I Think I've Found My Candidate

Lieberman on the Theological Iron Curtain in National Interest. This is definitely worth a read if you have the time and don't know who to support in the Democratic presidential race. Lieberman would be the ideal candidate for me if he weren't so dull.

- posted by Sam at 8:38 PM; link

 
Sunday Grass

There's an interesting art installation going on in London right now. The artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are growing the entire interior of a deconsecrated church with living grass. Yes, grass. The Guardian had a write up about it yesterday. The funny thing is that the photos from October are really quite beautiful.

- posted by Laura at 6:14 PM; link

 
Kurtz on Intellectual Freedom and Middle Eastern Studies

Stanley Kurtz takes issue with the academy in this article about Title VI reform. Title VI of the Higher Education Act basically makes available money and resources, mostly in the form of grants, to people who study countries and languages relevant to the US's national interest. Up until now, there has been very little government oversight as to who receives this money, but now some in congress are proposing the creation of an advisory board to do just that. As Kurtz says, every major center of Middle Eastern Studies in the country who receives funding from Title VI (e.g. Georgetown) has been hijacked by followers of Edward Said, and it would be worth the government's while to spend its money on a more intellectually diverse (i.e. not stridently anti-American) crowd.

- posted by Sam at 2:00 PM; link

 
re: Manned Space Flight

To answer Ethan's question, NASA has abandoned the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" approach. Or, at least, they've abandoned advertising their strategy as "Faster, Better, Cheaper," after the two failed Mars missions of 1999. But money is being poured into planetary exploration like never before, and it's being done with much diversity.

The success of Mars Global Surveyor (which arrived in 1997 and is still returning data, long after it's nominal mission ended) and the recently deceased Galileo mission have secured Mars and Jupiter's satellites as NASA's primary targets over the next twenty years, and probably beyond. So NASA is still "Faster" (multiple missions are already planned for Mars every two years for the next decade), "Better" (the Mars Exploration Rovers that will arrive at the beginning of next year will provide much more science than Mars Pathfinder did in 1997), but not exactly "Cheaper". While smaller (< $250 million) missions are planned in the next decade, so are large-scale (> $1 billion) missions, such as JIMO (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter).

None of this, by the way, appears to have been affected greatly by the Columbia explosion, as manned space flight and planetary exploration are completely separate arenas right now. If anything, the Columbia disaster has increased the emphasis on remote sensing technology, and eventual unmanned sample-return missions to Mars, which is being loosely targeted for the 2020 decade (which would be almost half a century after the Soviets successfully returned samples from the moon).

- posted by jay at 1:24 PM; link

 
Manned Space Flight

I was once on a flight into Houston when I discovered that I was sitting next to a guy, I’ll call him "Don", who worked at NASA. (He gave me his card, which had his name, followed by, "Rocket Scientist," which he assured me does not allow him to pick up more chicks.) This was shortly after the failure of a Mars mission because someone forgot to translate from kilometers to miles, or some such thing. After Don realized that I was an avid NASA groupie, we got to talking about NASA's new approach, which was modeled after an approach used by Russia and Japan.

As I understand it, the idea is that it is cheaper and more effective to launch lots of little, tiny projects rather than a few big ones, and that it is cheaper and more effective to launch remote controlled robotic stuff than humans. Japan and Russia have both sent several little satellites to the moon and mapped it better than NASA, and Russia sent several little satellites to Venus and gathered lots of information relatively inexpensively.

NASA sort of adopted this approach in its Mars missions, sending several little satellites there instead of a few big ones (or at least instead of human missions). Also, NASA launched several other small missions for other purposes, such as Deep Space One, which tested a few new technologies, among other things.

A higher mission failure rate is understood to be part of the method. You use "off the shelf" technologies to throw together cheap missions, but not every one of them works. Hence, NASA started having more mission failures. Don, pointed out that this made NASA look like it was doing a bad job, at least to the public, and this made it harder for NASA to get money from Congress.

I don't know if NASA has given up on the method. Certainly the Columbia crash is giving them second thoughts about putting people in space at all – there appears to be little reason to do it, except for experimentation on humans in space.

Now, China has put its first man in space, and, from all the media reports, it is generating a great deal of local public pride. Japan, however, is feeling the pressure to do something more exciting than build a module for the International Space Station Alpha. Will Japan be forced to abandon its frugal ways because of popular demand for the excitement of manned space flight? What about India, which has a booming communication satellite industry? Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times on this very issue.

- posted by Ethan at 12:55 PM; link

 
Einstein Pagels

If you want to read Pagels in her own words, check this out. Apparently, she thinks religions arise out of the attempt to account for some neurophysiological peculiarities of the human dream life. That she holds this bold reductive hypothesis makes it less surprising that she can't take any religious belief seriously, though more surprising that she would become a religious historian.

There's also some boilerplate stuff there about how the Bush Administration needs to learn that turning the other cheek is a part of Christianity.

- posted by Mark at 11:50 AM; link

 
Everything I need to know about theology, I learned in kindergarten

The current issue of the New York Review of Books includes Birger Pearson’s sympathetic review of a new book by Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Whether Pearson’s review conveys Pagels’s thoughts well or not, the religious agenda Pearson finds and embraces in Pagels’s book is a quite common one.

In a hard time in her life, Pagels found some solace in a local church, but was disturbed at the perception that to go to church or be a Christian you have to believe things. As any choosy shopper would, she decided to separate what she liked about Christianity from what she didn’t, and then buy into only the stuff that appealed to her.

As a historian of religion, however, Pagels had additional tools to effect this separation. In her book she recovers a “secret gospel” with doctrines more congenial to her, and tries to give an historical account as to how it was dogmatically and unjustly excluded from the canon by Catholic fathers intent on stamping out diversity.

Here’s some of what she tries to expunge from Christianity:

1. The belief in Christ as God.
2. The idea of heaven and immortality.
3. The idea of salvation as coming through Jesus.

She wants to replace these oppressive dogmas with the idea that we all have the divine light inside us, that heaven is just being successful at expressing yourself, and that there are many paths to salvation which do not involve belief but rather practice--these can be encountered “in the presence of a venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor’s singing at a bar mitzvah, and on mountain hikes.”

Perhaps this is the message of the secret Gospel of Thomas: “No man cometh unto the Father but by Christ—or hiking.” But I do not think one needs to be Catholic to think one has lost something essential if, when searching out the great and powerful God of the Christian religion, one pulls back the curtain only to find a genial simpleton spouting new-age platitudes about “creativity” and “self-expression.”

The review ends with a series of “What if…?” questions about what would have happened if this sort of thing had become orthodoxy (or orthopraxy, perhaps?). It’s a pleasant exercise to try to imagine a devout Thomasian Christian in Rome willing to be martyred because he thinks everybody is equally special and should be allowed to express his or her true individuality. I’m afraid, though, that my sympathy would be with the lions.

- posted by Mark at 12:45 PM; link

 
DBC Pierre

The 2003 Booker Prize was awarded to DBC Pierre for his first book Vernon God Little. Has anyone read it (or anything about it)?

- posted by Laura at 11:13 AM; link

 
An ax to grind.

If dramatic football movies (Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., opens nationwide Oct. 24) were realistic, they'd include more scenes like this.

- posted by jay at 9:52 AM; link

 
Off to greener gables?

A small loss for tennis, a great gain for the proud profession of TV awards presenting.

- posted by Bob at 2:07 PM; link

 
Northeastern Exceptionalism

Today, David Brooks has an Op-Ed piece in the Times on Sox / Yankees and the unique character of the Northeast.

The place in their [Southwesterners'] culture that is occupied by the concept "happiness" is occupied in our culture by the concept "cursing at each other."

- posted by Erik at 12:22 PM; link

 
Lethal Latex

Those "scientists" at the Vatican have been busy.

- posted by Cecelia at 6:51 PM; link