Category Archives: Humanities

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Politics, Writing

Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

 

Humanities, Myth and Story

Zealots

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Harvest Moon

More time today on Ovid.  Working on Book III:570-574.  This chunk, starting at 509 and running through 579, introduces the story of Pentheus, a cautionary tale about religious zealots.  Pentheus criticizes the seer Tiresias as an alarmist and disses the God Bacchus and his Bacchante as driven by potent drink, irrational, anti-military and decidedly non-Roman.  Later in the story Pentheus will be torn apart by his mother and her fellow maenads in a fit of religious frenzy.

This story warn us to understand religious zealotry as a serious political force and one often prone to violence.

I can feel my Latin muscles growing, a slow process, fed by numerous encounters with various words, sentence constructions, parts of speech.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

This Light of Mine

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“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman was a theologian who studied with the Quaker mystic, Rufus Jones.  His work, which I had forgotten until I read this quote yesterday, reaches deep into the human heart.

The Quaker concept of the light that leads from within influenced many theologians, including Thurman who, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King.

In Scientific American Mind a recent article referred to the human “self-schema.”  Created due to our ability to see into our past and project ourselves into the future, this organization of thoughts, experiences and natural gifts produces the Self, that ever elusive entity at the heart of our life.  Self-schema strikes me as a scientific description of the Self I refer to here from time to time, that Self that pulls us into the future, that can challenge us to live a deeper, richer, fuller life.

This Self is the light that leads us, a light whose brilliance and warmth comes not from a supernatural realm, but from a super natural one.  When Thurman challenges us to find what makes us come alive, he asks us to dig deep into our Self, to use our imagination and our deep heart to find vitality within it.

When we can locate a path, our own ancientrail, that knits together the genetic gifts, the particular experiences and the most exciting prospects we can imagine for our future, then we can come alive to the personhood for which we each yearn.  We can become alive in every fiber of our being. Such persons live.  They burn with an incandescence available only to those who feed all of themselves into the furnace of their Self.

You know such people.  Martin Luther King was a such a person. Perhaps you are.  I know for sure you can become one.

This is a spirituality that holds nothing back, that demands it all, all you have and all you will have.  This is a humanist spirituality, a call to kindle the light of your true Self, the one light only you can bring into this world.

Asia, Humanities, Travel, World History

Visa, Visa. Where Art Thou?

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Lughnasa                                          Waxing Harvest Moon

Oh.  Visas.  I think I shall never see a visa lovely as a tree.  Or something like that.  Anyhow, the Saudi visa saga took an unexpected and unpleasant turn this morning.  Turns out there are two steps to the process for teachers, certification of the degree and qualifications, then, the visa process itself.  This introduces more days, perhaps as much as a week more.

We’ll find out tomorrow how the school takes this news.  I’m not sure why the school didn’t alert us to this fix since the Saudi visa process is the same the world over, but they provided no help at all.  In fact, we’re still down one vital piece of paper, something from the Saudi Foreign Ministry inviting Mark to Saudi, a piece of paper the school was responsible to produce.

Dispiriting.  Mark and I had a heated conversation about the appropriateness of my way of addressing the school’s administrator in an e-mail.  Mark felt my wording was rude, boorish.  American.  To my ear the e-mail had nothing unpleasant or confrontational in it at all.  Mark says I don’t understand and he can’t explain it to me.

Well, maybe.  He and Mary both have a keen sensitivity to Asian cultures and their ways are not our ways.  I’ve only visited and studied Asia, not immersed myself in it as they have over the last 20+ years.  Of course, their knowledge is better than mine.

Even so, I believe Saudi culture different from Southeast Asian and enough so that whatever slight Mark felt I might have delivered will not be felt there.  We’ll see tomorrow.

He certainly has a broader and more direct experience of world cultures than I do.  If he turns out more right, I’ll have learned yet another lesson from life.  If I turn out more right, he will have learned one.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Text, Reader, Learning

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Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

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Lughnasa                                                                Waning Honey Extraction Moon

More butting my head against a language that any 4 year old in ancient Rome could speak and a reasonably intelligent 5 year old could read.  I guess there is a plateau affect here and I’m standing on one right now.  I can see the path I’ve taken to get here, off to my back, but the road ahead lies blocked, beginning at a point somewhere above me, as if I stand before a cliff.

Not complaining, just observing.  I’m here by choice and I know that.

Groveland asked me for a sermon topic, something I’m going to preach on October 9th, exactly a week before our cruise.  A month and a half is a long lead time, so I went back through this blog, hunting for a topic that interested me and one that might interest Grovelanders, too.

Here’s what I sent them:

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

What resources do we have, those of us no longer in the Christian faith?  Or those of us never in it?  What resources do we have to replenish the spirit and feed the Self?

The Western cultural tradition, a great river of classical literature and fine arts has enough nourishment for several lifetimes.  We’ll explore works like the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Inferno and how to use them for our personal growth.

I lifted the phrase the great river of the classics from one of my favorite authors, Camille Paglia.  Other eras have used the writings of the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans and the Italians in particular as stimulus for reflection, contemplation, meditation.  I’ll toss in a few later writers like Kafka, Camus, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, probably Rainer Rilke and Wallace Stevens, too.

Might toss in a few works of art, perhaps Goya, the color field painters, Song dynasty potters and painters, perhaps a Tibetan Buddhist thangka.

I suppose I’ll have to start by considering the nature of resources for spirituality, something I’ve come of late to define as enrichment, expansion, deepening of the Self.  But count on a Latin phrase or two, just because I can.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Gifts and Talents

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Kate and I had a conversation the other day about talent.  Two of her sisters make their living playing classical violin.  They have talent.  A lot of it.  BJ went to Julliard and Sarah to Curtis, both academies for topflight talent.  They both graduated and have been able to work using their training.  BJ makes a living as a classical musician in New York City, the hotspot for classical music today in the same way Vienna was at one time in Austria.  Sarah teaches violin and does the occasional solo spot with orchestras of the second tier.

Kate and I had/have above average intelligence and have been able to work making use of  those gifts, Kate in pediatrics and me in various religious, political and artistic positions.

Even so, in all four of our cases, we had enough talent to peer over the transom into the gifted realm, but not enough to participate in it.  This is a ruling contradiction of life, no matter what your level of talent, wealth or status, there is always someone more talented, more gifted, wealthier and higher up the status ladder.  Always.  Even if you’re Itzhak Perlman or Bill Gates or Merrill Streep, you have to contend with Paganini, Andrew Carnegie or Sarah Bernhardt.  History can always serve up an exemplar who achieved more, acted better or accumulated more wealth than thou.

This problem cannot be solved by saying don’t peek, don’t stand on the chair and try to see into the room where the door closed before you.  No, we all peek because we can’t help it.  We imagine, fantasize, try to pull ourselves up a little bit, maybe we can squeeze through, even if it’s only to the room where the jobs pay $15.00.  Or maybe to the room where the cool kids are.  Or the ones with enough food.  Or the Noble Prize.  Or authors with books on the NYT bestseller list.

Here is the one and true solution.  Know thyself.  Work within yourSelf, demanding from that Self the best it has.  Not the best it wishes it had, not the best others seem to have, but the best Self you have.  In this way you offer the world that unique gift, you.

This solution also solves the problem of transom peeking.  You will still wonder, fantasize perhaps, what might have been, but you will not be driven to either envy or despair because you have as much as work as you can handle already.  Being you.

Neither does this mean that you settle for mediocrity, less than the person you have the Self to become.  One of the most negative aspects of envy or despair is the demotivation it produces.  The, if I can’t be like her, or him, then I just won’t bother path.

No, your path, the ancient trail that you must walk is this:  know your Self and follow its lead, only that ancient trail can lead you to the gift only you can offer the rest of us.

Humanity needs all the gifts of the whole species.

We have enormous challenges today.  Climate change.  Hunger.  Religious and racial discrimination.  Wars.  Economic ups and downs.  We cannot afford to leave the talents and vision of even one woman, one ethnicity, one age to waste.

Humanities

In a Deep Hole

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And here I thought things were going well.  My translation this morning was far, far off the mark.  It was, Greg said, a combination of things.  I don’t know the story.  The poetry makes difficult constructions even more difficult to suss out and there were points of grammar here I hadn’t studied.  Still.  I felt like I had been wading at least in the muck, a marsh maybe, but this morning I dropped into a deep Latin hole.

Sigh.  Even though I know the only solution is to swim back to the surface and try to find the muck, at least, it was disheartening.  No wonder I couldn’t find any entries for the commentary.

Of course, I didn’t start down this ancient trail because I thought the journey would be easy.  And, I was right.

Humanities, Letters, Literature

A Latinate Day

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A Latinate day.  The am found me back in Pentheus, a story in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  I remember the story from the English version, at least in part.  Pentheus gets torn apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes while they are in the grip of a Dionysian frenzy.  As I’ve been translating this story, it’s clear that Pentheus is a tragic figure from Ovid’s perspective, a man’s man faced with hordes of soft, sweet smelling boys worshiping a God of irrational behavior.  Romans were not much into ecstasy unless it involved warfare or the circus.

They were orthopraxic in their religious views, at least most Romans were, that is, they believed that right rituals performed at the right time for the appropriate deity trumped everything else.

I have begun, in a modest way, work on the commentary.  I set up some files in Notes but made no entries.  It’s difficult for me, right now, to know what makes sense, but I’ll figure it out.

My next hurdle is to translate the Latin into idiomatic English.  Sometimes I can get there, often not.  To do that I need to have a solid understanding of the grammar–not yet–and a feel for how the Latin makes its meaning, not there either.  At least I’m no longer staring at the words on the page as if they were hieroglyphics.

Humanities, Politics, US History

3 Minute Critique of Libertarianism

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Lughnasa                                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Of course, we know where Bonaparte’s style got him.  Elba.  Even so he does cut against the grain of paralysis by analysis, the peculiar disease of intellectuals where worrying the problem like a bone often stands in for actually doing something about it.

Libertarians have a long, yet rather ineffective, track record in American politics.  That’s because most Americans hold libertarian views on social issues like no draft, keep the government out of the bedroom, no censorship, no government issued identity cards at the national level.  Many also agree with their hands off approach to adult drug use and other matters where personal choice collides with well-meaning, or not well-meaning, social engineers.  Think the pro-life movement, the anti-gay folks, the militarists who want everyone to have national service.

In other words this side of the libertarian thought experiment matches up well with a frontier ethos and the spirit of the bill of the rights.

On the other hand libertarians have had little effect on national politics and on state politics, too. Why?  They want to privatize social security, end all government support to individuals, cut government spending by at least 50% (which would mean closing military bases over seas, at least) and shut down corporate welfare.

Most US citizens agree that self-government should apply to social issues (matters of choice in our private lives), but also agree that there is an appropriate role for government in our public life.  A strong defense is a near universal among US citizens considering an appropriate role for government.  Many of us also agree that the promise of equality extends to such areas as health care, income support and affordable housing.  Since Teddy Roosevelt, we have also recognized government’s role as regulator of the economy, a role it engaged to good affect (though not great affect) in the recent financial crisis.  A free market blinder, worn by advocates of neo-liberal economics, blocks view of the wreckage in personal lives occasioned by capitalism’s creative destruction. (Schumpeter)

Scott Nearing, an economist at the New School, advocated a mixed economy.  We already have a mixed economy.   The government funds or controls defense, police and fire service, mail service, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, social security, medicare and various other combinations of services at state and local levels.  The market economy deals with goods and services outside of those sectors though there are overlaps.   When the goods and services are not necessary for human existence, e.g. cars, bicycles, televisions, phones, computers, appliances, insurance, most legal services, then the market does a good job of allocating capital according to the desires of purchasers of goods and services.

When housing, medical care and food, essential to human existence, are up for sale, then the market usually skews access to these away from the poor and toward the wealthier.  Equality, as a matter of simple justice, demands that we consider this bias toward the wealthy a failing of the market approach to these essentials.

Just how we mix our economy will depend on many things, but to my mind, only a cavalier approach to the obvious human costs of unfettered capitalism will demand that the many surrender access to those things essential for existence to those able to pay for them.  Therefore, I am not a libertarian.