SKJ Today
Faith, Theology, Culture, Life
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Archive of "Culture" Category
Why Ronald Reagan would be run out of a Tea Party and other conservative quips…
Last night television provided some interviews of interest for political junkies. Jay Leno marked his return to The Tonight Show by having Sarah Palin as his first guest. Meanwhile Stephen Colbert welcomed back NY Times columnist David Brooks. Palin was typical Palin and Brooks was typical Brooks. Both were entertaining and one was substantive. All in all, great entertainment.
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c David Brooks Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations Evangelicals The New Internationalists?
Came across a great column (http://nyti.ms/9gISFi) byNicholas Kristoff this morning about evangelical relief efforts. If more Christians were as Christlike as Kristoff maybe secular skeptics would be tempted to take the Gospel more seriously. Here’s a nice concluding quote from the piece:
If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.
Does The Tea Party Qualify As A Political Movement?
Bill Maher tackes this question in recent episode of Real Time.
Are Americans Politically Skitzophrenic?
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg doesn’t think politicians are to blame for America’s woes. He lays the blame squarely at our doorsteps. The problem is the American public.
On any number of issues from the stimulus plan to how to handle deficits to health care spending, Americans are of a divided, and often contradictory mind, argues Wesiberg:
One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending…The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time.
My Kind Of Conservative
If the Republicans ran the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Joe Scarborough we’d have a great debate in this country, and we’d all be better for it.
Why We Need To Be Care-Full…
I recently came across this passage in an essay by Colin McGinn. It explains the enslavement of human beings in the film The Matrix from the perspective of their robotic masters:
The Matrix naturally adopts the perspective of the humans: they are the victims, the slaves — cruelly exploited by the machines. But there is another perspective, that of the machines themselves. So let’s look at it from the point of view of the machines. As Morpheus explains to Neo, there was a catastrophic war between the humans and the machines, after the humans had produced AI, a sentient robot that spawned a race of its own. It isn’t known now who started the war, but it did follow a long period of machine exploitation by humans. What is known is that it was the humans who “scorched the sky”, blocking out the sun’s rays, in an attempt at machine genocide—since the machines needed solar power to survive. In response and retaliation the machines subdued the humans and made them into sources of energy—batteries, in effect. Each human now floats in his or her own personal vat, a warm and womblike environment, while the machines feed in essential nutrients, in exchange for the energy they need. But this is no wretched slave camp, a grotesque gulag of torment and suffering; it is idyllic, in its way. The humans are given exactly the life they had before. Things are no different for them, subjectively speaking. Indeed, at an earlier stage the Matrix offered them a vastly improved life, but the humans rejected this in favor of a familiar life of moderate woe—the kind of life they had always had, and to which they seemed addicted. But if it had been left up to the machines, the Matrix would have been a virtual paradise for humans—and all for a little bit of battery power.
Why do human beings reject an edenic paradise “…in favor of a familiar life of moderate woe—the kind of life they had always had, and to which they seemed addicted…”? This is the subject of the opening chapter of Robert Harrison’s Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.
Harrison finds in Odysseus an ideal case study of the human condition. Why can’t he rest content with the Goddess Kalypso on her island paradise? Why is he restless? Because he cannot be carefree:
What Odysseus longs for on Kalypso’s island—what keeps him ina state of exile there—is a life of care. More precisely, he longs for the world in which human care finds its fulfillment; in his case, that is the world of family, homeland, and genealogy. Care, which is bound to worldliness, does not know what to do with itself in a worldless garden in the middle of the ocean. It is the alienated core of care in his human heart that sends Odysseus to the shore every morning and keeps him out of place in the unreal environment of Kalypso’s island. “If you only knew in your own heart how many hardships / you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, / you would stay here with me and be lord of this household and be an immortal” (5.206–9). But Kalypso is a goddess—a “shining goddess” at that—and she scarcely can understand the extent to which Odysseus, insofar as he is human, is held fast by care, despite or perhaps even because of the burdens that care imposes on him.
Human beings reject Edenic paradise because of our longing for the active life, which Harrison defines with the help of Hannah Arendt, who sees at its core three things: labor, work, and action.
Labor is the endless and inglorious toil by which we secure our biological survival, symbolized by the sweat of Adam’s brow as he renders the earth fruitful, contending against blight, drought, and disaster. But biological survival alone does not make us human. What distinguishes us in our humanity is the fact that we inhabit relatively permanent worlds that precede our birth and outlast our death, binding the generations together in a historical continuum. These worlds, with their transgenerational things, houses, cities, institutions, and artworks, are brought into being by work. While labor secures our survival, work builds the worlds that make us historical. The historical world, in turn, serves as the stage for human action, the deeds and speech through which human beings realize their potential for freedom and affirm their dignity in the radiance of the public sphere. Without action, human work is meaningless and labor is fruitless. Action is the self-affirmation of the human before the witness of the gods and the judgment of one’s fellow humans.
The Decade Of The Tea Party?
Brooks is no fan of the Tea Party movement, but he clearly sees its potential to shape the coming decade’s politics. Put it in the “ignore at your own risk” file.
Theology, Daily Show Style
This is off color and hilarious, vintage Stewart…
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c The Best F**king News Team Ever - Tiger Woods’ Faith Daily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical Humor Health Care Crisis What Do We Talk About?
Robert Harrison, host of Standford’s Entitled Opinions, recently remarked that contemporary sociological research shows that the overwhelming amount of human conversation across race, gender, culture and class can be classified as “gossip”. Most of the time most people talk about other people they know and their affairs. A minority of conversation fits into a second category, namely politics. The third, and by far the smallest category that most human conversation fits into, is talk about ideas. Apparently we spend the least amount of time talking about the most important things: the good, the true and the beautiful. Yikes!
Now Reading
Planned books:
None
Current books:
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Christianity And Culture by T.S. Eliot
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The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology by Daniel Dubuisson
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Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions by Pope Benedict XVI
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