Over beers in Arlington, VA the other night, I was debating with some friends about whether Mormons should be allowed to baptize Holocaust victims without the consent of their families. (Jewish groups object, Mormons stop, but then sometimes persist anyway.) We tended to think, "Why not?"

Now, in Mumbai, there's a debate about whether the gunmen of the recent terrorist attacks should be given Muslim burials or cremated, as is the norm in India.

it would convey an effective, reasonable and humanistic message to the world: that a Muslim who commits terrorism dies excommunicated, as an infidel.”

That's for Muslims to decide, of course. But in Christianity, with the image of Jesus with the tax collector, there are the means to think that those whose actions we most abhor might be those most needful of our blessings. [go!]

Good old BLDGBLOG has a post mourning the cancellation of a tour of American and European forts and uses the opportunity to pin up some nice photos of what you'd see.

I don't at all agree with the statement that "architects no longer design for war" – this might be true for, say, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster, but it is in no way true for military spatialists employed on prototype base housing, prefab field shelters, or even secure urban embassy design

Who is designing today's forts?

In Mexico, recently, I saw a lovely army barracks built to watch over the Zapatistas in Ocosingo. It had a real idyllic feel to it, with rolling hills and Christmas decorations, but the best part was the view of the ancient Mayan fortress city of Tonina in the distance. [go!]

I've been reading Robert Earle's enthralling account of his time as an adviser to Ambassador John Negroponte in Baghdad, Nights in the Pink Motel. It gives an unusually vivid picture of people thinking through the Iraq debacle while it was exploding around them. All the while, Earle was working on a novel about religion, politics, and power in the time of Jesus.

Today I had the pleasure to sit down with him in Arlington to talk about writing, religion, violence, performance, and memory.

Consider taking up this book: an act of record-keeping, to the point of beauty, hewn in entropy. [go!]

The imaginative predictions of my favorite physicist, Freeman Dyson, are not always right, but they always make great thought experiments. Usually, they're eerily optimistic. Here's a new one over at Edge:

It is easy to imagine radiotelepathy as a powerful instrument of social change, used either for good or for evil purposes. It could be a basis for mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation of humans all over the planet. Or it could be a basis for tyrannical oppression and enforced hatred between one communal society and another.

And best of all:

Another set of opportunities and responsibilities will arise when radiotelepathy is extended from humans to other animal species. We will then experience directly the joy of a bird flying or a wolf-pack hunting, the pain of a deer hunted or an elephant starved. We will feel in our own flesh the community of life to which we belong.

[go!]

The BBC reports (found via Danger Room) that Iraqi security forces are engaged with a new religious movement apparently bent on causing chaos.

The cult is said to believe that its former leader, Dia Abdul-Zahra, who was killed in the fighting, was the Mehdi - a ninth century messiah.

The cult has since been led by Ahmed Hassani Yamani, who reportedly claims to be an ambassador, rather than a descendent, of the Mehdi.

If you don't get the reference from my title, see the famous study I'm referring to.

Also, happy Sovereignty Day! I can't believe we've actually withdrawn from the Green Zone. [go!]

Science and Religion News reports on a Pew study about whether Americans think one another are going to heaven:

Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

Doesn't living in America already feel like heaven anyway?

As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.”

[go!]

TierneyLab has an essay contest going about religion and self-control. Answer one of the three questions the best and win a free book.

1. Are there any specific religious or spiritual activities that you have found to help build your self-control, or your child’s self-control?
2. Religious activities can also be exhausting, and presumably they could they could wear down someone’s self-control. Has this ever happened to you or your child?
3. If you’re not religious, what do you think of Dr. McCullough’s advice that it might be possible to build self-control by tying your New Year’s resolutions to sacred (but non-religious) values like self-reliance or concern for all of humanity?

[go!]

Bjorn Lomborg has been making a splash for some years by arguing pretty persuasively that we can address the world's most pressing human problems better by tackling them directly than by focusing on the expensive, alleged fix-all of reducing carbon emissions. It is a striking claim, in part because it asks the environmentalist crowd to reexamine their own motives. Is the fight against climate change driven more by a desire to improve the lives of others or to enact some reactionary crusade against our own modernity? Take a look at this 2007 talk at the Googleplex. [go!]

I caused a little trouble a year ago with a paper that argued for a kinship of approach between Mohandas Gandhi and Osama bin Laden. I've also suggested that "jihad" makes for a pretty good term for nonviolent struggle.

Faisal Devji is stealing my ideas! Check out this review of his fascinating new book that probes "the terrorist in search of humanity":

The nature of this fragmentation is most easily understood by looking at what Devji terms “the rich inner life of the jihad.”

He also points to a link with the legacy of Gandhi.

Devji's act of provocation is, I believe, precisely what good archaeology of the present should do—reveal the familiar and admirable in the enemy and the kinship between apparent goods and evils. [go!]

I haven't really done anything Christmas-y on The Row Boat, but I thought I'd share some words from a friend who has:

I'm sure that most of you have come across the civil, polite Christianity that portrays the virgin Mary as a proper, white Victorian lady. I have found this hard to reconcile with the fact that she was a prophet of a colonized people, and Bethlehem is still colonized today. I wanted to get out another Christian perspective, one which recognizes how revolutionary Jesus' life really was.

This is particularly apt considering today's tragic escalation in Gaza. [go!]