising along Namibia’s long and empty roads, unsuspecting drivers face a no less dangerous hazard: sleeping donkeys. At night, the warm tarmac provides a much more comfortable bed than the vast expanses of land only a few yards away. Invisible in the darkm the dormant asses, which help plough Namibia’s land and pull its carts, have become a cause of many a car crash…In May, the head of the president’s guard was killed–by a donkey.

The article goes on to discuss what sounds like some kind of British non-profit organization which has been formed for the purpose of making the “donkeys glow by attaching reflective tags to their ears.”

All I can say is, “wow.” For those of you with an Economist subsctription, you can read the article here. –JA

I have been participating for the past few weeks in a Monday-afternoon study group at Blacksburg Presbyterian Church. The group is using a curriculum called “Living the Questions,” a multi-media curriculum developed by two self-described “progressive ministers” in the United Methodist Church, Jeff Procter-Murphy and David Felten. (Read on…)

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After engineers commanded Mars Rover Spirit into an unusual behavior — operating after solar input has all but disappeared — it returned this remarkable sunset image. More details are available at SpaceRef. –JA

Alas, since Christopher Lydon left WBUR’s The Connection in a furor several years ago, I have listened only half-heartedly. But I figured I should empty out my queue from the last few months… the following shows were, if of uneven quality, at least on interesting topics relevant to my community… (more…)