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The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon | RDBook | ReligionDispatches

Why is the character of Jesus so powerful? Why is he such a hit? Bestselling writer Mary Gordon re-reads the Gospels, asking these questions, among others, and trying to figure out why fundamentalist readings of scripture, grounded in fear and rage, have come to dominate the understanding of religion in this country.

via www.religiondispatches.org

Hawk's Notes: I really enjoyed this article and hope to read Gordon's latest book, Reading Jesus. Some of the broader issues Gordon speaks to were the same ones that inspired the questions behind my paper, Reading Harry Potter. But the article also came in serendipitous time for a post I finished yesterday in which I explore some teachings from my spiritual tradition that have driven much contemplation about my work in social and environmental justice, as well as my interest in psychoanalysis.

Read my post, Cain and Abel in the 21st Century here.

Permalink for Reading Harry Potter (it's long!) here.

Link to Reading Jesus at amazon.com.

Atlanta Falcons “Defend the Dome”: Football, Religion, and Existential Power | Media/Culture | ReligionDispatches

The origins of fandom lie, in this view, not in the catharsis of violent instincts or in neurotic attempts to dominate a symbolic mother figure, but rather in the desire to connect with, appropriate, and experience as one’s own a significant source of power.

via www.religiondispatches.org

Hawk Notes: I elected not to look at this article the first time it appeared on my daily article summary from Religion Dispatches, but when it popped up again -- further down the list of recent articles this time -- I'm guessing that some signal from my (or the collective) unconscious led me to use the link.

I found the author's suggestion that fandom is an attempt "to connect with, appropriate, and experience as one’s own a significant source of power" to be an interesting idea for further contemplation.

I also found Kenny Smith's article to connect obliquely to another idea I am developing in a paper I intend to call "The Case of the Hysteric Hydrologist." In his references to interpretations of "fandom" by psychiatrist A.A. Brill and religion scholar James McBride, followed by his own take on the fan-experience, Smith evokes a larger question about how we come to know what we say we know.

As it is a larger question, I hope to come back to it in pieces over a series of future posts.

Drew Westen: How Race Turns up the Volume on Incivility: A Scientifically Informed Post-Mortem to a Controversy

It all depends on what you mean by racism. If you mean that the average American consciously believes we should discriminate against Mexicans because their skin is brown, no, any more than the average American consciously believes a black man is incapable of being President. But does it mean that the average American harbors unconscious biases that render Mexican immigrants less "like us" than English immigrants--and that those biases make it easier for many to wonder whether a black President shares their values, loves his country, or can put his country before "his people"--even though the people who reared him were his white mother and grandparents?

What's been missing from our national discourse on "is it race or isn't it?" is the distinction psychologists and neuroscientists have made for over two decades between conscious and unconscious (often called "explicit vs. implicit") prejudice.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Hawk's Notes:

Drew Weston gets at the point I made yesterday about resistance to notions of anything "unconscious" in the American collective. I believe this is a valuable article for anyone desiring a better world and wondering how we make one, wondering what makes change happen.

One gripe I've had with many approaches to grassroots organizing -- which I think is a key to change for the better -- is a failure to apprehend and integrate necessary elements of individual psychological wiring and process into theories of organizing.

The reverse is often true, of course, for people -- including me -- who came into such discussions from psychoanalysis, psychology, etc. My involvement is grassroots activism and anti-racism training over the past few years has been extremely valuable for exploring those places where the rubber of the individual psyche meets the road of society.

I think this is one reason I so much appreciate Drew Westen, George Lakoff, Slavoj Zizek and others who bring thinking about individuals (and individual brains) into thinking about culture (and brains of the Other).

Anyway, this is a subject that I am passionate about and will be writing more on at this blog, as well as my new one exploring my anti-racist journey at Word Press: Raising Cain.

America, the beautiful (America, the ugly) | Salon Books

As the editors explain in their introduction, a survey of American literature has to be fundamentally different from a similar book on, say, France or Germany, countries that have "organic literatures or organic societies that long preceded the emergence of the modern French and German nations." America, by contrast, is "made-up," summoned out of a fusion of Enlightenment ideals, economic needs and geographic happenstance. It's a nation literally constituted out of documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Both of those literary works get examined in "A New Literary History of America," in fascinating entries (by Frank Kelleter and Mitchell Meltzer, respectively) that probe the contradictions within each. On the Constitution, Meltzer writes that the framers "turned away from the traditional reliance upon religious sanction and engineered a new paradox, what could be called a secular revelation," officially enshrining certain truths as emanations of the human heart and mind, not the word of God.

Pushing back against this humanist, rationalist impulse is a fierce vein of religious fervor. This makes itself felt in John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill" speech (made to a boatload of Puritan settlers and misrepresented by conservatives ever since) and the jeremiads of the late 17th-century Congregationalist ministers, the lineaments of which can be detected in today's State of the Nation speeches. These latter clergymen would scold the populace for straying from the piety of the original colonists and then promise a restoration of righteous contentment if they cleaned up their act -- the original return-to-values harangues. In George Whitefield, an itinerant British preacher who toured the colonies in the 1740s, astonishing the devout by acting out "fear and rapture ... stomping and cavorting on stage, crawling on his knees and breaking down in tears," contributor Joanne van der Woude sees the trigger of the first Great Awakening (a wave of revivalism that swept the new nation) and the prototype of modern charismatic evangelists.

via www.salon.com

Hawk's Notes: This book is the newest addition to my amazon.com wishlist. Lately I've been exploring ideas about Americans and American culture, and what seems to be a resistance to notions of the unconscious. This resistance manifests, I think, in national conversations that scurry around the surface of issues but never seek the depths, never look inside, never question our assumptions. It strikes me that this book has something to offer that may enrich my contemplation of these ideas. Just this tiny window into the book seemed to stimulate a lot of new thoughts and feelings about all this.

The Jet-Propelled Couch: true story of a physicist who thought he was a science fiction hero on another planet - Boing Boing

Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, September 17, 2009 3:31 PM | permalink

This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of "strange and adventurous" science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. The protagonist shared his name, and eventually the physicist started thinking he really was the character. But he was still able to maintain a duel identity -- he sort of "astral projected" into that fantasy world while keeping the appearance of a skinny-tie wearing physicist.

The article was written by the man's psychiatrist, Robert Lindner, and appeared in Harper's in 1954. (It was also a chapter in Linder's entertaining case-history book The Fifty-Minute Hour). The physicist, "Kirk Allen" (his name was changed by Lindner), worked in a government research lab, and his superiors were concerned by his behavior (Allen would often space out at work while his fantastical reveries played out in his head) so they sent him to Lindner.

I don't want to spoil the story (and the excerpt below won't spoil it). You can read it in its entirety at Harper's website (Part I, Part II). Harper's kindly opened access to the article at my request, so now anyone can read it for free. (If you subscribe to Harper's for just $16.97 in the United States and CAN$24.00 in Canada, you'll get access to all the archives dating back to 1850!)

via www.boingboing.net

This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of "strange and adventurous" science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. The protagonist shared his name, and eventually the physicist started thinking he really was the character. But he was still able to maintain a duel identity -- he sort of "astral projected" into that fantasy world while keeping the appearance of a skinny-tie wearing physicist.

The article was written by the man's psychiatrist, Robert Lindner, and appeared in Harper's in 1954. (It was also a chapter in Linder's entertaining case-history book The Fifty-Minute Hour). The physicist, "Kirk Allen" (his name was changed by Lindner), worked in a government research lab, and his superiors were concerned by his behavior (Allen would often space out at work while his fantastical reveries played out in his head) so they sent him to Lindner.

I don't want to spoil the story (and the excerpt below won't spoil it). You can read it in its entirety at Harper's website (Part I, Part II). Harper's kindly opened access to the article at my request, so now anyone can read it for free. (If you subscribe to Harper's for just $16.97 in the United States and CAN$24.00 in Canada, you'll get access to all the archives dating back to 1850!)