According to David N. Livingstone, the historian of science soon discovers that

scientific claims… sound universal but turn out to be situated, theories… seem transcendent but are profoundly embodied. At the same time, the plurality of scientific sites bears witness to the protean nature of science. Indeed, there is much justification for suspecting that the term “science” is an imaginary unity masking the disparate kinds of activity that trade under the label.

Discuss.

[From: David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: geographies of scientific knowledge (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 15]

I like this!

Tim LaHaye’s “Bible prophecy” scheme is full-gonzo insane. It’s based on an impossible and immoral reading of disparate scriptures cut-and-pasted into a not-quite coherent timeline of horror upon horror, a timeline that was invented in the 19th Century by fringe heretics and later embellished by profiteering Gantries preying on the gullible.

from here:

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC correspondent in Tripoli, reported today on the nature of the pro-Gaddafi demonstrations in the capital:

In Green Square the evening’s pro-Gaddafi demonstrations were starting. They’re always noisy, but their numbers are not big for a city like Tripoli, which has a population of more than 2 million. Regular attendance at the demonstrations leaves you with the impression that only one slice of the population is represented. They are people who share the regime’s world-view— seeing the outside world as hostile, condemning the activities of foreign news networks, especially Arabic satellite channels, blaming foreigners allegedly wanting to steal Libya’s oil, and also blaming Al Qaeda for Libya’s troubles. The anti-Gaddaffi protests are now concentrated on Fridays, after the noon pray. They consider it too dangerous for them to assemble at any other time. The protesters tend to be better educated than the regime’s supporters, often speaking foreign languages, and with university degrees from the West. (Six O’Clock News, BBC Radio 4, 7 March 2011)

In what way does that not describe the demographic of the Tea Party? (even down to blaming Al Jazeera for Libya / America’s troubles!)

A county council has been accused of over-zealousness in implementing CRB (Criminal Records Bureau). Everyone (it seems) who applies for a job with Swale Council in Kent is required to go through CRB disclosure, including “beach cleaners and leisure centre catering assistants”. CRB checks are intended for people who will be working directly with children or vulnerable adults.

Councillor Mike Cosgrove admitted that perhaps the council has been over punctilious:

“That is a balance which we are continuing to review,” he said. “But I would say that we are doing this in good faith.”

“We want to make sure that those services which we operate which touch children and vulnerable adults are as secure as possible.”

Perhaps you didn’t really mean to say that, Councillor?

It’s not often that the Acknowledgements page of a book brings one up short, but the first line of John Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine¹ had that effect on me:

Like Trappist monks, writers do their real work alone, but their efforts are sustained and bear fruit only with the help and support of others.

It immediately wonder if the vocation of Trappist monks, as seen by Kiser, can be extended to all Christians:

Like writers, Christians do their real work alone, but their efforts are sustained and bear fruit only with the help and support of others.

And, if this is so, what is the “real work” of the Christian?

1. John Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine : faith, love, and terror in Algeria (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). [↩]

On the BBC radio news this morning was reported the outcome of negotiations between the President of the US and the Republican congress about tax cuts. The president was “forced into a climb-down” to allow Bush-era tax cuts for the rich to continue.

What an interesting use of language… I wonder if it occurred to the news editor that the events could have been equally reported as: “the President negotiated a compromise, as an adult, wanting to see an extension of unemployment benefit to continue…”

Of course, that won’t fit in the media’s obsessive need to see politics and society as a zero-sum game, where there are only “winners” and “losers”, there is no such thing as adapting to circumstances, setting priorities or making the best the enemy of the good, but only “u-turns”, “defeats”, “dramas”, “twists”, and “humiliations”.

We live in a world which is entirely “soap-operaised”, and both our political discourse, and our ability to debate, evaluate and act, has been (almost) fatally compromised. And we can’t imagine it any other way, for after all, lege dicendi, lex credendi — the law of what we can say determines what we are able to believe.

… where filmic conventions operate … , we find what is true of many popular films – a consensus that traditional religious faith is deeply untrustworthy and to be placed at the margins of culture if not rejected altogether.

Bryan P. Stone, “Religious Faith and Science in “Contact”,” Journal of Religion and Film 2, no. 2 (October 1998), <www.unomaha.edu/jrf/stonear2.htm>.

Discuss.

… will the same happen in the parish church?

An interesting passage from the “Sage of Concord” about the whiphand of conformity, and how we have to “act nice”, even if we don’t “feel nice”:

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, vol. 2, 5 vols., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 32.