Alan Jacobs

davidjphooker:

(via No.9 | An Artist’s Journey)

As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over—from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings. Poetry will be removed from radio and TV (just as it is during the other eleven months of the year). Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose and other rimes to their children but only … fiction. Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy and only prose translations of the Bible will recited, with hymns strictly banned. Ministers in the Black churches will be kindly requested to stop preaching. Cats will be closed for the month by order of the Anti-Poetry Commission. Poetry readings will be replaced by self-help lectures. Love letters will have to be written only in expository paragraphs. Baseball will have to start its spring training in May. No vocal music will be played on the radio or sung in the concert halls. Children will have to stop playing all slapping and counting and singing games and stick to board games and football.

Watching a Twitter conversation unfold today, I was reminded for the hundredth time that debates about same-sex marriage tend to be so fruitless because SSM doesn’t really mark the point of disagreement. There are already preceding disagreements about what marriage itself is and is for, but even those are not foundational. People disagree about all these things because they disagree about what human flourishing (eudaimonia) is, about what kind of life is generally speaking best for human beings to live.

For instance, if you’re a libertarian you will ipso facto have a high regard for personal autonomy and will be willing to pay a pretty heavy price in other goods — family stability, for instance — in order to preserve and extend autonomy. That won’t be your only value, but you wouldn’t be a libertarian if it weren’t near the top of your list. And the emphasis on autonomy will have a major influence on what you think marriage fundamentally is and on the rules you’ll be willing to accept for getting into and out of it.

Conversely, if you’re a traditionalist Christian, who thinks of the summum bonum as life lived in imitation of Christ and in communion with God, all pursued within a uniquely constituted Christian community, then your account of flourishing will derive from that. And you will think of marriage as an image of the union between Christ and his Church, and child-bearing in terms of raising vibrant members of the body of Christ. (Marriage and child-bearing won’t be wholly constituted by those goods, but they will be irreplaceably foundational to your picture of marriage and child-rearing.)

This isn’t the whole story, of course. In practice things get more complicated: for instance, a traditionalist Christian might become a contingent libertarian because he or she thinks that in a libertarian society the Church is most likely to be left alone to do its work and to be what it’s called to be. (I.e., In the secular realm y’all can call marriage anything you want as long as you leave us Christians alone to define it as we wish within the Church.) But if you’re arguing about SSM, or any other deeply controversial moral issue, and you’re wondering how someone else can read the situation so differently than you do, then the answer is likely to be found by digging into one another’s deepest beliefs about what makes for a really good human life. In light of those beliefs many other beliefs can become far more understandable.

Dream Vision (Apocalyptic Dream): Albrecht Dürer, 1525. Watercolour on paper, 30 x 43 cm. Text written by the artist beneath the watercolour: “In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.” (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna)

All this via Tom Clark, who provides commentary on Dürer’s dream by Marguerite Yourcenar. David Dark on Twitter pointed me to this.

Unapologetic: Holy Week 6: Sabbath

There is, I believe, in the adventure of prayer, in our intimate relation with God, a point of breakthrough that takes us straight into the heart of the akedah story, the heart of the cross. It can only be called a moment of authentic spiritual terror. It comes when one allows God to invade one’s vulnerability in such a way that one sees that one’s polite, manageable image of that God has all along been an idol - a very big “something” that can be relied upon to protect one’s good undertakings and worthy religious projects, and above all one’s acceptable image of oneself.

The smashing of this idol, whether through patient prayer or personal disaster - or both - is a crisis of huge spiritual significance: I can walk into the dread, in which, seemingly, God has become nightmarish threat, or I can retreat. But at the heart of this nightmare is the same irresolvable conundrum of the “binding of Isaac” or of the cross: for this new God who magnetizes me and allures me and demands of me nothing less than everything, and whom I desire above everything, is the same God who also seems to turn on me and slay me, even as he “binds” and hands me over, with Christ in the Passion, into a new posture of pure, passive love. The contradiction is, in human terms, seemingly unbearable.

unapologetic-book:

Jesus before Pilate, from Sue Symons’ Bath Diptychs.

RAY: Tonight we’re talking to Darrel Dexter, the Komodo-dragon expert, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Say, doctor, would you tell us a little bit about the Komodo dragon?

BOB: Happy to! The Komodo dragon is the world’s largest living lizard. It’s a ferocious carnivore found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rintja, Padar, and Flores.

RAY: Where do they come from?

BOB: [Mystified pause.] The Komodo dragon, world’s largest living lizard, is found on the island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores. We have two in this country that were given to us some years ago by the late former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, and they reside in the National Zoo, in Washington.

RAY: I, ah, believe I read somewhere, where a foreign potentate gave America some Komodo dragons. Is that true?

BOB: [Pause.] Yes. The former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, gifted our country with two Komodo dragons—the world’s largest living lizards—and they reside at the National Zoo, in Washington.

RAY: Well, now, if we wanted to take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon—where would we take them?

After two months of delays thanks to donations totalling $700, the Cowpocalypse finally arrives at 7:20 pm on September 7. At that moment, all the cows disappear. They have been raptured—replaced with an image of an empty patch of grass. Players can still click on the grass, still generate points for doing so, but there are no new cows to buy, no mooing to celebrate their action. In some sense, this is the truest version of Cow Clicker—the pure, cold game mechanic without any ornamentation. Bogost says that he expects most people will “see this as an invitation to end their relationship with Cow Clicker.”

But months after the rapture, Adam Scriven, the enthusiastic player from British Columbia, hasn’t accepted that invitation. He is still clicking the space where his cow used to be. After the Cowpocalypse, Bogost added one more bedeviling feature—a diamond cowbell, which could be earned by reaching 1 million clicks. It was intended as a joke; it would probably take 10 years of steady clicking to garner that many points. But Scriven says he might go for it. “It is very interesting, clicking nothing,” Scriven says. “But then, we were clicking nothing the whole time. It just looked like we were clicking cows.”

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.”