(derekbaker)

If it updates quarterly, can it really be called a blog?

Gosh, has it been over three months already? Time flies when you're being dunned.

And I haven't had the intellectual capacity to add much more here that seemed worth adding, after a bunch of work stuff and a bunch of church stuff and some other stuff that's been taking up all my mental space.

But today's readings during Morning Prayer gave me pause, following as they did so soon after I finished The Canon, by the New York Times writer Natalie Angier. (A great book, by the way, although she's sometimes too clever and too heavy with the wordplay for her own good.) One of the things that make the book brilliant is the way it's organized. It's not original with her, but still a good idea. To give an overview of basic science, it should build up, rather than work the way it does in our elementary and high school educations. Start first with the scientific method, then explore probability, then measurement, and then, in this order: physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. What you learn in each of the fields helps inform what you learn later.

Angier (properly) doesn't give any quarter to scriptural views of "creation" when discussing biology, but much of what she writes -- about evolution, but also about physics, astronomy and cosmology -- had, for me, very religious overtones. I intend to do some more thinking and maybe even writing about this, but today I was struck by what seems a very modern scientific experiment, and that from a book in the Hebrew scriptures, the Book of Daniel. This was the Old Testament lesson for today's Daily Office. It's the beginning of the familiar story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (which is strange we remember them by those names, since those were the names given them by the Babylonians, whereas their real names were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah). The Babylonian king wants the best and brightest of Israel at his court, and so orders that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah be fed the best food (presumably meat) and the best wine. Daniel says this will defile them, if they take these gifts from the king, but their refusing makes the palace master nervous:

The palace master said to Daniel, "I am afraid of my lord the king; he has appointed your food and your drink. If he should see you in poorer condition than the other young men of your own age, you would endanger my head with the king." Then Daniel asked the guard whom the palace master had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: "Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. You can then compare our appearance with the appearance of the young men who eat the royal rations, and deal with your servants according to what you observe." So he agreed to this proposal and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was observed that they appeared better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations. So the guard continued to withdraw their royal rations and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.

— Daniel 1:10:16

A couple of things about that this pericope brings to mind:

1. Daniel proposes a test


2. The test will yield measurable results


3. He proposes a control for the test (the young men of the same age, on a diet of royal rations instead of vegetables and water)


4. The Babylonians did not have much of an ethical standard for clinical trials. While we don't know how much the control group knew about this test ("informed consent"?), they are still conducting tests on prisoners for one thing, and for another, after the test group showed better health than the control group, shouldn't they have offered the same diet to the control group?


5. Interesting early evidence of the health benefits of vegetarian/vegan diets (and alcohol-free, at that) in scripture. However, it also backs up what a lot of people say, which is that a vegetarian diet, alone, may not help you lose weight.

I'm partly joking in those last two points, especially, but those are exactly the kind of issues that get discussed around clinical trials in diet and medicine even today.

Let me be clear here, which is the kind of thing I want to explore more, later, at some point: I'm not saying that the Bible is scientific evidence of anything. Or that the story in Daniel is a factual, historical account -- whether it had been informed by historical events or not beyond the accepted historical fact of the Jewish exile in what is today Iraq (and there's a whole subject worth a little more discussion, probably) I don't know. But for this particular reading, it is interesting that the scientific method has a long position in Jewish history, if we take this experiment as evidence. Which makes sense, since the Greeks and the Babylonians themselves were exploring scientific methods around the time that Israel was exiled in Babylon, or soon thereafter.

I'd never noticed this use of the scientific method in this story before in reading it in the past, but it stood out to me this morning, particularly in light of my last post, about the woman with the hemorrhage who asks Jesus to heal her. I guess you could say, if there's anything theological to these observations in these readings, it's not that "a Biblical viewpoint is scientific," but rather the opposite: "a scientific viewpoint is (or can be) Biblical." That's where I would differ most profoundly, I suppose, with the literalists. By positing science as anathema to religion, or religious faith as the opposite of scientific inquiry, they insult Christianity and the Bible's relationship to it far more than any scientific rationalist ever did.

Labels: faith, science

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Get Up, Stand Up. Stand Up for Your Rights.

had emergency surgery recently. (It was caused by a hernia that I already had another surgery scheduled to fix, but a strangulated small bowel turned an elective surgery into an emergency surgery, and they had to remove about 6-7" of my small intestine and resection back the healthy parts, leading to a week in the hospital and another week at T's, recovering.) As I still don't have a lot of energy -- and a cold is now sapping whatever brain activity I was capable of to begin with -- I pretty much manage to do some light reading every day, but can't concentrate for long before I find myself getting tired. But one thing I've been trying to stick to is the Daily Office (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, or both) in the Book of Common Prayer. This has become a highlight of my day, to be honest, and I was rewarded today with a Gospel reading that seemed so applicable to feeling so under the weather as I currently do. It was Mark 5:21-43 for Monday in the 3rd week of Epiphany today:

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, "My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live."

So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?'." He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader's house to say, "Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?" But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, "Do not fear, only believe." He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping." And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Now, of course, the two healing narratives in this passage are what made the strongest impression on me. I've read this passage many times, I know, but I'm not sure I've ever read it when I was myself was sick -- certainly never when I was recovering from a cold and major abdominal surgery. So it's a comforting Gospel lesson in Epiphanytide for that reason alone.

But I was also struck by a couple of things. For one, it's interesting to me to see that, once again, Christ's divinity is demonstrated through his interactions with women. This happens so frequently -- from his birth to his death to his resurrection -- that we don't think much about it these days. But in 1st century Palestine, I understand, it was rather radical for a teacher and a healer to devote as much time -- including, in this story, travel time -- and (literally) energy to women. Or for a strange woman to touch a man and vice versa. Some part of this openness may be due to the fact that, in Judaism, one traces one's Jewish ancestry through the mother, which itself was a novel concept for the religions of the region and is literally more "feminist" than the paternal line of determining who does and doesn't belong. But it also shows that in Christ, there really isn't "male or female, Jew or Greek." (Or "gay or straight," I would add.) Instead, all are welcome to his grace, even (or especially) a 12-year-old girl.

It heartens me also that the leader of the synagogue was so concerned about his daughter that he sought out this healer he'd heard about and begged him to attend to her. How different a story is that from what we hear how women, and especially girls, are treated in so many parts of the world even today! Here, however, two thousand years ago, was a little girl, a "talitha" in Aramaic, who was loved by her father Jairus and the people in her life as much as any boy might have been. That may not seem amazing to us today -- in fact, anything otherwise is hateful to us -- but I imagine this story has far more resonance in those parts of the world where girls still aren't valued as much as boys and where religious leadership is still solely the province of men.

The other thing that struck me as very modern is the description of the woman's ordeal with her hemorrhage: "Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse."

In other words, our healthcare system, which today continues to bankrupt sick people, hasn't much improved in 2,000 years in how its delivered, only perhaps in the science behind it.

Labels: church, faith, personal

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Getting Downright Apocalyptic on You

ith all the panic over a credit freeze and the climbing London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), it seems increasingly clear that something is broken here. Not only is the shadow economy of investment banking threatening to bring down the real economy of labor, production, sales, and profit margin, it's now clear that the shadow economy is now the primary organism and the real economy merely survives to feed it. (A grisly picture, but it's starting to look that way.)

That's probably a result of lax regulation — old-fashioned greed isn't the culprit here so much as a get-rich-quick, quarterly horizon is — and maybe in the longer term it can be fixed. But for the last two weeks I knew there was something I'd read somewhere that was stuck in my mind from way back when. I've read a few analyses from the 40,000-foot view of how this financial crisis came about, but I was thinking of something I'd read that was more like the 40,000-year view. I finally found it:

"There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or "usury" as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. This is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life."

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952.

Yeah, that was what I was trying to remember. Thanks, Jack.

An interesting twist on this, where the meta-issues in our domestic policy meet the meta-issues in our foreign policy meet issues of faith, is the realization that, under Islam's Shariah law, charging interest is still illegal.

I'm not sure what the implications of that comparison are, and it certainly isn't a prescription for an economic rescue package that a majority of House members can vote to pass. But I find it an interesting commentary on this crisis from the perspective of religious history, nonetheless.

Labels: economy, faith

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Reality and Post-Reality Checks

TIME magazine's site (not sure if these articles will also appear or have appeared in the dead-tree version) has two articles that gave me a pause.

1) If the electorate has moved away from the Republicans, does that necessarily they have moved to the left? Or even if they would be more willing to call themselves "moderate" than "conservative" these days, will they see John McCain as the candidate who better reflects their own political journey? He's pretty conservative by most measures (including the American Conservative Union's), but given all the right-wing wailing at the prospect of a John McCain administration, he may just be seen as the centrist. Article: "The Price of Overconfidence."

2) The Bishop of Durham explains what he says is the true (at least biblical) Christian view of heaven. I've heard this before in discussion with or sermons from more than one clergyperson -- but they don't talk about it a lot, because they probably don't completely understand it, either (who does?), and it's not quite as appealing a promise as the common, if unfounded in Scripture, idea of the resurrection. Article: "Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop". (That should probably read "Many Christians" in the headline, because as I say, I've heard this expressed before.) One thing that doesn't get addressed here, however, is that if God stands outside of time, then perhaps that final victory is as real and accessible to souls who have entered the Church Triumphant as today's battles are for the Church Militant -- or the Creation was to God.

But perhaps TIME didn't want to tackle the issue of time.

Labels: faith, politics

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Bad Nonhabits

Just like in keeping a journal (or in exercising regularly, for that matter), I'm not very good at maintaining good habits, if blogging could be considered a good habit. It's getting to the point where the "sorry it's been so long since I've posted" are the only posts I post. As always, I resolve to be more regular (if only to achieve my goal of daily writing-that-isn't-for-work), and think one way to do that is to ignore the need for every post to be a complete essay unto itself.

Not that they've been all that good, as essays, I realize, but having a complete thought, exploring it thoroughly, and making some kind of point always seems the ideal -- but as Voltaire said, "the perfect is the enemy of the good." ("Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," which would normally translate as "the best is..." but such exactitude in translation is, perhaps, exactly what Voltaire was warning me about. I must ask him when we meet next.)

So a few random thoughts for now, if only to stake a claim for perhaps future posts. Otherwise, this blog is likely to revert back to its natural state, overgrown with kudzu and marauding bears.

• There's a skunk at the garden party. Or to be more precise (apologies to V.), we have skunks in my co-op's garden. For non-New Yorkers, a "co-op" is an apartment building or complex in which you own shares in the overall "co-operative," but don't own your actual apartment. It differs in some legal ways from a "condo," but in practical terms, it means you have to be approved by the board before you can buy and they can sometimes impose rules that condos generally can't. (As I understand it, a condo you own "from the paint in." In a co-op, officially, you don't, but they generally treat it the same.)
  
  Anyway, my co-op is actually five separate buildings, each divided into two sections with separate entrances, surrounding a 2+ acre (?) garden, which is obviously a rarity in New York City. A few weeks ago, they posted a sign in the elevator informing us that the management office was aware that we had a skunk in the garden and that a humane trap had been set, and the skunk would be removed (and released elsewhere?). A week or so later, the note in the elevator told us all that we had so far caught four skunks. I saw a fifth, dead skunk on a sidewalk about a half block from our co-op a week ago that someone had likely poisoned (as it was lying beside a snow shovel that had the remains of an orange, probably poisoned, on its blade.
  
  
• If you follow anything going on in the Episcopal Church or the wider Anglican Communion, you know that there's a huge showdown underway between the U.S. church, the minority of fundamentalists in our church, and the fundamentalist Anglican archbishops (also a minority, but representating a majority of the world's Anglicans) of other national churches. It's getting both tense and ridiculous, but listening to the arguments on all sides, it's made me update my bias against Biblical literalism, which would be....
  
  
• I've long felt that Biblical literalism replaced a worship of God with a worship of the Bible -- or bibliolatry, in other words. Despite the fact that the church created the Bible (or determined its canon and scriptural nature), and not vice versa. I've decided that, too often, even that doesn't adequately describe the ways literalism is used to pervert the Gospel of Christ. Pretty much these days, it's not even worshiping the Bible, it's worshiping a concordance of the Bible.
  
  An excellent exposition on this was written by the Rev. Thomas Woodward at the Episcopal Majority blog, to which I posted a comment and then got into the kind of "Bible says/Jesus says" argument that this stuff generally comes down to these days.
  
  
• I'm co-chairing a capital campaign at church this fall, and the preparation for it (including a four-color brochure and pledge cards) is taking up all my non-work time. But this is also the time of year that life picks up steam, anyway. Right now, for example, I need to quit adding random bullets to this post and go practice a few hymns on the keyboard, as I said I would play the bells before the service tomorrow. I'm also filling in for someone else as a torchbearin' acolyte. And next week, I have a Voices of Ascension concert to attend (at Carnegie Hall; normally they're at church), and a campaign committee meeting to attend. So as I say, the fall is picking up steam. As in "steamroller."
  

Labels: church, faith, Inwood, personal

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Dangerous Combinations

don't usually like to start celebrating Christmas too early. Certainly not before Thanksgiving -- it's almost an insult to the First Thanksgiving's Pilgrims and Native Americans, neither of whom, for their different reasons, believed in celebrating Christmas at all. And, really, even the day after Thanksgiving seems a rush that we could do without. Strictly-strictly speaking, "Christmas" isn't even celebrated until December 25, and for the 12 days that follow. And Advent (the season before Christmas) begins today, on December 3.

One nod to the holidays, however, was to move all my Christmas music from my PC over to my iPod. With my old 40GB iPod, I didn't have enough room for all my music, so I would have to pick and choose which genres to keep on the iPod, usually leaving the Christmas stuff off all year until December, when I'd swap out the classical stuff (5.83GB right there) for the Christmas stuff.

With the 60GB iPod I got this summer, however, I can just barely get everything on there. I know -- does anyone really need 60 gigs' worth of music? And there are admittedly some things on there I either rarely listen to or haven't gotten around to. In fact, I have a playlist I created called "Due for a listen." And, now that I check, I still have 15.8 days worth of music that iTunes says I haven't listened to yet.

Which isn't actually true. Many of those titles are songs that I just haven't listened to on either this iPod or on this PC (both of which are only a few months old at this point). Since I just added the Christmas music to the iPod, for example, that alone accounts for 2.9 days' worth of the "Due for a listen."

Yep. I have 2.9 days -- 1226 items, or 4.59GB -- of music in the genre "Christmas." Much of it came in originally with the genre of "Holiday," but some didn't, and I use the genres so much in my "smart playlists" that I have to make sure they're accurate at least insofar as my own listening is concerned.

Using the "comments" field of each song's tags (in Windows, right-click on a highlighted track or tracks and choose "Get info"), I've broken much of that down even further. For example, I have 17 hours' worth in the "Christmas-Traditional" playlist (Genre contains "Christmas"; Comment contains "traditional"; Comment does not contain "weird").

That playlist covers everything from the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble "Festival of Carols in Brass" and the Julie Andrews/André Previn album (originally a Firestone Tire release!) to things by John Tavener, Herbert Howells, and stuff sung by Chanticleer. Oh, and a Shirley Bassey singing "Ave Maria" is in there, too.

I would have expected more in this vein from my collection, but surprisingly, it's not the Christmas playlist with the most titles. That distinction goes to the playlist "Christmas-Pop," which has a full day's worth of all the Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Harry Connick, Jr., The Roches and Sarah McLachlan stuff. So it covers a wide swath, and there's obviously some overlap with both jazz -- Diana Krall shows up in both -- and traditional: the Henry Mancini Orchestra's medley of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," "Away in a Manger," and "The First Noel" is pretty traditional -- but in a 60s, easy-listenin' way. So for some reason I left him out of "traditional" but put Shirley Bassey in. Go figure.

The "Christmas-Jazz" playlist has 14.2 hours of tunes in it, but in addition to a few overlaps with "Christmas-Pop," there are also a few overlaps here with "Christmas-Piano," such as George Shearing and Liz Story.

Actually, the "Christmas-Piano" playlist is made up almost entirely of cross-listings with either "jazz" or "new age" or both -- all 9.2 hours of it.

And speaking of Liz Story, she may be the most represented on any of my Christmas playlists, which is probably appropriate, because her album The Gift is one of my all-time favorite Christmas albums. Not only does she do some thought-provoking medleys, pairing up carols and hymns that one doesn't hear often recorded ("Bring a Torch Jeanette, Isabella" and "Il Est Ne, le Divin Enfant"), she even includes some that I've never associated with Christmas at all -- but it works. "Pange Lingua," which I usually think of as a Maundy Thursday hymn, is paired with "A Hymn to the Virgin"; or "The Truth from Above" combined with something she calls "O King of Light and Splendor," which I've only ever heard as "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," a classic Good Friday hymn, but the same tune is apparently used by Bach in his Christmas Oratorio (and again in his St. Matthew Passion).

They're all good, but the best track on that album, in my opinion, is the medley of "In the Bleak Midwinter/O Sanctissima." I have the sheet music for this; someday, I'll take the time to learn it.

As I said, this album The Gift is on several of my Christmas playlists, because it crosses genres, but among those genres I have to admit includes "Christmas-New Age." I hesitate to even mention this playlist (although I do have, uh, 13.5 hours' worth of Christmas music in this category). And some is definitely better than others, but it's almost all from Windham Hill, almost all acoustic, and includes, other than Liz Story, people like George Winston, Alex De Grassi and William Ackerman. So not a Mannheim Steamroller number in the bunch. So get off my back.

Except to hear a few of these tracks here on the computer while I wrote this, I haven't yet played the Christmas music on the iPod yet. I'm just not in the mood yet this year, and not sure how much of a Christmas mood I'll be in this year anyway.

I'm taking a few days of retreat up at a convent north of New York City this week, just to clear the head. I'll take the iPod with me, but we'll see. I imagine the convent is all "decked out" for Advent -- meaning, not at all festive, since it isn't yet Christmas -- so I doubt there will be much inclination to listen to holly and jolly for a little while yet, anyway.

But thanks to iTunes's "smart playlists" and the obsessive-compulsive tendencies they enable and nurture in some of us, I'm ready, just in case that holiday spirit does hit.

Labels: faith, music, personal

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