Nano Nano

The New York Times' Bits blog has a provocative little piece by Barnaby Feder on the silence of religious leaders regarding nanotechnology, picking up on an article by Chris Toumey in Nature Nanotechnology:
"The fact is that the most interesting spiritual questions raised by nanotechnology stem from the most speculative applications. Mr. Toumey indirectly concedes the point right from the beginning of his commentary, which starts with a scene from“Halo,” a short science fiction story by Charles Stross in which a Muslim scholar is wondering whether bacon assembled from scratch by a molecular assembler is forbidden food like all pork products. And what if the Koran and other sacred teachings have been downloaded onto a computer that is then programmed to analyze and act on them like a good Muslim? Is it Islamic? What are its sacred rights and duties?"

Lots to Read...

The New York Times' Sunday Book Review features books about Islam, and includes an essay by Tariq Ramadan on Reading the Qur'an (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Ramadan-t.html?ref=books). Lots to read in 2008.

Poem for Christmas

Poem for the Nativity of Our Lord
By David L. Wade, United Church of Christ
Based on Luke 2:1-20

The Child is born
Wrapped in swaddling clothes
Laid in a manger.
How romantic!
How idyllic…
The soft
Holy
Glow…
The “friendly beasts”
The song of angels…
But
In reality,
How terrible!
An unattended birth
An unsanitary setting
(A cold
drafty
dirty
stable!
Old rags
And scratchy straw)
A horrible place for any birth
Much less for my Lord!
I romanticize the Birth of Christ.
I forget that he came in poverty
In want
In pain
- In danger,
- And that he may still be found
In the poverty
In the dirt
In the squalour of human life.
Lord, forgive my Christmas card imagery
My affluent celebration of his birth
And remind me that the Christ himself
Was “one of the least.”
Open my eyes today to the presence of God,
Not only on the heights,
But also in the depths of the world,
Where life is threatened,
But
Also
Holy.
Amen.

Line of the Day

"I am not calling you a liar, but I don't want anybody here to think I believe you."
- NDP MP Pat Martin to former Prime Minister the Right Hon. Brian Mulroney, December 13, 2007

Advent Sunday

So much snow - so busy - so little time to blog.

More From Myanmar

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, which will appear in print tomorrow, has a piece by Charles London recounting his experiences in Burma (Myanmar) in September - before the military junta crushed the protests led by Buddhist monks.

London is in front of the Sule Pagoda in Rangoon (Yangon):
'500 monks emerged in rows four across. They carried flags and overturned alms bowls. When the first group stopped and chanted a prayer, some people in the crowd dared to clap. It was timid at first, but as more monks emerged to begin their protest, the clapping grew louder until the whole crowd seemed overcome by it. A Burmese man leaned toward me. “They have never done this before,” he said. “They clap for freedom.” The faces in the crowd were excited, part bliss, part terror.

'As the monks kept pouring out of the temple, the clapping turned to cheers. They walked on and hundreds of civilians marched with them, in spite of the rain. “We march to University,” a man said, urging me to come. University Avenue is the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has been under house arrest for many years.'

Myanmar Brutality

Today's Globe & Mail is reporting that, according to Democratic Voice of Burma, at least 138 people were killed and 6,000 imprisoned (2,400 of them Buddhist monks) as the Myanmar military junta crushes opposition. US diplomats have found 15 monasteries around Rangoon empty as the regime evicts monks. The arrested monks are being held at a former race course, forced to give up their robes, and transported to prisons in the north.

The junta appears to believe that it can avoid any serious consequences, as it enjoys continued support from Thailand, India and China. The Indian army chief of staff says that the crackdown is an "internal matter" and that New Delhi will try to maintain its "good relationship" with Rangoon.

Political Goings-On

Summer is over, I've moved to a new church on internship, and political goings-on are, well, going on. Two items:
The Ontario election campaign is revving up for the October 10 election. The governing Liberals released their platform yesterday. It takes a lot of gall for the Premier, who had a major photo-op last time signing a "pledge" not to raise taxes (and then brought in a huge tax increase - sorry, "health levy"), to make any promises at all.
Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is attacking another ex-PM, Pierre Trudeau, for not serving overseas during the Second World War. And Mulroney served in which branch of the Canadian Forces? It amazes me how politicians without any military service are the most vicious pit bulls for causes like "supporting our troops." Another case in point is Messrs. Bush and Cheney, who succeeded in avoiding service in Vietnam, but during two campaigns savaged Gore and Kerry, both of whom actually went to war, as unpatriotic.

The Politics of God

I'm absorbing Mark Lilla's article on political theology in today's New York Times Magazine - see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html.

Hitting the Bottle

The media laughed at the United Church of Canada taking a stance against bottled water last summer - so today's New York Times has a piece on bottled water becoming a symbol of excess.

Is Love Enough?

I don't agree, but it's thought-provoking - an excerpt from Richard Flanagan's novel The Unknown Terrorist:

THE IDEA THAT LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.

Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was "wholly love" in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.

Jesus, who wanted love to such an extent, was clearly a madman, and had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance o the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history's first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber.

Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer. Every day now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

From U2's album The Joshua Tree:

I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed harderned lips
Felt the healing fingertips
It burned like a fire
This burning desire

I have spoken with eternal angels
I have held the hands of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the Kingdom Come
When all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well, yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds
And you loosened the chains
Carried the cross
Of all my shame
all my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

Down on the Farm

...in two interesting articles today. William Saletan writes in Slate and The Washington Post about the controversy over the impact of growing crops for biofuels on the developing world; will it drive up food prices and increase hunger? See http://www.slate.com/id/2169867/. The Globe & Mail reports on suicides among farmers in central India who cannot make ends meet; http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20070706.windia0607/BNStory/Front/home.

The Bottom Billion

The day after Canada Day celebrations - let me recommend seeing The Cowboy Junkies live. Great show.

I'm reading the review of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What We Can Do About It. Collier makes interesting arguments regarding focusing development efforts on the poorest billion people, among them his identification of the reasons why civil wars have plagued sub-Saharan Africa: the risk of conflict is exacerbated by a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men, a numerical imbalance among ethnic groups, and a supply of natural resources (like diamonds or oil) which can encourage and finance conflict.

I'm also reading Freeman Dyson's article, Our Biotech Future, in The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370.Dyson favours using genetic engineering to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries in general and stop the migration from rural areas to cities in particular. He describes a vision of genetic technology " halting the migration from villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations." I'm inclined to argue against his embrace of genetically modified crops to alleviate rural poverty, but I'm still thinking about it.

Bury My Heart...

...at Wounded Knee. That was the site of the 1890 massacre of the Oglala Sioux by the US cavalry. As the news is full of talk about whether Canadian First Nations will blockade highways and rail lines as part of a national day of action on June 29, I'm reading about the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the site of the Wounded Knee atrocity. The New York Times article has a picture of a Station of the Cross in the Holy Rosary Catholic Church on the reserve - the Romans are represented as American cavalrymen.

Bopha!

Watched the 1993 film Bopha!, about a black police sergeant and his family in 1980 South Africa. Most powerful were the scenes of dancing, singing protesters confronting the South African Police with their rifles, batons, whips and tear gas, and the funeral of the protesters killed by the police.

Lectures About Heaven

That's the title Thomas Laqueur gives to his review of Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known in London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n11/laqu01_.html):
"There is a joke about a crowd of Germans pouring out of a tourist bus that has stopped in front of the Pearly Gates. They see two signs. One points to the left: ‘Heaven.’ The other points right: ‘Lectures about Heaven.’ The Germans all head to the right."

This joke needn't be about Germans, of course.

Long Time...

...since I posted to this blog. Been busy - convocation, working, gardening, annual church Conference meeting. At Conference, which was in Montreal, Quebec, I went to a workshop led by a couple from the Mohawk community at Kanesetake - it's famous for the 1990 confrontation between Mohawk activists on one side and the Quebec provincial police and Canadian Army on the other. They began presenting about work translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Mohawk - only the Gospels have been translated previously. But the discussion soon turned to conditions within the community, which has 75 percent unemployment (!). I visited places in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Americas, which have lower unemployment levels.

Gunner Palace

...is the title of a documentary on a US Army artillery unit in Baghdad four months after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. After watching it I read the Newsweek article on chaplains in Iraq: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18367801/site/newsweek/.

This is Your Brain on God

Two good pieces in Slate on neurotheology: an overview by George Johnson (http://www.slate.com/id/2165026/) and John Horgan's piece on being an experimental subject at Laurentian University (http://www.slate.com/id/2165004/). And, in another vein, The New York Times reports on the Noah's Ark children's museum at the Skirball Cultural Centre in Los Angeles; the article has an accompanying video and slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/arts/design/29fink.html?ref=arts. And, finally, a Florida bar is the location for Sunday church services for bikers: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/070427/K042702AU.html.