Sisters in Islam

Excellent interview with this Muslim group, whom I met while in Malaysia, in one of the major dailies there.

Convent Life

I think I lied to a nun this morning.

The story begins here: in the back of a closet at my parents’ house over Thanksgiving, I found this old leather handbag my grandmother gave me ages ago. In one tug it goes from a backpack to a slightly slouchy shoulder bag. I couldn’t decide whether it was too nerdy to be worn but in the end decided it was so grandma as to be vintage. Just perfect for a travel/work pack. I travel very light (never more than a carry-on-hurrah for the new airline liquids rule!-for anything under two weeks), and I am loathe to pack multiple bags.

This morning I was leaving the convent to go to work, and the nice Sister from India (at the Brigida, I’ve moved closer to the center, just in time for the transport strike tomorrow-there has to be a strike every time I come to Rome) said to me to be very careful about my bag because of pickpockets (which I hear about from every person I meet here). She insisted it was better for me to wear my bag in the front instead of on my back. I switched it to the front and said, I’ll wear it like this, and she smiled and said, Yes, this is better. I walked out and waved goodbye, but it was a bit uncomfortable, so about halfway across the Piazza Farnese I switched it back. Catherine claims it was just not taking her advice, but I think that almost counts as lying to a nun, or at least misleading her.

Staying at a convent is actually doing wonders for my prayer life. It’s very quiet, and knowing there are all these faithful women serving and praying also kind of encourages prayer, which I desperately need with this job. I attended mass at 7am this morning. We were only eight or so in a small chapel in the convent. One of the younger Sisters with the wine who doesn’t know I’m baptised Anglican was a bit shocked when I refused communion, but the priest with the eucharist was nice and smiled and prayed for me instead. She probably went back to her room and prayed for my soul, which is nice. It’s funny, whenever I go to Catholic mass (rarely) I don’t feel uncomfortable but I get the feeling the Sisters who know I am not baptised Catholic are all praying for God to correct my doctrine, but there are worse things.

Oh! I met a Manhattanite. Sister Margaret has been a Dominican nun since 1968. Very fashionably dressed, though. Even in a long black skirt she looked cool, ha! She’s the International Coordinator for the order and she was very encouraging about work.

I ate breakfast (bread and tea) with Sister Christina, who is British and taught school in South Africa for 29 years during apartheid. The Catholic Church opened an interracial school, which was forbidden by the government, but the Church resisted, the Anglicans joined them, and in the end the government couldn’t stop the churches because they refused to close and they were too numerous-there was nowhere else for the children to go. It was good to hear of people doing such things in a very dark time. Stick it to the Man!! Not that I think Sister thinks of it that way.

I asked Christina how the children experienced going to an interracial school during apartheid, but of course the parents of those children must have wanted their children to be studying with children of other colors. She said, Oh, children don’t see color; they’re taught. She told of one ten-year-old at an all-white school who raised her hand and said, My mummy says that in other countries they treat blacks like they are human beings and it’s just awful. Ten-years-old! Of course she told her that’s because they are, and we all are, because God made people of all colors in His image and that’s what gives them value as human beings. What an evil time. I’m not sure what else you could say to a child whose parents taught them in this way. I mean, you can’t just say, They are just like you and me because they are just like you and me.

An all-Zulu school where she worked had an 8-year run of 100% pass rates even though the government funding was maybe only a third of the white schools and there weren’t nearly enough textbooks. I noticed in the morning mass that Cristina has a beautiful voice. In her classes, the Zulu children learnt their Afrikaans lessons by singing the conjugations, but they hated it-it was the language of the oppressor. She said English they didn’t mind at all. The Zulu children had beautiful Zulu names and then they would have English school names that were very odd for an Anglophone. A student might be called “Professor” or “Machine” because her father worked for a professor or with machines. One boy was called “Praise God,” that was just his name, and she said it was difficult to be cross with him for misbehaviour when she had to call him Praise God. That’s great.

I might name my children Praise God just to regulate my character. Poor children.

Yes, I am leaving Brussels to return to the land of TomKat’s wedding, bucatini, and the Pope. Rome tonight. Originally I was to stay with the Mastromatteos but a scheduling mishap occurred and now I am staying in a convent.

Tree bed

Irresistible.

By the time you read this, I will have landed in Brussels on the red-eye, downed a café, and pushed thoughts of sleep aside in favor of the pleasures of the Sablon, speculoos, and Pierre Marcolini. If all goes as planned, I will be dining with Saskia, Vanessa, and dear Filip Monday night, talking with the US Mission to the European Union Tuesday morning, and meeting with European Parliament Members Tuesday afternoon.

In Lebanon, Bobby Kennedy was shot

This is what I’ve realised as I’ve followed Lebanese blogs about the assassination of anti-Syrian Cabinet Minister Pierre Gemayel. It must be as it was for America when Bobby Kennedy was shot. Another young hopeful for the nation dead, and how many more can the people take? Even more than the Palestinians these days, the Lebanese feel like pawns. It’s hard to read the hopelessness, the pleas for calm, even the pardons:

“I have one wish,” Gemayel’s father, former president Amin Gemayel, told them after nightfall, “that tonight be a night of prayer to contemplate the meaning of this martyrdom and how to protect this country. I call on all those who appreciate Pierre’s martyrdom to preserve his cause and for all of us to remain in the service of Lebanon. We don’t want reactions and revenge.”

Thanksgiving soup(s)

The best part of Thanksgiving at my house is the soup my mom makes from the picked over turkey. Usually it’s a plain hearty soup, made with potatos, carrots, and tomatos. This year, she’s made it with white Japanese yam, lotus root, gobo, and small bean-red herbal plums. With a little brown rice, it’s amazing, and it makes working today really not so bad.

And then there was Asian squash soup with broken egg; stewed oxtail; steamed fish; braised fatty pork and tofu; brown and red rice with mushrooms and scallions; ginger oil chicken soup.

Unsuggestions: literary navel gazing

I am still suffering from writer’s procrastination. Tim Challies is feeding my habit. I’ve been looking for a good program to catalogue my ridiculous collection of books and he’s found the Library Thing, which gives you Unsuggestions of books that people who have your book are least likely to have. I typed in Jürgen Habermas‘s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and up popped, number 1, Anne of Green Gables. I’m planning to fix that little glitch by entering both books in my library list. Mwahaha.

So then I decide to type in one of my favorite (though not most-read) books, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Up pop a bunch of pseudo-literary romances by the likes of Maeve Binchy, Nicolas Sparks, and Tim LaHaye, of the Left Behind series, none of which I have read.

I mean, this is a psychologist’s dream.

There are all these questions: who uses the service, is it mostly nerdy A-type academics who read Horkheimer and Habermas, and housewives who read romances and Christian end-times books (go ahead, shoot me for stereotyping, I don’t care)? why is it that someone who reads romances is so unlikely to read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, on the sociology of power and being seen? and what is it about Piper among all the other Christian apologists that brings out the ascetic who won’t read Harry Potter?

I could play with this all day, but I’m going to be good and go back to writing about the federal political structure of Afghanistan instead.

The road to thanksgiving

This simple, throat-tightening, beautifully written piece from Alissa at Radiant Magazine is worth your time any day, but especially today.

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

This is such a great read, from the NYTimes.  Scientists being human, and funny without meaning to be:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. [W]hether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall.

Although I think I’ve made it abundantly clear in the last week that I find Dawkins’s attitude and logic (if not his science) wanting, I can’t really blame them for being frustrated with people who aren’t interested in facts, or aren’t interested in discovery, or aren’t able to distinguish metaphysics from physical exploration.  I completely understand the frustration.  From a Christian point of view, you might as well pretend that God did not give you a body in the world or a mind with which to engage it.  But people act like it all the time.

Raising an atheist generation

It just gets better and better.

If Richard Dawkins could take your children away, he would. He worries they’ll be taught to believe in anything he can’t replicate in a lab, like God. Where did I learn this? From one of his devoted followers, who conducted a series of interviews with him:

When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Here is where Dawkins’ analogy breaks down. Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

“How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?” Dawkins asks. “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”

Read on for a whole lot more at Wired (via Arts and Letters Daily)

First of all, for a man who says it’s a ridiculous rhetorical technique to ask him to prove there isn’t God (and I agree), he’s amazingly confident in calling God a falsehood–and crusading for “evangelistic atheism.”I am completely fascinated by this because I was standing on a New York street corner not so long ago with a group of highly intelligent atheists I’ve known for some time and one of them started to explain that ideally, children would be taken from their parents to be raised in a public institution, taught about religious ideology and atheism dispassionately, and then left to choose themselves what to believe. They could visit their parents periodically. He is one of the smarter, more creative people I know, atheist or not, and he was completely serious.

His main reason was the belief that religious parents visit untold harm on their children and are given too much leeway to teach them falsehoods that lead to things like terrorism and guilt. Apparently the great parenting among religious parents there is out there wasn’t enough to make up for bad parenting. He thought the state could do better. My friends: parents, not just religious parents, visit untold harm on their children. It’s because they’re sinners and capable of screwing up just like daughters and sons and sisters and brothers. And strangers. That’s why we have public child welfare departments that are overrun. Sometimes with incompetent bureaucrats that do no better. Perhaps Dawkins is happier thinking only the competent bureaucrats are atheists.

It was shockingly myopic to me that anyone could think the state would do any better at raising children than they are now at stemming the tide of abuse. It was, in fact, the first time I heard this sort of argument. Aside from when I read 1984 and Brave New World in high school. But it turns out my atheist companion was just playing to Dawkins. Except Dawkins takes it a step further.

If he had it his way, he would not only teach religion dispassionately, but inculcate children in the virtues of non-belief. It’s really amazing to me how atheism still turns to communitarianism–authoritarian communitarianism (with the superior atheist intelligentsia as benevolent dictator, of course) for real responses to life.

Maybe Dawkins thinks if the Chinese were just smarter–or at least if they all read his genius book–they would stop seeking out spiritual food in the droves they are today, and turn back to the wonderful traditionless, atheist roots that have robbed them of continuity and context and made them thirsty in the first place. Maybe Dawkins attributes the spiritual thirst that I have seen first hand simply to the poverty of socialist realist art. Better aesthetics, maybe, would have stemmed the religious tide and rendered God needless. Maybe he attributes to Mao some latent spirituality that never manifested itself in any public way, and that’s how he explains how a professing, proselytising, atheist could actually *gasp* harm society. Who’s ignoring reality here, anyway?

The point is not whether or not religious believers sin. They do, and if you’re a Christian, you know you do, too. And it’s not just the disingenuous unintelligent, sometimes psychotic ones that sin. Perfectly sincere, true believers, do, too. Let’s not take any easy outs. The point is they aren’t the only ones, and taking away religion is not going to purge the world of its ills, or even of its worst ills. And in the meantime, they’re also doing a lot of good. It’s obvious even if you don’t believe in anything but yourself.

Dawkins’s manifesto goes beyond what Christians do or do not do or even what Christians want others to do or not do. He’s said quite clearly he is not willing to resort to physical violence. But this is about purging the public square of ideas that Dawkins doesn’t like, and I have no doubt based on his remarks that if he could use the law to do so, he would. I can’t believe he has designs not only to convince my children what to believe, but to be the only one. I am so glad I will never live to see a world where Richard Dawkins gets not only to tell me what not to believe (I don’t mind being told I’m wrong), but can force it on me.

And I have the Judeo-Christian tradition of the inherent dignity of human beings that’s engrained in the fabric of our society to thank for it.

For reviews from left, right, and center on his latest book, see Hermeneutics of Dawkins.