Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

For an update on Sharon Howard's"Death in London," see: Matthew Tempest and Jeffrey Simon,"Police Under Pressure Over Menzes Leak," The Guardian, 17 August.

I am shocked and saddened by the murder of Brother Roger, the 90 year old Protestant founder of the Taize monastic community in eastern France. Founded in 1940 by Brother Roger, Taize welcomed refugees from World War II and grew to include over a hundred Protestant and Catholic brothers from 25 different countries. In the second half of the 20th century, Brother Roger became a highly respected leader of ecumenical Christianity. Our colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, shares my sense of loss.

Edward Wyatt's"Sales Lag for Book on Deep Throat," New York Times, 17 August, reports that the sales of Bob Woodward's The Secret Man have been far below the expectations of his publisher, Simon and Schuster. While Woodward may have sold more books than any other living writer of non-fiction, Eric Alterman points out that he's not, actually, a very good writer and he had nothing new to say in the book that had not become known in headline revelations. Sometimes, the market is rational.

I haven't seen September's Vanity Fair yet, but Hiram Hover gives us a preliminary report on Christopher Hitchens'"My Red-State Odyssey." Hitchens is the most recent in several centuries of cognoscienti and punditrati to descend on the alien South, only to find it strangely fit the frames they brought with them. Hitch didn't bother to meet any black Southerners -- oh, say, our Congressman John Lewis or our Mayor Shirley Franklin --on his venture here, says Hiram. But I recommend that you go read his report, especially the part about his encounter with real Southerners, like Gene and Betsey. Rings true. So, they're sitting there in the great room in that great white enclave over on Sheridan Road and Gene says something insufficiently critical of an enemy. Betsey jumps in with a sharp corrective. Been there. Heard that.

In Phyllis Barone, pseud.,"The Quotidian Miasma of Discrimination," Inside Higher Ed, 17 August, an associate professor at a private Midwestern university describes the kinds of sexism she experiences in a place where her male colleagues think it no longer exists. It's their own, of course.

At The Onion, there's a report that"Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory." Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

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Rebecca Anne Goetz - 8/19/2005

That's true. Of course, getting into the adult vs. infant baptism debate also opened a whole can or worms on the efficacy of the sacraments as methods of salvation--did faith follow baptism (infant option) or did baptism follow faith (adult option). And there it gets ridiculously messy. Of course, the only reason I know anything at all about this is because I've been reading this stuff all week as background for a chapter I'm working on. :)

Ralph E. Luker - 8/18/2005

I think we disagree only in emphasis. Since Lutherans and Calvinists, as well as anabaptists, denied five of the seven Catholic sacraments sacramental status, on the grounds that there was no warrant in the words of Jesus for them, it seems to me that the anabaptists move only a bit further in the direction of requiring an explicit Biblical mandate for sacramental action.

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 8/18/2005

I don't think so; Anabaptists WERE literal in that they wouldn't do infant baptisms because there were no (explicit) Biblical precedents but there were Biblical precedents for adult baptism, which they would do. In other words, they attempted to conform what they perceived to be Biblical sanctions for sacraments, which was a hot topic in the Reformation anyway. Are the Anabaptists a good analogy for modern-day fundamentalists? No, probably not. The issues and the context are too different.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/18/2005

But, Rebecca, isn't there something odd about saying that the anabaptists were literal about something that the Bible does _not_ say?

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 8/18/2005

Well, Anabaptists were more literal than, say, Lutherans on the baptism issue. Anabaptists baptized as adults because the Bible never mentions infant baptism. The Lutherans got around this in a pretty non-literalist fashion--Luther wrote than baptism was to Christians as circumcision was to the Israelites (he conveniently skipped over the gender part of that). Of course, non-radical Protestants took the issue seriously enough to slaughter millenial Anabaptists holed up in Muenster in 1534, so I suppose that's an example of a literalist movement that failed to take off...

Hiram Hover - 8/18/2005

Oscar -- You're right that the red-blue framing of his article is another fundmantal bit of laziness, one among the many stereotypes and cliches that Hitchens piles up in this article. Ralph rightly notes that this is a common-enough failing among drive-by commentators and sociologists of the South, but it still gets me riled.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/18/2005

I can't speak about the Sadducees and Essenes, but it isn't obvious to me how or that the anabaptists were any more "literalist" than their Calvinist, Catholic, Lutheran, or Orthodox contemporaries. Quite seriously, Christian fundamentalism, at least, is basically a 20th century phenomenon and one largely limited to the English-speaking world.

Jonathan Dresner - 8/18/2005

Well, there have been literalist movements in the past (the Sadduccees and Essenes come to mind; also the early Anabaptists), but they were usually short-lived and tended to do less cherry-picking than our modern literalists.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/18/2005

With all due respect, Mr. Proyect, Roberts' distinction, if you have outlined it correctly, is one that won't hold up. There are plenty of historical claims in the Qu'ran and plenty of claims about how people should live in the Bible, whether you're talking about it as defined by Judaism or by Christianity.
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism each have fundamentalist forms, which insist on reifying primal texts. My impression is that these fundamentalisms have no ancient history. In Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, they are reactions against modernity. Moreover, the fact is that specialists in certain kinds of science and technology do find the fundamentalist reaction to modernity attractive. This is, on the whole, not true of biologists, but it is true of certain engineers and computer scientists.

Louis N Proyect - 8/18/2005

This reminds me of something I just read. In the introduction to Hugh Roberts's "The Battlefield Algeria 1988-2002", he cautions against making facile comparisons between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. In the first instance, you are dealing with a holy book that is tied up with *histories* that one has to accept at face value. Hence creationism. With the Quran, you are not dealing with history, but how people should live. Hence you can believe in the 100 percent Truth of the Quran but not be forced to defend unscientific beliefs in miracles, etc. Hence, the tendency for some scientists to be Islamic fundamentalists. As Roberts puts it, "Radical Islam is wholly orthodox and this is one of its strengths. And there is nothing incongruous about the presence within its ranks of many highly educated people with intellectual backgrounds in engineering and other branches of science. These considerations should be enough to make us take seriously the challenge it represents."

Oscar Chamberlain - 8/18/2005

I sometimes think that the sense that the South is something different is overblown. One reason I say that is much of the distinctiveness that many urbanites from outside the south feel when they go there has more to the do with the distinction between rural and urban than between north and south.

I remember being surprised when I moved up to northern Wisconsin from South Carolina about how similar the regions were. Hunting, gun racks in pick-ups the size of Kamchatka, the belief that there is no food that can't be savored deep fried, people cheering the race cars down at the dirt track on Saturday night--That's all the same.

And some differences, for example making an Old Fashioned with Brandy as opposed to Bourbon, can be chalked up to local color.

There are some real differences, too, of course, betwen norther Wisconsin and the South. The cultural conservatism has a less in-your-face edge to it, at least most of the time. The area has remained Democratic, mostly. And a fair number of new Republicans--or at least a fair number of the visible ones-- are well off retirees who, having made their share, hate to see any of it go to local taxes.

However, it's probably a bit cheap to lay that last point at the feet of Republicans alone. That's an element in the generational wars that is all too national.