Religion and Politics: Conservatism

A NYT review of books by Michael Gerson and John Bolton:

Describing the Elephant, Michael Lind

A sampling of the Gerson section:

"Where social issues are concerned, Gerson’s heroic conservatism is actually closer to the Social Gospel Protestant tradition and its equivalents on the Catholic left than to Republican orthodoxies or to the “national greatness” declarations of the neoconservatives....As one might expect, a number of conservative reviewers have been hostile to such a point of view, and with them it is reasonable to ask why Gerson considers himself a conservative at all, inasmuch as his heroes are mostly progressives, liberals and radicals."

Religion and Politics: Progressivism

I thought this was an interesting dual-book review from the Times about religious faith and the Democratic party:

Left Wing and a Prayer, R. Scott Appleby

Here's a sample:
"In short, the Democratic Party’s long string of counterproductive responses to the enduring influence of the religious right has had the cumulative effect of driving away any type of base with the word “faith” attached to it, and opening the door to the Republicans’ shrewd, if cynical, courting of religiously conservative white Christians. It’s been a self-defeating failure, since there are millions of moderate and progressive Christians ready to embrace a reasonable alternative...

"Are Sullivan and Dionne to be believed, or is this the triumph of wishful thinking over political reality?"

Dmitri's choice

Here is a link to an article on Slate about Vladimir Nabokov's final manuscript... and whether or not his son will burn it according to his father's final wishes.

Dmitri's Choice

A sample:
"Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died."

Mapping the Political Landscape

Hey, you there! Remember when we used to post to this blog? Share funny stories, argue with Grady and Coye and Ryan about things important and things not so important? Yeah, I miss that.

Just for fun, I filled out the series of questions on electoralcompass, which then plotted my range of responses on a graph to suggest which political candidate I ought to support. No big surprises here. More moderate than Coye, less than Dusty (yes, you are my political landmarks).

Happy 2008.

Stanley Fish and Theodicy

There are a few of you to whom I owe email responses or other signals that I continue to live and breathe. Especially Adam, who wrote to me before his trip to Italy and is still waiting for a response. Unconscionable, I agree. Alas, I am finishing (read: writing from scratch, or re-writing) the first chapter of my dissertation this week, to be submitted to various members of my committee on Friday, so I won't be communicating much this week. But, by Saturday, I'll be back in action.

In the meantime, you might be interested in reading Stanley Fish's latest blog post on "Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God." The post is actually an extended review of two forthcoming books, Bart D. Ehrman's (a Wheaton and PTS grad) God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer and Antony Flew’s (not even close to a Wheaton grad) There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Both books take up Epicurus's old question: “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil.” As you might expect from their titles, they come to different conclusions on the matter. An interesting read.

Towards Perpetual Peace

I am in the early stages of designing and proposing my own Rhetoric course here at UT. The standard convention is teaching a course named "The Rhetoric of..." fill in your topic here. It will come as no surprise to you that I am thinking of teaching the rhetoric of political violence. My interest will be pushing the concepts of peace, war, oppression, security, violence, retribution, resistance, revolution, protest and the like. (I am also thinking about the practices of war and peace, national security and civil rights, captial punishment and torture, peaceful protest and revolution.)

I have ulterior motives in telling you this. I want to exploit you as resources. I am wondering what kinds of texts-- poems, novels, songs, films, essays, etc-- you might recommend for giving undergraduates a conceptual vocabulary to think and write about violence in the political sphere-- particularly violence that is framed as necessary and/or instrumental. A text that justifies violence could be as useful as one that presents my own personal pacifist views (although I will, of course, appreciate that kind of suggestion). Particularly, does anyone know of fitting texts by MLK or Ghandi?

[My second choice might be a rhetoric of profit, so if you have any great ideas in that direction...]

So, about that Einstein Fellow...

Steve came up with this fantastic idea to read some Einstein this summer and talk about relativity—that enormously interesting idea which, along with the quantum mechanics of the ensuing decades, shaped what has come to be known as the century of physics. But he followed that great idea up with a rather dumb one: outsourcing the implementation of the project to me. It has sat as a task on my iGoogle todo list for a couple of weeks with no action on my part. Sorry for dropping the ball.

But now that Steve is back from vacation (the pictures were great, by the way), and Dave should be back from Maine this weekend, and I’m still where I always am, it might be a good time to turn our attention back to Dr. Einstein. As they say, there’s no time like the present.

If you’ve forgotten, Steve provided these great links to the 1920 English translation of Einstein’s 1916 book Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: MS Word format, MP3 files, or Podcast. Or you could go to your local library.

Einstein wrote of this book in 1916 that "the present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics.... In the interest of clearness, it appeared to me inevitable that I should repeat myself frequently, without paying the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation. I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler."

For those who are interested—and several of us have expressed some interest in this endeavor—perhaps we could spend two weeks or so on part one of the book, which encompasses the special theory from 1905, before moving on to the more comprehensive general theory that Einstein finished in 1916. Please post comments, questions, reactions, connections to other things you know in science and/or culture and history. I'll leave it to you whether we want to make observations as separate posts with comments in response, or a big, long comments thread. I don’t want to make this really formal, but I also know from experience that without some sort of framework this discussion won’t have the traction it needs. So start reading, and we’ll talk more over the next couple of weeks about Herr Einstein and his world-changing theories.