This is the coolest thing I saw today.

The narrator reminds me of the computer voice in Radiohead’s song “Fitter Happier.”

I’ve been using A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons as a morning read and it doesn’t fit well within the traditional dose of daily encouragement so you can carpe diem like other devotional books. This book doesn’t allow the reader to wake up and wrap themselves in a warm blanket of Jesusy fuzziness, which is no surprise since it’s from Bonhoeffer. Rather, this book challenges the reader, often with a punch in the nose. Consider the entry for yesterday, June 26. The excerpt comes from his book Ethics, pages 140-141.

June 26: The Sin of Acquiescence

The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognize its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guiltly for the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ.

Yesterday I attended a delegates meeting for One LA, an affiliate with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). One LA delegates told stories about specific civic issues such as a landfill in Sun Valley, or education in Los Angeles School District. They also asked questions of and posed challenges regarding these issues to city leaders who were present such as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council President Eric Garcetti. It was an interesting experience of democracy at work. The meeting seemed to be part rally and part town hall. Los Angeles Daily News has a report on the meeting here.

In preparation for the meeting I read “Reweaving the Fabric: The Iron Rule and the IAF Strategy for Power and Politics,” a chapter by Ernesto Cortes, Jr., a regional director of IAF. The chapter can be found in Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation, edited by Henry Cisneros. I found these paragraphs very thought-provoking:

Politics, properly understoody, is about collective action initiated by people who have engaged in public discourse. Politics is about relationships enabling people to disagree, argue, interrupt one another, clarify, and negotiate, and through this process of debate and conversation to forge a compromise and a consensus that enables them to act. Practical wisdom is equivalent to good judgment and what the Greeks called praxis, the action that is aimed, calculated, and reflected upon. People must be given the opportunity to develop practical wisdom, to develop the kind of judgment that includes understanding and responsibility. In politics, it is not enough to be right, that is, it is not enough to have a position that is logically worked out; one also has to be reasonable, that is, one has to be willing to make concessions and exercise judgment in forging a deal. Elections understood in this sense are not to discover what people want, but to ratify decisions and actions the political community has reached through argumentative deliberations….

Politics is where our moral dimensions emerge. We are social beings. We are defined by relationships to other people. These include family and kin. These also include the less familiar people with whom we engage in the day-to-day business of living our lives in a complicated society. When people do not have the opportunity to connect to meaningful power and participate in public life effectively, they learn to act irresponsibly—a complaint that is frequently voiced about the residents of our inner cities.

Focusing on the least important elements of political action—voting, elections, and turnout, trivializes our citizens by disconnecting them from the real debate and real power of public life. We fail to recognize that voter participation is the wrong measure of the health of our politics. Voter turnout was high in Pinochet’s Chile. Voter turnout was never a problem in the totalitarian countries. Bcoming mere voters, clients, taxpayers, and plantiffs, rather than citizens, renders people incompetent, making them passive viewers of an electronic display. If there is to be genuine participatory politics in this country, there must be opportunities for ordinary people to initiate action about matters that are important to their interests. (297-298)

Randy Dotinga of Health Day reports:

Over the past 17 years, successive generations of AIDS drugs have restored a total of three million years of life to HIV-positive Americans and prevented an estimated 2,900 infants from becoming infected, a new study finds.

Now let’s get those treatments out to the rest of the world.

Disclaimer: This is not a post about Plato and his cave or the contemporary versions of that allegory found in C. S. Lewis’ works or The Matrix trilogy, so relax. Nor is this about MTV’s long-running reality series.

Having spent the majority of my life in school—I finished the 19th grade in December – I have heard the common refrain that I would soon find out what it would be like in the “real world.” I also heard a lot of talk about the real world when I worked at a Christian summer camp. The real world, as I understood the term, was the one where had the responsibilities of families, bills, etc. In the real world, people are faced with concrete challenges. There is a sense that the real world is where most of the people spend most of their time.

The term the real world has always struck me as odd and condescending. First it is odd for no one has told me the boundaries of the real world. For example, the academy is not the real world presumably because it is a place of theory and research that is not ruled by the capitalistic theories that determine much of our society. That, and fewer people go to college or teach in college than work outside the university. But just because few people work in a setting doesn’t mean that their experience is not as important as others’ work. For example, relatively few people work in investment banking and yet we consider the realm of finance the real world whereas the realm of academics is not.

Second, I find the term condescending because it belittles peoples’ experience. What is it that we experience in our lives that isn’t real? Now everything I experienced in school or camp may not be applicable in the vineyards in Selma, California, but at the same time, not all the skills one gains harvesting raisins is applicable in the classroom. One realm is not categorically more real than the other. The danger as I see it is when we universalize our experience and assume that it is the totality of reality for everyone. My experience and knowledge is reality for me, but when I universalize my experience and deem it exclusively real, I run the risk of invalidating other experiences because they do not fit into my understanding of what is real. I’m not arguing for relativizing ethoses, but describing the fact that there is a plurality of experience.

For us living in the West, how can we say we live in the real world when our wealth is far beyond what the majority of the world experiences (see the Global Rich List to calculate your wealth relative to the rest of the world)? Does the fact that we experience a level of comfort foreign to the majority of the people on the globe mean our experience is less real? Perhaps, but I prefer not to speak about the “real world.” Instead, I prefer the term found in the film Fight Club: “Who you were in Fight Club was not who you were in the rest of the world.” (Emphasis added.)

Ghana 2, USA 1

The National Research Council (NRC) released a report to Congress today that says,

There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other ‘proxies’ to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years. Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, said the committee that wrote the report, although the available proxy evidence does indicate that many locations were warmer during the past 25 years than during any other 25-year period since 900.

It was a report done in response to claims made by Michael Mann and his research group in the 1990’s. The NRC was less confident than Mann and his colleagues in their findings as data before the years 1600 becomes scarce, though the NRC did find the large-scale reconstructions helpful.

Also of note:

The committee pointed out that surface temperature reconstructions for periods before the Industrial Revolution—when levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases were much lower—are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that current warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.

(The full news release can be found here. The full 155-page report can be found here. The quotations above are taken from the news release.)

On page 94, the report states:

• Greenhouse gasses and tropospheric aerosols varied little from 1 A.D. to around 1850. Volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were likely the most strongly varying external forces during this period, but it is currently estimated that the temperature variations caused by these forces were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas forcing since the mid 19th century.


• Climate model simulations indicate that solar and volcanic forcings together could have produced periods of relative warmth and cold during the preindustrial portion of the last 1,000 years. However, anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases are needed to simulate late 20th century warmth.

An AP story reports that during the briefing to Congress:

The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was “likely” to be true, said John “Mike” Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the ‘90s research “are very close to being right” and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.

In “Detroit’s White House Problem,” David Welch of Business Week Online writes:

Relations between the Bush Administration and Detroit have grown so frosty that some Motown executives privately say they are looking to the Democrats for help. In some cases, they are even supporting them.

Perhaps we are seeing a change of heart. Granted, Detroit political action committees have thrown money at both sides of the aisle to hedge their bets. Still, in the past two Presidential elections, top executives at all three carmakers have individually showered Bush and Republican political action committees with money.

But perhaps the most telling statments come at the end of the article:

Then there’s health care. Bush and the Republican-led Congress have done nothing to mitigate escalating health-care costs. It doesn’t look as though they have anything in the works, either.

Detroit hasn’t asked for a bailout. For that matter, I have never even heard Wagoner or Bill Ford offer up a solution. So it’s unclear what they want government to do. But medical insurance and health care have clearly proven a massive burden on U.S. industry—and one that Bush and Co. has done nothing about.

All of this makes you wonder what Detroit has gotten for its long-standing support of Bush and the Republicans. From the sounds of it, auto industry leaders are starting to ask the same question.

It’s summer and that means annual rituals that coincide with the increased heat begin. The baseball season enters into full stride and pennant contenders are solidified, publishers release the new beach books, blockbuster films aimed at kids and teens fill the multiplexes, the major tournaments in golf and tennis take place, and the most exciting and fun recurring event of all, denominational meetings and assemblies commence. The Episcopal Church has already made many headlines with regard to issues of women in leadership and the ordination of homosexuals (the debate of these topics themselves could be synonymous with summer given their annual frequency). The Presbyterian Church (USA), my old ecclesial stomping ground, has also made news with the story of receiving a policy paper on incorporating different formulations of the Trinity in its liturgy at their General Assembly. The traditional formulation approved by the Ecumenical Councils of the early church is, Father, Son, and Spirit. There are a variety of new “alternative phrasings” for the Trinity, such as “Rock, Redeemer, and Friend,” “Lover, Beloved, and Love,” “Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier,” “King of Glory, Prince of Peace, and Spirit of Love.” But of course, the one that catches the media’s attention is the gender-inclusive formulation, “Mother, Child and Womb.” I’m curious of peoples’ responses to these new formulations. Do they strike you as helpful and creative new ways of expressing the Godhead, are they unorthodox and teetering on the verge of blasphemy, or is it a mixed bag in which some are good and helpful, whereas some are distracting or dangerous? Do you think, if ain’t broke don’t fix it, or do you think that new phrasings are necessary? I’ll hold my tongue, er…fingers, for now and give my thoughts in the comments, if a discussion begins.

I recently re-read Michael Chabon’s brilliant novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The first time I read it was back in the summer of 2003, and I wrote a review on it on my old, old blog (which you can read here). After finishing the novel this time, I thought, I should write a review on this book every time I read it, which I plan to do several more times during my life. The book is that rich, that rewarding, and that enjoyable. Chabon has created a novel that leaves me aching after the final sentence ends because I want so badly to follow the characters through the rest of their lives. A one-sentence synopsis makes the book sound boring, but I’ll give it to you faithful readers anyway: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows two young Jewish cousins, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, as they create comic books in New York City beginning in the late 1930’s with the war in Europe looming on the horizon. The sheer scope of the novel, however, is far greater and more wonderful than one sentence could ever capture. Kavalier & Clay is one of the most perfect examples of plot and character melding together. The independent variable in the novel is always world events and the dependent variable is how these events directly or indirectly affect Joe and Sammy.

Chabon is a craftsman of words par excellence. When reading his prose, it seems that the English language is not just a tool for him to tell his story, but that he owns the language. His use of the English language is on the level of Ernest Hemingway’s sparse and rich dialogue, or Toni Morrison’s lyrical prose that calls to be read aloud. Chabon’s use of language is a concoction of words one only encounters in unabridged dictionaries, heartbreaking warmth, precise description, and spontaneous humor. One of my favorite examples of Chabon’s prose comes when the main characters are about to attend the New York debut of Citizen Kane (d. Welles, 1941).

They were all headed uptown together, crammed into the back of a taxicab. Sammy and Rosa had taken the jubp seats, and Rosa had a good grip on Sammy’s arm. She had come from the offices of the T.R.A. and was dressed, with a dowdiness that pained her considerably, in a square-shouldered, belted brown tweed suit, of a vaguely military cut. She had been dressed like a schoolteacher the last time Orson Welles and seen her, too—the man was going to think that Joe Kavalier’s girlfriend was about as fascinating as a sack of onions. Sammy had on one of his big, pinstriped leftovers from a George Raft film, Bacon the usual penguin suit—he took the part of man-about-town a bit too seriously for Rosa’s taste, though, to his credit, that seemed to be just about the only thing he did take seriously. And Joe, of course, looked as if he had just fallen out of a hedge. (355)

But Kavalier & Clay is not all style; it is a truly engrossing story touching on themes of frienship, love, anger, forgiveness, salvation, parenthood, and art. Another of my favorite passages comes later in the book as the U.S. Senate is about to open an investigation into comic books:

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. (582)

Kavalier & Clay reminds me of the film Amadeus (d. Forman, 1984) for the simple reason that just as Amadeus makes me want to listen to Mozart for a week after watching it, reading Kavalier & Clay makes me want to go to a comic book store and buy armfulls of titles.