Like most post-modernist professors of jargon, Caputo isn’t ever clear about anything, but he appears here to be saying that reason itself is “socially constructed,” and therefore subjective or arbitrary, or something. The close corollary is that language is also “socially constructed” and just a tool for power. Whenever I meet such people I have two questions: Why are we having this conversation — if in fact we really can’t talk to each other? Moreover, if language is an arbitrary social construction, then how are we having this conversation? May I answer by interpretive dance instead of sounds from my mouth? Why not?
Multinational studies find “women have higher levels of well-being than men, with a few exceptions in low income countries” and “We conclude that differences in well-being across genders are affected by the same empirical and methodological factors that drive the paradoxes underlying income and well-being debates.” That is, women feel better about their different life choices than men do. The implication is that women’s innate desires to a job that satisfies them drive their choices moreso than men, who appear to make choices less for happiness in the job and more for the wages … Further, as to the attraction to STEM fields of men vs women, the evidence is strong that men prefer “things” and women prefer “people” and social value. Put more scientifically, “The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones.
The revered Christian author whose bestselling classics include The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines provides a new model for how we can present the Christian faith to others. When Christians share their faith, they often appeal to reason, logic, and the truth of doctrine. But these tactics often are not effective. A better approach to spread Christ’s word, Dallas Willard suggests, is to use the example of our own lives. To demonstrate Jesus’s message, we must be transformed people living out a life reflective of Jesus himself, a life of love, humility, and gentleness. This beautiful model of life — this allure of gentleness — Willard argues, is the foundation for making the most compelling argument for Christianity, one that will convince others that there is something special about Christianity and the Jesus we follow.
Interview with Gabe Lyons, "A Curious Confidence", in The Table: The Journal of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, Issue 4, Spring 2015. ()
“Achieving disagreement.” That’s a curious phrase. Is disagreement really something to achieve? It’s intriguing because it implies you can’t safely assume that all ideological conflict counts as legitimate disagreement. And it’s provocative because it seems to suggest that disagreement is something to seek after, to embrace. We don’t always achieve disagreement. We often fail. When we don’t truly understand the other — if we can’t articulate their view charitably — we fail genuinely to disagree. So what’s the difference between really, actually disagreeing—entering into a shared conversation—as opposed to a competition of monologues?
Go
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So wed with Truth I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
In a very provocative and dense TEDx talk, Rupert Sheldrake posits ten core tenets of current, “materialistic” science, and suggests they should be questioned. The subversive ideas in the talk were so upsetting that power brokers and repeat offenders PZ Meyers and Jerry Coyne organized an effort to pressure TED to censor the talk. The ensuing discussion on how to differentiate between science and pseudoscience is worth following. Two follow-up interviews are equally interesting, with Alex Tsakiris on Skeptico and at The Best Schools. Sheldrake’s most recent work is Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Sheldrake propounds a thesis he has dubbed “morphic resonance”, which has a distinct paranormal tint. Dissenters to current scientific orthodoxy often claim that science has devolved into an orthodoxy, a core set of fundamental belief which, to question, is heresy. This episode would seem to reflect that. Science and skepticism should be regarded, rather, as processes, as methods of inquiry, not as sets of beliefs, as they so often are by those who claim them as a label. Whatever the merits of Sheldrake’s particular ideas, that materialistic scientism is the reigning orthodoxy is clear. (Censored video after the jump.)
Generally, our civil liberties protect our freedom to make our own choices in life. But some civil rights claims—the ones that assert a right to be immune from discrimination practiced by our fellow citizens—require the government to constrain people’s free choices. ¶ This tension is unavoidable in a society that strives to be both decent and free. A decent society will admit that there must be some limits to individual freedom, that some uses of individual freedom are wrong enough or damaging enough that they should not be permitted. At the same time, a free society will admit that many uses of freedom will have to be tolerated, even if they seem unwise or even inappropriate to those who govern. After all, it makes little sense to speak of a free society in which people are free to do only what is officially approved. ¶ The tension between these two principles may be theoretically problematic—at least to those who demand that their society conform to a particular theory. That tension, however, is perfectly satisfactory from a practical point of view. The good society involves various different kinds of goods. These goods cannot all be maximized: maximization of one necessarily entails the minimization of others, and the absolutization of one necessarily means the annihilation of the others. A healthy society, then, tries to strike a prudent balance among these various goods, by keeping them all within reasonable bounds.
To a very considerable extent the media of mass communications in a given country reflect the political, economic, and social climate in which they flourish. That is the reason ours differ from the British and French, or the Russian and Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. And our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. ¶ … I do not advocate that we turn television into a twenty-seven-inch wailing wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense. But I would like to see it reflect occasionally the hard, unyielding realities of the world in which we live. … This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
The Global Charter of Conscience has been drafted and published by a group of followers of many faiths and none, politicians of many persuasions, academics and NGOs who are committed to a partnership on behalf of “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” for people of all faiths and none. ¶ A growing number of academic studies and reports show that “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” is widely neglected and threatened today. A recent Pew Forum report, for instance, says that three quarters of the world’s population live in countries where is a high degree of menace to their faith – sometimes through government repression, sometimes through sectarian violence, and sometimes through the mounting culture wars that we are now seeing in Western countries. ¶ In our global era, it is said that “everyone is now everywhere,” and that “living with our deepest differences” has become a massive global problem, especially when those differences are religious and ideological. This is a huge problem for the future of humankind that must be resolved.
Not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. ¶ The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not.