Summer reading; first, in summary

Reading for pleasure does not for me mean "non-serious" reading. Since I enjoy serious topics, philosophy and such, and since I am usually writing some sort of publication for which I have research-driven reading, my leisure reading covers a wide range of materials I am reading for no particular reason other than intellectual curiosity. My list of books I am lining up to read are on LibraryThing.

This summer, in addition to working on a book chapter for an edited collection of essays about the core sources for international legal research, I went through a few titles of which the following are just highlights. I like to wander back to fiction, as well as cultural history and philosophy. I am giving each a brief review in my next blog post.

Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions (2008)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2009)

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)

"..the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.."

To revive the blog and my own reflections on texts of all kinds, I can think of no better way to do it than to respond to President Obama's Inaugural speech. I was inspired by the intelligent, adult tone of the speech as well as the musical variations on "'Tis the Gift to Be Simple." But most of all, as I've been reflecting myself on the ongoing nature of bully becoming victim becoming bully becoming victim in our human history and even now in Gaza, Barack said after St. Paul, "...the time has come to set aside childish things..." and there can be greater indictment of the petty crimes as well as the human rights violations of the warmongering of the outgoing administration. Hope does seem to be springing forward for all of us.

As Cheney was wheeled away in a bizarre appearance, in a wheelchair and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the sorrow of waste and damage, human and ecological and now economic, was the only low tone in an otherwise inspiring beginning for our country. I feel personally inspired and ready to continue with teaching, writing, and promoting a conscious examination of communication theory to law, comparative and religious.

Habgood on the Evangelical Textual Mistake

While catching up on my book review reading, I came upon a review by Dr.John Habgood(Lord Habgood, formerly Archbishop of York and one of the outstanding theologians of the Anglican tradition, in my opinion), who brings together science and religion, among many other important convergences. In reviewing the work of an evangelical, Richard Turnbull, (Anglican and Evangelical? Continuum, 2008)in the TLS of March 21, 2008 (subscription required), he makes two excellent points. One is commonly held by many non-evangelicals, like myself, namely a rejection of the belief that "Scripture alone" provides the basis for the Christian faith, and he cites not only the conferring of authority on these documents by the church itself (and by implication their attribution to the church as author) but also biblical criticism and scholarship, which is the hermeneutical and textual approach I've been exploring as central to my own intellectual life.

The second important point is one that has come up often in my discussions with skeptics: the theory of what he calls "penal substitution," which he defines as the suffering and death of Jesus as the penalty for our sins, taking all of God's wrath and "making it possible for God to forgive us.) (TLS 3.21.08 at 8).Fortunatey, I was never taught this, so I take it on his (unfootnoted) word that some evangelicals believe this. He acknowledges the echoing of language from Isaiah and St. Paul, though surely this is within the tradition of prefigural language that characterized the early Jewish attempts at understanding what Jesus' death was about. In a very articulate way, he expresses it as I believe it should be expressed, as the ultimate revelation of God's love in the face of human wrath, the rejection of Jesus and his message of love. We are the wrathful ones, not God, and the cross brought forgiveness of the ultimate result of human hatreds, not a sacrifice as of old to propitiate the imagined god of the people, who had not yet built his temple in their hearts, as we are all called to do.

The Courtier and the Heretic

subtitled "...Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World," this double philosophical biography (Norton,2006) by Matthew Stewart was an interesting review for me of aspects of both philosophers' works, and I have to confess that I have not read Spinoza's Tractatus or Leibniz' Monadology (both in translation) with any slow, deep reflection since college. But this was a stimulating, if somewhat superficial, refresher of some issues I am still grappling with as I look at systematic theologies as well as newer process theologies.

Relevant to some of the legal and social ramifications of metaphysics is the different tack Stewart takes in comparing the responses to modernity of these two thinkers; it is one which he believes, as stated in his "Note on Sources" at the back, is one of his more original contributions. That is, he looks at Spinoza and Leibniz as moral and political philosophers, too. They were reacting to the rise of modern science, and as Lawrence Principe and others remind students, science and religion were forced apart only gradually. These two philosophers seem to have seen it coming, as it were, and anticipated the consequences but ironically also contributed to them.

Spinoza's seeming "God intoxication" but actual near pantheism and alleged atheism certainly remind one to regard immanence with caution and begins the challenge: materialism or radical infusion of the Divine? And how can this one Substance, be it Mind, energy, even Love, be regarded still as personal? Spinoza certainly seems to have rejected that.

Enter Leibniz- lacking the (ahistorically for the West) "zen" attitude of Spinoza (although I was surprised to learn of his interest in China as just then encountered by the Portuguese Jesuits)but committed to a new view of transcendence. We are still trying to figure out what the monads (and the Monad) are and if they help at all. Certainly the wave/particle and water/wave attributes that we can now accept as co-existing in matter (or rather, in matter/energy) thanks to the quantum perspective may be somewhat like the missing link that Leibniz sought to find. But even after Kant it still comes down to Plato and Aristotle with the former getting it right grammatically and the latter closer to a truth we can take more literally as to the complex of matter and form that every thing seems to be.

But I am still stuck with the God problem and the personal nature of Love. Whether Spinoza was motivated to eliminate God as a model for the monarchs he wanted to overthrow in favor of personal freedom of conscience and a nascent awareness of human rights, and whether Leibniz was motivated by a need to preserve the moral status quo from the anarchy of individual liberty- I leave that to Stewart to go on pondering. I am still in the theological and metaphysical woods, looking for the answer to the disappointment we feel about the seeming lack of immortality of our consciousness in any real, felt way. Even if the ashes are windowless monads, why do we want them to continue to be aware of the Love that Moves us (Dante)?

Codes and Hypertext: The Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law

The Syracuse Journal of International Law invited essays suggesting areas of further research and the creation of tools and resources for information studies related to international and comparative law. My contribution, now with the editors, suggests ways to explore literary and information theory that connect these to continuities between the print and electronic media experiences. The first paragraph is posted below:

Codes and Hypertext: The Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law
Marylin J. Raisch

Introduction

Recent discussion of scholarly communication in the emerging internet landscape of hypertext has brought the study of law into an interdisciplinary , intertextual framework . International and comparative legal research, as a major area of special inquiry for practice and scholarship, must be brought into this discussion along with the texts- primarily codes and treaties as well as constitutions and judicial opinions- which form its body of meaning. The language of its norms, whether they be of private law, contract, human rights, or religious law, resonate across cultural contexts, making comparative law and transnational understanding twin means to important ends such as peace and trade. Critical to this discussion and necessary to close this gap in international and comparative law in the global information society will be aspects of communication theory and the philosophy of technology.

Poison or Cure? Hitchens/McGrath debate at Georgetown

Last week I attended the debate and discussion at Gaston Hall sponsored by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs as well as something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, with which I was unfamiliar. The title of the debate was Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World. I take it from the program that the Ethics and Public Policy Center, unlike the Berkley Center, is perhaps more of a Christian evangelical think tank. Fortunately, the Berkley Center is a pluralist and scholarly center; otherwise I think the sponsorship would have made the event appear to someone like me to be less seriously open-minded. Even so I wish that Tom Banchoff of the Berkley Center had been moderating the discussion and not just introducing the event.

In preparation I read Vol. 1 of Alister McGrath's A Scientific Theology, Nature and found it intriguing if slow-paced. It assumed a desire to see a parallel view of "nature" (contested, but the historical versions of the term were reviewed) and Christian belief in a salvific presence and history. He never really got to a proper attempt at a theodicy. This is a pity, as he could have attempted it and been more forceful and clear in the debate with Hitchens. I did not get a chance to read Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything before last night so I may try to do that soon- it may answer some of the questions I will put here.
Hitchens had a typcially theatrical and bold "take no prisoners" approach to what he sees as the horrors of religion and the immoral implications of the doctrines of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The debate was not fully joined insofar as McGrath spoke only of Christianity. Hitchens said at the outset that he would not deal with other monotheisms, then went on to stray from his own limitation to address them all in the course of the evening.

Here are the questions I might have put after hearing the debate:
To Hitchens: Many scientists have been amazed by the success of mathematics and is predictive powers in applied physics and the like. What do you make of it? Not a loaded question but one he should have been asked since he is a journalist and McGrath a scholar of both biochemistry and theology.

To Hitchens again: You stated that even many people who call themselves religious confess that the scriptures of their faith are really metaphorical in most parts or embody myth or legend. However, exegesis of these texts uses the same method of "peeling the onion" as is used in other textual criticism without implying, as you do, that such a method calls into question the truth value or legitimacy of the ideas contained therein. It does so no more than learning (as we did) that Thomas Wise, a bibliographer and (later revealed) con man forged a first edition of Jane Austen's work. Discovering that made the nature of her work more clear and interpretation more sound. It did not call into question the value of studying the works of Jane Austen.

To McGrath: Is religion really the only source of morality?
To McGrath again: do we not have to answer to the apparent indifference of a loving God to suffering? Is this not still the greatest barrier to the moral rationality of monotheistic belief? Is the sacrifice of Jesus (as opposed to his teaching) not violent and hard to explain since it must be at once foreordained and yet freely chosen by him in some way?

McGrath puts much store on the Incarnation and the Logos in the first volume of his study and the latter notion carries many interesting implications. I am still peeling this onion myself.

Finally, Hitchens said in a quick response that he did not want to endorse any confusion between the supernatural and the transcendent or "numinous," implying his disbelief in the former but leaving me with the impression that he had something more to say about the latter. I hope that the moderator's closing suggestion that we "do this again" by having a "part II" of the debate with the two adversaries might actually take place so that Hitchens might develop this with more scholarship (as opposed to mere cleverness)and McGrath might take a stronger stand in some areas, perhaps more like Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker. Still some real problems there but strong overall.
I will post link to the webcast which they said would be up by sometime this week.

Reviving the blog with reflections on rationality, broadly conceived

In reviving this blog I hope to create space for my own reflections and the articulation of my thoughts concerning many points of convergence among important issues in law, religion, and the philosophy of science. Since my field is information, my own stance will be critiqued and at times even deconstructed for clarity.

Revived blog

Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, and in this case my laziness and cold tea bags, I once again have decided 'tis better to have y blogged and shared than never to have blogged at all. Or words to that effect, as Peter Sellers once said in a long-ago LP comedy album to which my brother Jeff and I are probably the only remaining ones still referring. I'm actually going to have to copy posts out of a handwritten journal in order to get started again, just because the journal has so much in it that I want to say. Until then,....

Web Sites to Integrate into Guides

Juris International- for IIEL and trade law guides