My most-viewed picture of 2012. The photos I have taken since moving to Germany in 2008 can all be seen here.
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Monday, 31 December 2012
If [Joel] Barlow was America's first atheist, he was tentative about it. "Flirtation," [James] Turner's term, seems to be accurate. He came to his unbelief privately, in the context of his reading and his private notebooks, and he kept it private too. It's significant, nonetheless, that he did go so far as to disbelieve, even if only cautiously. It was, in his notebooks, a crazy thought. And not one without consequences. Barlow hesitated, in the face of those consequences, but still might be rightly understood as marking an early moment in a significant societal shift.
Barlow's private unbelief, as possibly America's first atheist, is an important moment in that move Charles Taylor describes as "a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood as one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace," the shift from a society in which "it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believes, is one possibility among others."
In this sense, Barlow is significant to late 18th, early 19th century America. There may have been a historical moment, there, where in the privacy of his notebooks Barlow was the only American anywhere who thought of himself as rejecting all conceptions of God. Where he was the one who thought what was almost unthinkable, that there is no God, and thought it even to the point of tentatively, privately, accepting for himself what to most was an insult, a slur, the name "atheist."5. On the meaningfulness of books bought, but not read
Even if one does, eventually, read all the books one owns -- itself a dubious proposition -- there's a delay, a lag. There's no easy, simple link between buying a book and reading it. There's no simple formula by which one could predict readership based solely on sales.
If this seems obvious, it should. Yet, without fail, cultural critics act as though there's no difference between book purchase and book reading, as if measuring the one were measuring the other. As if the one always and everywhere  meant the other. As if there were a simple relationship between the two acts, and the only reason anyone ever bought a book was to read it, the purchase a promise always made good.
Somehow, this needs to be broken.
There has to be a way to talk about book purchases as culturally meaningful and yet distinct from and different from acts of reading.4. The myth of infatuated Žižekians
I couldn't name even one orthodox Žižekian. One really dogmatic one. One good apologist for or public proclaimer of true Žižekism.3. Mark Driscoll on Pot: sloppy, lazy and deeply unserious
Rather, what one finds is an almost ritual distancing and disowning.
Talk about Žižek is regularly prefaced with disclaimers. One has to apparently deny, first, any affiliation with a broader Žižek project, deny buying into a big Žižek system of thought, deny going too far, or accepting all of it, or not being critical enough. One has to start with a little ritual reiteration about how of course he's wrong, but there's some salvageable aspect in spite of all that.
If Žižek has followers, they're all Peter right before the cock crows that third time.
This whole booklet seems to presuppose the reader is not a half-way intelligent, reasonably capable adult human being in 21st century America. The assumption on every page is that the reader needs the most basic information explained. Driscoll may say he wants Christians and his congregants specifically to think these issues through like adults, but he doesn't act like he's writing for adults. This booklet makes no sense unless you think the intended audience is people who are incapable of considering an issue like the morality of marijuana without a lot of handholding and rudimentary help.2. Prophecies
1. Ignoring David Foster Wallace's religion
Though it's known that, at one point, Wallace belonged to a church in Illinois -- maybe a Mennonite church -- and also he reportedly twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, there's not much more information about his religiousness. Beliefs, practices, problems or questions, affiliations -- it's all question marks. A lot is known about his life, but not about this. His life fascinates people, and moves people. His ethical-religious reflections especially.
But no one in the position to find out more about his religious beliefs or practices seems to have been interested in doing so.
Saturday, 22 December 2012
The current variety of Christian fiction is illustrated pretty well in the Library Journal's list of the year's five best.
There's an Amish romance, though the review calls it a "fresh take on an overcrowded genre," two historical romances', one set in Tudor times and the other on the Titanic, a Christian horror novel, and an apocalyptic/CIA novel.
That might still seem rather limited -- Christian fiction authors of more speculative works, such as sci fi and horror, certain complain about the constraints of the market -- but it was only a decade ago that an organization with a name like American Christian Fiction Writers only served romance novelists.
Update:
Another year-end list, from a LifeWays Christian Stores' book buyer, shows the variety to be found even in what is still, broadly speaking, the romance genre. via Carole.
There's an Amish romance, though the review calls it a "fresh take on an overcrowded genre," two historical romances', one set in Tudor times and the other on the Titanic, a Christian horror novel, and an apocalyptic/CIA novel.
That might still seem rather limited -- Christian fiction authors of more speculative works, such as sci fi and horror, certain complain about the constraints of the market -- but it was only a decade ago that an organization with a name like American Christian Fiction Writers only served romance novelists.
Update:
Another year-end list, from a LifeWays Christian Stores' book buyer, shows the variety to be found even in what is still, broadly speaking, the romance genre. via Carole.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
The first episode of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers was watched by 1.29 million people. It is the most-watched show in National Geographic's history. By the time the fourth episode of the second season aired last month, ratings had suffered a little, but still there were more than 700,000 viewers.
It's very unlikely that all those 700,000 viewers were themselves interested in ways to prepare for the end of the world. It seems unlikely even that such a show would make sense, economically, if it catered only to those sympathetic to the ideas of the subjects of the show. And really, the people featured in this show are presented as strange, as freaks, as laughable.
To quote the New York Times review:
Watch [...] for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule.It may be the case that there's a "burgeoning 'prepper' movement," as USA Today claims, but there's little actual evidence of that. Such people do clearly exist, but that's not a new thing. And that's not why such a show exists.
If you want to explain the reason such a show as this exists, you have to look not only at the existence of the people featured in the show, asking why there are so many people dedicating their lives to preparing for the end of the world, but also at the audience.
Why are there so many people so fascinated by people so obsessed by the end of the world?
This is true, too, with the slate of apocalyptic predictions all due tomorrow, the Mayan calendar and the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the hidden planet set to collide with earth. The number of people who take such theories seriously is vanishingly miniscule. The number of people who take seriously the people who take such theories seriously, however, is quite sizable. How do we explain that?
I'm very skeptical, personally, about reports of how widely such apocalyptic theories are believed. A lot of the accounts of belief seem to be very vague or very naive about what it means to believe, and there's also a strong, strong tendency towards credulity when it comes to other people's credulity. However, even if we accept the phenomenon of apocalyptic beliefs without any skepticism, that wouldn't explain the cultural phenomena of obsession with the end of the world. Because that obsession, in American culture at this moment, is not just and not even most basically obsession with the end of the world, but obsession with obsession about the end.
Beyond the matter of "true believers," there's a cultural phenomenon right now of avid interest in true believers. There's a market, here, and it's booming.
It's not enough to just explain the people featured on Doomsday Preppers, the people out there who aren't joking about Nibiru, the people who are violent in their belief in the possibility of zombie apocalypse. If we want to understand this, we can't just look at the obsessed on the TV screen. We have to also look at us looking at the TV screen.
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