christopher hitchens
Heart-breaking.
Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so ... considerate.
via Vanity Fair.
exceptionalist justice
NT Wright, on recent events:
Consider the following scenario. A group of Irish republican terrorists carries out a bombing raid in London. People are killed and wounded. The group escapes, first to Ireland, then to the US, where they disappear into the sympathetic hinterland of a country where IRA leaders have in the past been welcomed at the White House. Britain cannot extradite them, because of the gross imbalance of the relevant treaty. So far, this seems plausible enough.But now imagine that the British government, seeing the murderers escape justice, sends an aircraft carrier (always supposing we've still got any) to the Nova Scotia coast. From there, unannounced, two helicopters fly in under the radar to the Boston suburb where the terrorists are holed up. They carry out a daring raid, killing the (unarmed) leaders and making their escape. Westminster celebrates; Washington is furious.
What's the difference between this and the recent events in Pakistan? Answer: American exceptionalism. America is subject to different rules to the rest of the world. By what right? Who says?
via guardian.co.uk.
I think Wright is wrong when he implies that US:Pakistan::UK:US
Well, perhaps not wrong... mere exaggeration?
Or perhaps I don't understand the realities of the IRA when compared to al-Qa'ida.
In any case, he makes a depressing point. Who decides what is terrorism, and what is justifiable action against it? I find myself in agreement with the action taken by the US in Abbottabad (for complicated reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that I'm Indian and grew up with a certain unfortunate perspective on Pakistan...), while grieving the real complexity of evil and our hopelessly wrong, inherently subverted & evil-multiplying attempts to defeat violence with more violence.
Revelation, reason, wisdom & love have long since departed this discourse, and all that's left is the rhetoric of power, politics, deception & hatred.
מרנא תא
colonial missions
Missionaries receiving offerings from Christians at Harvest Festival, Jamalamadugu.
via USC Digital Library.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 10:13 am
"the virgin birth at the opening & the empty tomb at the close... bear witness that this life... is marked off from all the rest"
"[the church] is not created, formed & introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority & insight"
"in face of such a church [man initiated] we... must appeal to the free grace of God to be made blessed outside of it"
"a church of that description is not the Church but the work of sin, of apostasy in the Church"
"with God all things are possible, and with us at least very many" barthian humor?
"the revelation of God in its subjective reality [is] the existence of men who have been led by God himself to a certain conviction"
"the work of the Holy Spirit is that our blind eyes are opened &... in thankful self-surrender we recognize & acknowledge it: Amen"
Barth is either impossibly narrow or impossibly broad. can't yet figure it out. no worries, still have 8000p left. all in good time.
maybe that's where wisdom lies. in the tension between impossibly narrow & impossibly broad. or the harmony thereof. Paul, anyone?
"when we ask how a man comes to hear the Word of God, to believe in Christ... at once we must turn and point to the inconceivable..."
"the Word creates the fact that we hear the Word. Jesus Christ creates the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ"
"true preaching from the Holy Spirit will not consist in pointing to our own or other men's seizure, but to the divine seizing"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 12:10 pm
"what in the OT (the expectation) was God's covenant with man, is here in the NT (the fulfillment) God's becoming man"
"To the protest of the Synagogue we can and must reply unreservedly that God's becoming man is the goal of the Old Testament"
"...there ceases to exist in the NT the manifold and multiform office of men of God, the instruments of the covenant"
"the whole problem of the OT is compressed into the twofold question as to why it goes so ill with this people, & why it is so evil"
"it is only because Jesus lives that His cross is the sign under which His Church marches"
"against the whole unending burden... stand the words: it is finished"
"in the most artless possible way all the NT Easter narratives fail to supply... an account of the resurrection itself"
"not a line of the real NT can be properly understood unless it is read as ... the witness to hope"
"Christ is always He who stands at the door and knocks, & faith is always the decision in which a man opens to Him that He may enter"
"as Christians and theologians we do not reject the description of Mary as the 'mother of God'..."
"Mariology is an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought. Excrescences must be excised"
salman khan
In an undistinguished ranch house off the main freeway of Silicon Valley, in a converted walk-in closet filled with a few hundred dollars' worth of video equipment and bookshelves and his toddler's red Elmo underfoot, is the epicenter of the educational earthquake that has captivated Gates and others. It is here that Salman Khan produces online lessons on math, science, and a range of other subjects that have made him a web sensation.
via CNN.
Like so many entrepreneurial epiphanies, Khan's came by accident. Born and raised in New Orleans -- the son of immigrants from India and what's now Bangladesh -- Khan was long an academic star. With his MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science. He also was the president of his MIT class and did volunteer teaching in nearby Brookline for talented children, as well as developed software to teach children with ADHD. What he doesn't know he picks up from endless reading and cogitation: His gift, like that of many teachers, is being able to reduce the complex. "Part of the beauty of what he does is his consistency," says Gates. Of Khan's capacity to teach, Gates, who says he spends considerable time trying to help his three kids learn the basics of math and science, tells Fortune, "I kind of envy him."
Micah & I are thoroughly enjoying Sal's pedagogy. He makes the basics crystal clear. In any field, gaining a deeply intuitive feel for the fundamentals is everything - the complexities are only impossibly or confusingly complex when the fundamentals aren't really understood. And teaching the basics well is very difficult - I myself haven't the patience or ability. And so, I'm incredibly grateful for Sal.
Micah says: this is simply not fair - he's making school-stuff exciting and fun!