Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Monday, November 19, 2007
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Trial transcript: Day 5 ((September 30), PM Session, Part 1
John F.Haught, PH.D., called as a witness, having been duly sworn or affirmed, testified as follows:
Continue
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Mindblowing..."Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace"
Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace (Theology in Global Perspective) (Paperback)
By Mary J. Miller (Iowa and Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
"This book may take our breath away." So states the cover blurb from Walter Brueggemann on "Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace," released on April 17, 2007 by Daniel G. Groody. The basic premise is, metaphorically, that the global family has booked passage and is now aboard the ship of globalization and there is no turning back to the shore. The question we must ask ourselves, as passengers on this ship, is, "who is at the helm and where are we going?" As Gustavo Gutierrez quips, "Being against globalization is like being against electricity." We can't stop the ship, and one would question the wisdom of wanting to, but the issues of who's driving and where will we end up are legitimate.
The book begins by offering an overview of the dual nature of globalization--its inherent propensity for good, such as the triumphs of technology, and for ill, such as the tragedy of poverty. Perhaps more importantly, chapter one details where we have sailed on this ship so far. This chapter seeks to give a realistic picture of the world today and paints that picture by using the most current statistics available. These statistics were gathered from sources such as the World Bank, the United Nations annual Human Development and World Development reports, and the World Institute for Development Economic Research. It is staggering to learn that 19 percent of the global population lives on less than $1 per day, 48 percent live on less than $2 per day, 75 percent live on less than $10 per day, and, according to the World Bank, two-thirds of the population of the planet lives in poverty. The weight of these income disparities is compounded when one looks at the unequal distribution of wealth and our disordered spending patterns. According to an article in the December 2006 issue of "The Economist," half of all wealth is held by only 2 percent of the world's adults. The world spends almost as much money on toys and games as the poorest 20 percent of the population earns in a year, and four times as much on alcohol as on international development aid. The troubling area of military spending is also addressed.
The world picture, from the perspective of poverty and need is indeed bleak, but Professor Groody does not leave us in the grip of its reality with no hope. He is convinced that, while fully aware of the abuses committed in the name of religion throughout history, the gift theology can bring to the process of globalization is a navigation system that has the potential to guide us to a place of solidarity and peace, where if globalization is left to itself or to those leaders who are only motivated by profit we may run aground on the icebergs of greed. As Groody notes, we are doing theological reflection all the time, but he argues that to find a place of human solidarity we must undergo a conversion from "money-theism" to monotheism. The remaining eight chapters of the book deal with how the various sub-disciplines of theology inform the process of globalization.
* Chapter two details the core narratives of the Bible--the Narrative of the Empire, the Narrative of the Poor, the Narrative of Yahweh, the Narrative of Idolatry, and the Narrative of the Gospel, integrating them all with the Narrative of the Passover.
* Chapter three challenges idolatry and excessive wealth through the words of the early church writers.
* Chapter four lays out an overview of Catholic social teaching with an acronym ("A God of Life") that provides a framework on which to hang the basic tenets. There are also several very useful charts that detail the documents of the universal and regional churches by categories of year, author, context, and key concept.
* Chapter five consists of a short section (five or six pages) on the basic social teachings of each of the major, non-Judeo-Christian, world religions--Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Bahai Faith, and African Indigenous religions. Here we see that social justice is not unique to Christianity.
* In chapter six the lives of five contemporary models of justice are briefly chronicled: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and Oscar Romero. Attention is paid especially to their foundational experiences, the major metaphor of their life, their operative theology, and their core contribution to justice.
* Chapter seven reflects on God through the perspective of the poor by looking at liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor. This chapter is an especially helpful read for anyone who wishes to understand what is meant by these two terms and the position of the Vatican on liberation theology. The global perspective is readily apparent again in this chapter as attention is paid to Black, Hispanic, Feminist, and Asian liberation theology.
* Chapter eight concerns the rite of the liturgy, and justice as living in right relationships with God, self, others, and the environment. This chapter also has several nice charts that are helpful in linking the sacraments to social teaching by way core issue.
* The final chapter on spirituality and transformation beautifully sums up the book by looking to the spiritual disciplines which can strengthen us for doing the work of justice in the world: fasting, prayer, community, solidarity, nature, simplicity, recollection, and Sabbath.
Each chapter begins with a relevant story, and ends with a set of questions that would be helpful for personal reflection, group discussion, or classroom use, and a detailed bibliography for further reading and study.
I recommend Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice for upper level undergrads and graduate students in theology, peace studies, political science, ethics and justice, and economics and business, as well as justice groups, and the general reader interested in this vital and timely topic. Groody has managed to research and write a compelling treatise on global injustice without conveying a bleak and hopeless message. At its core, this book seeks to respond to the deeper issues of the human heart that globalization has largely left unexplored--questions related to belonging and loneliness, good and evil, peace and division, healing and suffering, meaning and meaninglessness, hope and despair, love and apathy, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, and ultimately life and death. He is not interested in overwhelming readers with guilt, but rather with guiding readers to examine our personal and corporate lives and motivations, all the while encouraging us to think beyond ourselves to the needs of our brothers and sisters in the global family. The book is clear and well documented, exquisitely written, and sings a wonderful melody of the gratuitousness of God that is both a gift to and a demand on our lives.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
67/68. Who was this guy called Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? Why is he Famous in the Scientific Community?
From Are Jesuits Catholic?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. In this endeavor he became absolutely enthralled with the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an "Omega point" where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity. Long before ecology was fashionable, he saw this unity he saw as being based intrinsically upon the spirit of the Earth:"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth." Teilhard de Chardin passed away a full ten years before James Lovelock ever proposed the "Gaia Hypothesis" which suggests that the Earth is actually a living being, a collosal biological super-system. Yet Chardin's writings clearly reflect the sense of the Earth as having its own autonomous personality, and being the prime center and director of our future -- a strange attractor, if you will -- that will be the guiding force for the synthesis of humankind.
"The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.
"We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits."
To this end, he suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding, was growing a new organ of consciousness, called the noosphere. The noosphere is analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noosphere is a "planetary thinking network" -- an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication. At the time of his writing, computers of any merit were the size of a city block, and the Internet was, if anything, an element of speculative science fiction. Yet this evolution is indeed coming to pass, and with a rapidity, that in Gaia time, is but a mere passage of seconds. In these precious moments, the planet is developing her cerebral cortex, and emerging into self-conscious awakening. We are indeed approaching the Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin was so excited about.
This convergence however, though it was predicted to occur through a global information network, was not a convergence of merely minds or bodies -- but of heart, a point that he made most fervently."It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"
In his productive lifetime, Teilhard de Chardin wrote many books, which include the following:
Most of these quotes were taken from Building the Earth, and The Phenomenon of Man, but as I no longer have a copy, but only old notes, I can't quote exact page numbers.
by Anodea Judith, Dec. 96.
from: http://www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html
more on Teilhard de Chardin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Simpler Way
From Australia, a book that advocates a return to the above─Review: Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. An except from the book:
…the essential factor in our global predicament is over-consumption… [so] we must move to far more materially simple lifestyles…We have to come to see as enjoyable living frugally, recycling, growing food, ‘husbanding’ resources, making rather than buying, composting, repairing, bottling fruit, giving surpluses and old things to others, making things last, and running a relatively self-sufficient household economy. The Buddhist goal is a life ‘simple in means and rich in ends’.I'm reminded of the most famous chapter of Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, explained in this 1977 article by Charles Fager─Small Is Beautiful, and So Is Rome: Surprising Faith of E.F. Schumacher:
He readily owned up to being a Catholic, a certified convert as of five years ago. This item is not mentioned in his book; in fact, one of the most frequently cited chapters, “Buddhist Economics,” almost made it appear as if he were deeply involved in Eastern religions. But wasn’t this chapter, I inquired, really more informed by the Catholic writings and thinkers he mentioned so frequently elsewhere in the book -- the papal encyclicals, Newman, Gilson and, above all, Thomas Aquinas?Schumacher grinned. “Of course. But if I had called the chapter ‘Christian Economics,’ nobody would have paid any attention!” [emphasis mine]
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Designing Life
By John F. Kavanaugh
The Case Against Perfection
By Michael J. Sandel
Belknap Press. 176p $18.95 (hardcover)
In his first essay, “The Ethics of Enhancement,” Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, raises the question whether “curing” is different from “improving.” Do plastic surgery and Botox injections heal us or improve us? And if there is little difference, why do they seem acceptable, while muscle enhancement through steroids or blood doping is not? If growth hormones are permitted for children whose projected height is under 5 feet, why are they not acceptable for a possible 6-footer who wants to be a power forward? If reproductive autonomy is so important, why should it be prohibited for parents who want sex selection? He applies these questions more specifically to athletic enhancement, both low-tech assistance by better shoes and golf clubs, through Lasik surgery on to blood transfusions and hormone injections.
While discussing athletes, Sandel surfaces the theme that will mark his later discussion of “designer children” and his final chapter, called “Mastery and Gift.”
To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, nor even fully ours…. It is also to recognize that not everything in the world is open to any use we may desire or devise. An appreciation of the giftedness of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility.Thus, in discussing children, Sandel warns that they must be appreciated and accepted as gifts, not as objects to be manipulated for utilitarian or egoistic goals. He suggests that there is the danger of radical pride in trying to design or control. Concurring with William May, he holds that the “transforming love” of guiding, forming and enhancing a child must be balanced with “accepting love” that embraces children for their own intrinsic, not performative, goodness. While Sandel offers no hard and fast line of difference between (a) specialized training and the best schools, (b) growth hormones and orthodontics and (c) eugenics (a “presumably bad thing”), the drive to mastery and control could extinguish our appreciation of life as a gift.
The dangers of reproductive mastery are horrifically sketched in the book’s best chapter, a treatment of the “old” eugenics and the “new.” The old eugenics of forced sterilization in the United States and racial cleansing in the Third Reich, having been replaced by a seemingly more benign combination of market-based and liberal eugenics, still haunts our contemporary consciousness. Insistence on atomistic autonomy in reproduction and fixation on desired traits are a flight from the contingency and connectedness of our common humanity and a refusal to accept our existence as a gift. These are Sandel’s ideas most worthy of development and elaboration, perhaps in concert with his interlocutors, William May, Leon Kass, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas.
As for myself, I would want to engage Sandel over his epilogue, the longest section of the book, titled “Embryo Ethics: The Stem Cell Debate.” This serious and insightful attempt to prove that an individual human life, and surely human personhood, is incorrectly attributed to early stage embryos, should be read by anyone who holds the conception criterion for the beginning of an individual human being. His arguments, while not being the traditional ones that are made concerning undifferentiated cells, twinning and the high number of spontaneous abortions, are telling. Our collecting of “spare” embryos, our apparent acceptance of in vitro fertilization, our lack of mourning for all the supposed tiny persons lost, President Bush’s eager willingness to say he is not banning the use of private funds for embryonic stem cell research all indicate that we really do not believe we are dealing with persons. This is indeed a powerful critique of the present confusion. But it does not address what exactly a human being is. Surely, as Sandel says, an acorn is not a full-blown oak. Neither is it a sapling. The acorn, however, is the start of a tree’s existence. An embryo, similarly, is neither a grandmother nor a toddler; but every piece of genetic evidence we have reveals that at conception we have the beginning of a unique human career (or two, if it is so programmed from the beginning to twin).
As you read this book, you might imagine yourself sitting in on one of Sandel’s classes of a thousand Harvard students. It is said that he can be mesmerizing with his probing questions and tricky sample cases. Another thing you might imagine is sitting with him at a meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics, engaging the likes of William Hurlbut and Leon Kass—both strongly disagreeing with him at times, but hearing what he has to say and being honestly heard in return.
The Case Against Perfection, consequently, is open to a very wide audience indeed. It will introduce the novice to some of the knotty problems in genetic therapy and enhancement. It will propose thoughtful challenges to the college undergraduate. As for scholars, it will unsettle those who may have too easily or ideologically arrived at unwarranted conclusions. And it will challenge those of us who disagree with him on the status of the human embryo to provide our most cogent and well-evidenced arguments.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Eugene McCarraher on the enchantments of mammon
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
What Do Subsidized Corn, A Militarized Border, and Finance Reform Have To Do With It?
It began when Mr. Clinton approved NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, and when he militarized our southern border at the same time. Prior to these combined actions, families crossed the border very commonly and casually, especially during harvest seasons. After harvest, they would go home to Mexico or Central America because that’s where they lived with their families in quite happy communities.
When the border was militarized, it became too risky to go back and forth. So they stayed.
Why did Mr. Clinton militarize the border? He did so because NAFTA was about to pull the rug out from under Mexico’s small family farms. We flooded Mexico with cheap corn–exports that we now subsidize to the tune of some $25 billion dollars a year. Congress gives that money of ours to a handful of agribusiness giants. Of course, I am not here to tell you why Congress does that, and what might be done to stop it, such as with the public financing of campaigns. But they do it, and Mexican family farmers cannot compete. In the years since NAFTA was signed, half of Mexico’s small farms have failed. The only kind of farming that can now compete in Mexico is big agribusiness, which does not employ as many people. Tortillas in Mexico now contain two-thirds imported corn, and they are three times as expensive at retail level than before NAFTA. The people have less money, and the cost of food is rising. We have done that. Our precious Senators and Congressmen and their corporate cronies have enforced that raw and cruel exploitation in our names.
The result of undermining Mexican farms, as Clinton expected, was a rising flood of poor people moving from rural areas into Mexico’s big cities, which have become so poor and overcrowded that all one can do is dream of going north across the border.
Now, if any Democratic candidates for President would like to show a little courage and intelligence, let them address the real cause of our flood of unauthorized immigrants. Will Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards or any of the other candidates face down the agri- gangsters that are behind this problem? Probably they will not, so long as Iowa has a major primary.
Let me say that I am not ranting and raving in the least about these new Americans. When Mexico owned Texas and everything west of Texas, and when Mexico cut off migration across their borders into Texas, our people kept coming anyway –crossing illegally in search of opportunities for their families. When Mexico got upset by this, we trumped-up false reasons for a war, and we illegally took those lands. If that wasn’t enough law and order for you, we also conducted unfettered genocide against the region’s native people. So let’s not stand on any moral high ground regarding that southern border.
The people coming across the border today, with the usual exceptions, are family people with an incredible work ethic. Personally, I welcome them. I congratulate them for their courage and their dedication to their families. I want them to stay and become citizens, or, if some prefer, to return to their homeland at a time when there is international justice and a decent chance for their prosperity at home.
I regret what the political corruption of our system has done to their farms and their communities back home. It is not the peoples’ fault –it is the fault of corrupt leaders of both parties and both nations. We must speak this truth to these powerful people, even to those presidential candidates whom we otherwise admire....
CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE [and check out the comments/discussion after the article]
Friday, April 27, 2007
The Ecology of Work
Environmentalism can't succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work—and supplants it
by Curtis White
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Last of a two-part series. See The Idols of Environmentalism for part one.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental degradation is the debasement of the human world. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.
We are not the creators of our own world; we merely perform functions in a system into which we were born. The most destructive aspect of our jobs is that in them we are mere “functionaries,” to borrow Josef Pieper’s term. Just as important, we have a function outside of work: consumption. Money in hand, we go into the market to buy the goods we no longer know how to make (we don’t even know how to grow and preserve our own food) and services we no longer know how to perform (frame a house? might as well ask us to design a spaceship).
Challenging our place in this system as mere isolated functions (whether as workers or consumers) is a daunting task, especially for environmentalists, who tend to think that human problems are the concern of somebody else (labor unions, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). We’re about the “Earth first.” My argument is simply that the threats to humans and the threats to the environment are not even two parts of the same problem. They are the same problem. For environmentalism, confronting corporations and creating indignant scientific reports about pollution is the easy stuff. But these activities are inadequate to the real problems, as any honest observer of the last thirty years of environmental activism would have to concede. The “last great places” cannot be preserved. We can no more preserve them than we can keep the glaciers from melting away. Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.
Unfortunately, on these shores the suggestion that there is something fundamentally destructive in work, money, and capitalism leads quickly to emotional denials. This is so even among self-described environmentalists, card-carrying members of the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. So we try to persuade ourselves that capitalism can become green. I don’t believe that capitalism can become green, simply because the imperatives of environmentalism are not part of its way of reasoning. Capitalism can think profit but it can’t think nature. It’s not in its nature to think nature. What is part of its nature is marketing ("We’re organic! Buy us!"), even while its actions—industrial livestock practices that masquerade as Earth-friendly, for instance—are really only about market share, dividends, and stock value.
Capitalism as a system of ever-accelerating production and consumption is, as we environmentalists continually insist, not sustainable. That is, it is a system intent on its own death. Yet the capitalist will stoically look destruction in the face before he will stop what he’s doing, especially if he believes that it is somebody else whose destruction is in question. Unlike most of the people living under him, the capitalist is a great risk-taker largely because he believes that his wealth insulates him from the consequences of risks gone bad. Ever the optimistic gambler with other people’s money, the capitalist is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won’t have to pay them. Animals, plants, impoverished people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won’t. If called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness. This is his “freedom.” At that point, we have the unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, “Yes, but yours is a freedom without conscience.”
Being willing to say such things about capitalism does not mean that one has a special access to the Truth, but it also doesn’t mean that one is a mere ideologue, or that most dismissible of things, a communist. It merely requires honesty about what looks us right in the face. It requires intellectual conscience. CONTINUE...
