World Religions in America (4^th Edition)
by Jacob Neusner
Westminster John Knox, 2009
449 pages (paperback)

Available
Amazon

Not long ago, as I was designing a course on American cultures and religious traditions, I included the newest edition of World Religions in America as a primary text.  This text, edited by the well-known Jacob Neusner, is perfect for the classroom.  Unlike many world religions texts—in which one or two people write the entire book—each chapter comes from an author who holds some sort of commitment, academically and/or personally, to the tradition they represent.  Instead of getting a polemical perspective (more…)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin
Anchor Books, 2006
230 pages (paperback)

Available
Amazon.com
Indie Bound

Warning: Some Spoilers

Some things cannot be proven and will forever remain uncertain.  To accept that dangerous idea, one may need to be mad or be willing to risk it.  Janna Levin’s novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines looks at the real lives of “two mad treasures,” the most important mathematicians of the last century, Kurt Gödel (1906-78) and Alan Turing (1912-54).

Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity were not the only challenges to early twentieth-century Enlightenment certainty. (more…)

I am going to attempt to revive this blog from its 4-5 months of slumber.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick up any remaining readers.  I began Discarded Image with several reviews and things were moving along well, but a combination of factors—e.g. a new house and increased professorial duties—just about killed any time I had to blog.   To add to that, I teach both traditional and online courses, and the courses online are a lot like blogging, so at the end of the day, it gets hard to get back online and write even more after already having done so much online for my classes.  Writing, however, is the only way I really know for thinking through ideas.  So yes, I feel compelled to push forward, writing either here or somewhere.

I’ll be making some changes here and there to this blog, but it’s theme remains the same.  Books remain central to this blog, particularly whatever I’m reading at the moment.  This blog is about thinking aloud, speculation, and the endless pursuit of self-awareness.  To put it another way, it is about questioning my very soul, discarding old images for better ones—those that make sense of the world.  (For more on this blog’s theme, see the “about” page.)  It living ontologically, as that great Episcopalian Madeleine L’engle would say.

So I’ll leave you with a favorite quote from her Circle of Quiet (6)

From the stone wall to the brook takes two balls of twine. Unreliable eyes make my vision variable, and there are days when my string path is extremely helpful, although, as my husband remarks, “All anybody who wants to find your secret hideout needs to do is climb the stone wall and follow the string.”

That’s all right. All secret places need to be shared occasionally. So the string guides me across a high ridge where there are large outcroppings of glacial stone, including our special star-watching rock. Then the path becomes full of tussocks and hummocks; my legs are etched by the thorns of blackberry brambles and wild roses. Earlier this summer the laurel burst from snow into fire, and a few weeks later we found a field of sweet wild strawberries. And then there are blueberry bushes, not very many, but a few, taller than I am and, to me, infinitely beautiful.

The burning bush: somehow I visualize it as much like one of these blueberry bushes. The bush burned, was alive with flame and was not consumed. Why? Isn’t it because, as a bush, it was perfect? It was exactly as a bush is meant to be. A bush certainly doesn’t have the opportunity for prideful and selfish choices, for self-destruction, that we human beings do. It is. It is a pure example of ontology. Ecology–ontology–the words fascinate me. Ontology is one of my son-in-law’s favorite words, and I’m apt to get drunk on words, to go on jags; ontology is my jag for this summer….Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

I go to the brook because I get out of being, out of the essential. So I’m not like the bush, then. I put all my prickliness, selfishness, in-turnedness, on to my isness; we all tend to, and when we burn, this part of us is consumed. When I go past the tallest blueberry bush, where my twine is tied to one of the branches, I think that the part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but our ontological selves; what we are meant to be.

The author of Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero has a very interesting article in USA Today this morning (”A Buddhist moment in America”).  In it, he takes a look at Tiger Woods confession from the perspective of religious literacy.  It is well worth reading.

Nonetheless, we expect, sometimes unconsciously, for things to proceed largely on Christian terms. We expect our presidents to be Christians and to quote from the Bible. And when they fall short of the glory of God, we expect them to call their shortcomings sins and to confess them not only to us, but also to Jesus. Part of living in a multireligious society, though, is learning multiple religious languages. In a country where most citizens cannot name the first book of the Bible, we obviously need more Christian literacy. But to make sense of the furiously religious world in which we live, we need Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist literacy too.  Read full article at USA Today…

Menachem Wecker’s blog (Iconia) at the Houston Chronicle has an interesting article on art in relation to Numbers 5 (the “wayward wife” passage).

At the risk of being crude, the narrative in Numbers 5 of the Sotah, the so-called “wayward wife,” ought to be a goldmine for biblical painters….Why have Jewish artists entirely neglected this important biblical episode, and why have Christian artists nearly avoided it altogether? It is hard to imagine that they were aware that the episode might never have been enacted… And even if Numbers 5 is meant to put forth a law that was never practiced, why should that have stopped artists?  Read the whole article…

A recent article at New Scientist suggests that “Our world may be a giant hologram.”

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.  Read the full article at New Scientist.

What does this mean for our fundamental perception of life?  Individuality? Pain? Happiness?   Future work in this area should be really interesting.

Wanting to know what books have been reviewed on this blog?  See my book review index for the recent additions.  This  is a fairly new blog, so return back regularly to see what has been added.   There are several books, fiction and nonfiction in my TBR, but if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment on a post letting me know.

Front&Centre is seeking edgy short fiction [HT: Places for Writers]:

We are looking for fiction set in a realist tone, that concerns the contemporary. We are strictly non-genre and DO NOT publish science fiction, horror, fantasy or fluff of any kind. We prefer dirty realism, urban angst, noir and tales of ordinary woe. Otherwise, thematically, the magazine is wide open. Quality new fiction is what we want.  More information at Front&Centre…

Lately, my reading has consisted of several books on biblical interpretation.  This is, in part, due to my career, but it is also because I am entirely interested in the real world behind the text, by which I don’t mean some sermonization of the biblical text so as to make it sound like it was written in today’s world.  Understanding the religious mindset of ancient peoples is difficult, which is probably why some ignore it entirely.  When that happens, watch out.  Peter Enns is great at getting to these points in a very accessible way, and so I like to highlight his posts at Biologos when I can.  His most recent, “Yahweh, Creation, and the Cosmic Battle,” is a great and brief look into one of my favorite biblical motifs.  In it he writes:

One of the ways the Old Testament describes creation is through a conflict between Yahweh and the sea (or “waters” or one of the sea monsters, Leviathan or Rahab). Sea is a symbol of chaos, and so Yahweh’s victory in the conflict establishes order. He is the creator, the supreme power. Israel’s proper response is awe and praise.

One may argue that there is no single account of biblical creation.  Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis are at least two accounts and the many references to God versus the sea monster are considered other ways of representing creation.  Even the book of Revelation is not without its many allusions to the sea monster, where the sea is the home of all that is evil (for a good narrative critical look at Revelation see this book). Then there is John 1, where allusions to both the Old Testament and Greek philosophy play together, helping to form another lens through which one could describe creation, but this one featuring the logos. Seeing and accepting all of this for what it is helps create informed readers, as I tell my students.  So I’m done pontificating, but I would heartily recommend reading Peter Enns’ post in its entirety.  If you are interested in more, see also my recent review of John H. Walton’s book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate.

The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate
by John H. Walton
InterVarsity Press, 2009
192 pages (paperback)

Amazon.com

Thales of Miletus, a mid-6^th century pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, said the world was created from water.  Fast-forwarding several centuries, the writer of the New Testament’s Second Epistle of Peter reminded his readers that God formed the Earth “out of water” (2 Pet. 3:5).  Undoubtedly, Second Peter is referencing cosmic waters of Genesis 1, rather than Thales, but many scholars have wondered about the ancient cosmology that starts with water.  John H. Walton’s thin, but important book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate helps bring questions like these into focus. (more…)