Quotes from Searching for God Knows What

Taking a page from a fellow prof's blog, I'm going to retype quotes that hit me in particular from the books I read, so I have a record of them for later and I think about them as I type them. So here are the quotes I'd like to keep from Don Miller's book:

p.108 "... the most selfless thing God could do, that is, the most selfless thing a perfect Being who is perfectly loving could do, would be to create other beings to enjoy Himself."

p. 160 "When the church began to doubt its own integrity after the Darwinian attack on Genesis 1 and 2, we began to answer science, not by appealing to something greater, the realm of beauty and to spirituality, but by attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations, thus justifying ourselves to culture, as if culture had some kind of authority to redeem us in the first place. Terms such as 'absolute truth' and 'inherency' [sic., which is ironic in itself! BJM] (a term only used to describe Scripture in the last hundred years or so) became a battle cry, even though the laws of absolute truth must, by their nature, exclude ideas such as Jesus is the Word, He is both God and man, the Trinity is both three and One, we are united with Him in His death, because these are mysterious ideas, not scientific ideas."

[I really like this paragraph, but I have to say something at some point that redeems the idea of translation! Some translation is necessary.]

p. 190/1: "If we are preaching morality without Christ, and using war rhetoric to communicate a battle mentality, we are fighting on Satan's side. The battle we are in is a battle against the principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In war you shoot the enemy, not the hostage."

[Combining Galatians and Ephesians in one vivid quote. Nice!]

p. 204: "Lately I have been thinking about the verse in Scripture that says to work out your salvation in fear and trembling (see Phil. 2:12): I take this to mean salvation isn't something you go around feeling sure of, they way you might if you had completed a to-do list. I take this to mean working out your salvation involves a very careful searching of the heart, asking time and time again what we really mean by attending church, what we really mean by reading the Bible, what we really mean when we worship God."

Book Review: Searching for God Knows What

http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/searching.php

To tell you the truth, I only read this book because they were handing it out free on Father's Day at my church (along with Wild at Heart which I've already read), it was very small and paperback so I threw it in my London luggage, and then I got so much reading done in London I actually got it started while I was over there (last book I started), and once I start a book I will almost always finish it. The ending of something just pulls like gravity once I open that front cover.

So how was it? I was pleasantly surprised. It was better than Blue Like Jazz, which I liked alright, but had the distinct feeling that it was the magnum opus of Donald Miller, in the same way that Pulp Fiction was for Quantin Tarantino. His laid-back, self-deprecating style and focus on his particular Portland community didn't convince me there was enough left in the well for a good second book (really third, but I usually read the author's first book last for some reason!). But this is evidence that there is enough in that well, and in many ways Searching is better than the "big hit" book. To tell you the truth, I only remember three things from Blue Like Jazz right now: the description of a bowl-like geographical feature in Portland, the "confessional booth" at Reed College, and some talk about the narrative function of scripture. It didn't seem to "add up" or illuminate much beyond Portland culture and narrative, emergent theology. This book comes much closer to being a coherent, sustained narrative.

The biggest reason it's better is that literally half the book is actually exegesis. Miller writes about Genesis 1-3 (a big passage for me as a scientist), the gospels, and Romeo and Juliet. I don't buy his theory on the last one but it's interesting enough that I'd like to know more about it, and the book seems to end too early, meaning I want more and look forward to his next book. Miller ties everything together with some social theorizing that isn't really that deep or complex, but is apt enough to be worth thinking about in its genuine criticism of "normal life." (His "theory of everything" doesn't really compare with Walker Percy, whose novel I'm reading simultaneously, so I might be a little harsh on that aspect -- very few people have as well-defined and unique a theory of everything as Percy!)

Miller's most poignant stories are pulled from high school, either his or his friends, and he does a good job of bringing in stories from other people in general into the narrative. I think there are several moments in there that will stick with me for a while. So I judged a book by its cover and didn't think it would be a step forward, but it was. Miller is a lot closer to writing like Eugene Peterson in this book than he was previously, and you know, that's where he should be heading.

They should put a label on this book "Now with 50% more Bible!" Then again, that might not make a Miller book sell ...

That's Not Paisley, It's a Crystal Structure!

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/exhibitions/fromatomstopatterns/gallery/WTD039444.htm

On my last day in Britain, I decided to save the $10 for a tube day pass and walk from my hotel near Paddington Station to the British Library (2.5 miles up Marylebone Road, thanks for asking). On the way I passed the Wellcome Centre, and thought it would be worth a stop-by when it opened. Inside was an exhibition about a brief fad in the design world when artists took crystal structures of minerals and proteins and put them on plates, ties, wallpaper, and lineoleum. Above are plates based on aluminum hydroxide and beryl. Imagine, there was wallpaper on a restaurant wall that was a version of insulin, the protein actually being deployed in the patron's bloodstreams in response to the sugar being ingested at those tables. China clay's atomic arrangement is a particularly nice combination of hexagons and triangles. There even was a white evening dress of "Beryl Lace" made for Alice Bragg, wife of Sir Lawrence Bragg, one of the founding fathers of crystallography. At first it looked like a wedding dress, but I don't think even Lady Bragg would have worn that to her wedding ...

I'm sure Laurie thanks her lucky stars (and her pocketbook) that none of those ties or fabric patterns was actually on sale. Instead I spent 20 pounds on a full-color book listing it all! You can find most of the pictures in the Wellcome gallery at the link above.

Science Surprise of the Week: Parents are Less Happy

Here's an article from Newsweek on the latest official study on parenting:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792

To quote:

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

This study might be important, but not for the obvious reasons. Let's see, you go through 9 months of pain and discomfort, with an apex in childbirth. Then you have a mewling little thing that outputs several pounds of gross stuff per day, your social life is now anchored to that thing, it catches diseases and makes you sick, becomes a teenager and won't talk to you and wrecks your car, and then goes to college and spends $100,000 of your money on four years of sleeping
through class. Then it moves back in with you.

And that doesn't sound like it will make you happy?

Come on, people should know that if you want to be happy, the best person to do it is you and the best way to do it is to live your life focused on maximizing your happiness. The whole point of having kids is that they're autonomous, which means, surprise, they're not focused on your happiness all the time. So of course I'll do a better job of keeping myself happy than my child will!

This is bad news if life is about accruing a commodity called happiness. So a childless person will report more happiness and well-being. Children wear you out and screw up your life. But is life really about maximization of the Maslow hierarchy? If you're all about self-actualization, you probably shouldn't bring non-selves into the picture. Yet you have a need to do it, despite the occasional resulting unhappiness.

Looking at the paragraph above, remove the pronoun "it" and replace it with "he"/"she"/"him"/"her." All of the sudden it looks different, a less "modest proposal." It looks more possible and more reasonable because kids aren't "its," they're other selves. The benefits of having another person around who is independent of your own desires, these benefits are not measured in surveys of well-being. Parents specifically sacrifice happiness, knowingly (or it should be knowingly), when they have kids.

The point is that real life is centered around sacrifice and not happiness. And this doesn't mean childless people can't be part of "real life," either. I offer the church as an example for how childless people can have family, with all the accompanying happiness-sapping relationships. St. Paul never had kids, but his family was the church. He wasn't necessarily self-actualized or even happy all the time. One day he was singing hymns in prison, but the next he was writing in tears to his Corinithian church because his family -- his source of happiness -- was hurting him. So you don't need to have children to have a full life, but you do need other people. And not to make you happy. You just need 'em.

It's just not about the happy-meter, and the sooner we get over that idea the better off -- even happier -- we'll be.

Book Review: Longitude

Dava Sobel is good at telling scientific stories. This particular one may have been her breakthrough, and it's a good one, about John Harrison's 18th-century quest to build a clock that would keep time accurately on board a ship. Why this was important, and why it was hard, and why at times it seemed that the entire scientific establishment was against it, are all covered colorfully and efficiently in this book.

When I was in Westminster Abbey leaving a Sunday service a few weeks ago (and you know there's only a few times in my life when I'll be able to use that introductory phrase), I looked down and saw a memorial to John Harrison in the stones under my feet. A gold line was etched on that stone, with the exact longitude of that position. The integration of science with that building of faith is one of my favorite things about the U.K. I was just a few steps away from Isaac Newton, to boot.

Sobel's account occasionaly omits part of the human story. I completely missed how and when Harrison passed away, for instance. But she makes the best of a complex situation and a somewhat opaque main character, and so I recommend this book.

The "Lone Genius" of the title is what gets me thinking about broader implications. Harrison did have to fight against a lot of institutional barriers. The lunar-calculation method promoted by the establishment wasn't really wrong, it was just unwieldy. That groupthink stood in his way for about 50 years of unnecessary testing and refinement. Once sailors had a chance to use Harrison's clocks or the establishment's tables, they quickly chose Harrison's clocks.

Try as I might I can't find a close parallel to this situation in current science. If I did I could make some money off it. How and where is the "establishment" wrong? When is someone a lone genius or just a quack? As an American, I can say we're all born and bred to think of ourselves as potential "lone geniuses" (or, failing that, potential American Idol winners). But the proof is in the pudding, to continue the British metaphors. Lone geniuses are few and far between. The freedom to communicate and sell your stuff is crucial to letting lone geniuses succeed -- but it sure does lead to a lot of "noise" in the signal of all sorts of people who think they're lone geniuses but are really just lone.

Book Review: Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist. This means, rather than assuming people always behave in their own dispassionate self-interest, he looks for the ways in which people behave irrationally. His book is called Predictably Irrational because his research attempts to predict irrationality.

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This aspires to be a book on the level of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (in fact, at one point it also mentions the Pepsi Challenge, and Ariely's take conflicts with Gladwell's). Although it doesn't quite reach the counterintuitive heights found in Gladwell's books, it's a very easy read and there's a good nugget or so in each chapter. Many of Ariely's experiments take place in the classroom or with students, so I found several points of real-life application. For one, to eliminate cheating, it's best to ask students to sign something that simply says an Honor Code exists (even if an Honor Code does not exist for your institution!). The Ten Commandments will also suffice as a cheating deterrent. Also, you overvalue what you personally own: this is why so many eBay prices are ridiculous.

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A few times connections to current morality structures are glossed over. Anyone who reads the Old or New Testament should know that you make decisions differently (and worse) in the heat of passion. The "reptilian nature" of behavioral economists seems a lot like the "flesh" of St. Paul.

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The most illuminating chapter in my view was the one about choices, which describes how we will irrationally hold on to "lesser options" and make our lives worse, just for the sake of keeping our options open. Decide and commit -- that's another virtue that comes out of this book.

In fact, this book reads surprisingly like a book of virtues. Not in every case, but close enough, I find that the structures offered by St. Paul or Jesus already incorporate an understanding of the predictable irrationality of us fleshly humans.

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"But Jesus did not commit himself unto them / because he knew all men /
And needed not that any should testify of man / for he knew what was in man."

Lots of Book Reviews

So when going (by yourself) to the City of the English Language, you might as well immerse yourself in the English Language. That and what else are you gonna do when the entire in-flight entertainment system shorts out 5 miutes after takeoff for a 9-hour flight? So over the past week I polished off:

Sacrifice by Eric Shanower (Part 2 of the Age of Bronze)
Betrayal Part One by Eric Shanower (Part 2 of the Age of Bronze)
The Professor and the Madman (The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary) by Simon Winchester
Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World by Nicholas Guyatt

That last one was particularly interesting. A Brit from Simon Frasier University who's a historian turns his research questions to current America, asking what exactly and why evangelicals believe about the apocalypse. Of course, he pretty much interviews the lunatic fringe and those making lots of money of it, but because he actually talks to them, his portrayal has an impressive amount of sympathy and context (though he still doesn't seem to like John Hagee and I don't blame him at all for that). Once in a chapter or so he gets a theological point just plain wrong, but then again, he's reporting on people who do that for a living, so can't get too bothered. I found it surprisingly readable and relatively nuanced. It even helped me in conversations at my convention about my own country, so there ya go.

Oh, and as for the convention? The only one I've ever been to where a music/history/theology talk was followed by an art talk was followed by a clinical psychology talk. For that reason alone I hope more conventions like that take place.