St. Maximos' Hut

James Lileks:

Sign of the times: Type "naked woman cuddling dead pig" into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.

No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: "There's something you don't see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent God."

It's a serious post, and a good one, but the opener deserves to be part of sermons around the world this Sunday.

And you should read it, if only because it also contains the line: "Here's the ghost of Eisenhower. Booga-booga!"

Really. Find out why here.

In a new church land use case in this part of the world, McLean Bible Church (MBC) of Fairfax County, VA, a metro D.C.-area megachurch, filed a federal lawsuit July 3rd challenging a government ruling that it was "improperly holding seminary-level classes on church grounds." Christianity Today reports that MBC, partnered with Capitol Bible Seminary in 2001 to offer Bible and religion classes. Apparently, MBC did not issue academic credit or confer degrees, but students could take classes at the church toward a degree from the seminary. Three years after the classes began, Fairfax County officials determined the level of learning went beyond typical Sunday school, meaning the church would need to apply for zoning status as a college or university. MBC filed suit after exhausting administrative remedies at the the county-level.
This is one to watch, particularly as to the role of municipal officials in assessing course offerings by churches.

Today's internet meander unearthed another interesting read at Forum 18, which "aims to ensure that threats and actions against religious freedom are truthfully reported as quickly as possible across the world."
From a summary of the story:

Economics has a large effect on China's religious freedom, Forum 18 News Service notes. Factors such as the need of religious communities for non-state income, significant regional wealth disparities, conflicts over economic interests, and artificially-induced dependence on the state income all provide the state with alternative ways of exercising control over religious communities.... Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of economic clashes is the state, which can use both control of income and also favouritism in economic conflicts to restrict religious freedom.

You can read it here

I recently finished reading Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, which has been a goal of mine for a number of years. It is a difficult-to-describe book, and one very strongly based in the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One key aspect -- and one reason the book is hard to read -- is that time and space are shifting in unpredictable ways throughout the book and shifting in different ways for different characters. For example, a house may face one vista on one day and another on a different day, but only one character will notice the change. Or a period of time that for one person seems like a few hours will seem like a few days to someone else.

Needless to say, a book like that causes one to reflect on the theory of relativity. One of the most fascinating insights from that theory (the clearest exposition, to my mind, is still Bertrand Russell's ABC of Relativity from the 1920s) is that all of us are living in slightly different worlds. Delany takes this insight to an extreme in Dahlgren and uses it to advantage by illustrating that people have a choice of accepting and forgiving behavior that seems odd or condemning it. As Christians, we are exhorted to forgive each other and we are also encouraged to behave in ways that are inexplicable to other people. While Dahlgren is far from a Christian tract, and far from a single-themed book, it was a pleasant surprise to find this particular idea in it.

I'm noticing more and more essays, articles, etc. that analyze various religions as equivalent points of view. For example, there's a forthcoming book entitled FAITH AND LAW; HOW RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS FROM CALVINISM TO ISLAM VIEW AMERICAN LAW (Robert Cochran, ed., NYU Press, 2007) which includes an essay on "Reform Judaism, B'tzelem Ehlohim, and Gay Rights" by Prof. Ellen Aprill of Loyola Law School (Los Angeles). (Her paper is available on SSRN). The paper discusses the reaction of Reformed Judaism to the Boy Scouts v. Dale decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that the Boy Scouts' associational freedom trumped New Jersey's attempt to force the Scouts to accept gay scoutmasters.

It's sort of interesting to examine how different faiths respond to various legal events. But there seems to me to be an increasing trend to make claims of roughly this sort (and I'm not suggesting Prof. Aprill does so, as I haven't read her paper - just that the title of the book in which it will appear sparked this reflection): Religion is just a point of view, all points of view are equally valid as none can be proved/disproved by the scientific method (which is not a point of view), and they all express some deeper wisdom which can be discovered by comparing their (often quaint) views on various topics.

The central claim of most religions (perhaps even all) is, however, that they embody the ultimate truth and that their truth claim is stronger than the scientific method. That is, each religion makes a truth claim that is incompatible with the rest - either Jesus is the Messiah or He isn't. If He is, Christianity is true and other religions are not. If He isn't, Christianity is not true and (perhaps) some other religion is.

This seems to me to put a limit on what we can learn from playing anthropologist and comparing and contrasting religions. If, for instance, Christianity is true, then "how Muslims react to American law" is a much less interesting question in religious terms. Similarly, if Islam is true, then how Christians react to American law is less interesting.

Western academic study of religion seems to me to be often premised on a neutral disbelief of all religions (save science). Once the idea that a religion might be true and the others false enters the picture, the typical academic approach seems less useful.

"God's Will or Linked Fate: Race and Religion in African American Views of the Death Penalty (A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach)"

Contact: MELYNDA J. PRICE
University of Michigan
Email: melyndap@umich.edu
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ABSTRACT: In its adjudication of death penalty cases, the Supreme Court has increasingly relied on the notion of a community consensus in support of the death penalty as a modern justification of the death penalty. The Court supports this notion with survey data that shows a general support among Americans for the death penalty, however, the reliance on general data ignores substantial differences in support for death penalty that break along racial lines. At the same time the Court is utilizing public opinion data to support their decisions, there is a resurgence of public rhetoric in support of the death penalty based on religion. This paper utilizes multiple forms of individual level data as a way to measure correlation between religious and political beliefs and support for the death penalty among African Americans. African Americans score high on almost every measure of religiosity. Additionally, they have been disproportionately subject to this form of punishment. What do polls tells us about attitudes about the death penalty among African Americans? How does such a religious community reconcile their religious beliefs with their position on the death penalty?

This paper analyzes the factors that influence African Americans' opinion of the death penalty and the beliefs that construct those opinions. The important findings of the survey analysis are that income and perceptions of discrimination significantly decreases support for the death penalty among African Americans. The survey data yields a more complicated picture of these opinions by adding the role of increased incarceration rates and belief in the fallibility of the state. This paper contributes to both the discussion on the reality of the Court's community consensus in support of the death penalty and the way various groups experience/understand this particular aspect of criminal justice policy.

The topic of Islamic finance is a perennial one in discussions of law, religion and economics. This paper offers what looks to be an interesting analysis:

"Muhammad's Social Justice or Muslim Cant: Langdellianism and the Failures of Islamic Finance"
Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 06-116
Cornell International Law Journal, Vol. 40, 2006


Contact: HAIDER ALA HAMOUDI
Columbia University - Columbia Law School
Email: hhamou1@law.columbia.edu
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ABSTRACT: Though it is advertised and promoted as the bulwark of an alternative economic system based on populist Muslim notions of social justice and fairness, Islamic finance as a practice has failed to meet these objectives. The causes of that failure and the question of whether alternative approaches are possible are the subject of this Article.

The failure of Islamic finance to provide that which it promotes is the direct consequence of the application of an Islamic logic driven interpretive system through which rules are derived, which its adherents claim was formalized and systematized by the early jurist Muhammad Ibn Idris Al-Shafi'i. The system bears remarkable resemblance to the jurisprudential theories of Christopher Columbus Langdell in that particular "cases" (the reports of Muhammad, or hadith) are selected and then expanded into fundamental principles, or at least fundamental rules, through a doctrine known as qiyas, or analogical reasoning. The result is a financial system characterized by an incoherent web of rules, convenient and specific blindness respecting those rules in particular contexts, and deceptive and obfuscatory measures intended to lend the entire affair a patina of legitimacy as Islamic. Social justice and fairness are not significant components of the system.

A principled alternative interpretive system, however, does seem possible so long as it remains within particular parameters, among them faithful adherence to Qur'anic verse, substantial respect for the hadith and sufficient systematization and methodological rigor to avoid what some Islamic jurists call "subjectivity," or lack of interpretive control. Specifically, the Article engages and expands upon the ideas of Abdul Razzaq Sanhuri and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr as potential avenues for reform that lie within these parameters.

A further note on the Islamic perspective on the relationship between religion and economics can be found is a brief article by Dr. Jamal Badawi of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. The piece also includes some useful links to other topics including: Property Rights in Islam, Islamic Economics and "Freedom of Economic Activity". Bear in mind, though, that these items appear on the distinctly partisan website IslamOnline.net.

Once again, early morning meandering along the internet by-ways has resulted in an unexpected stop. "The Economic in Religion and the Religious in Economics: A Qur'anic-Weberian Perspective" by Basit Koshul of Concordia College affords some useful insights into our favorite topic from the Islamic perspective. Happily, Koshul's piece avoids the customary focus on poverty and debt-release, but, mainly addresses a particular Scripture (the Qur'an) to "demonstrate that there is an irreducible presence of the economic in religion." The paper also briefly examines "a particular corpus within social science [to]show the inadequacy of the attitude of the academy by demonstrating the irreducible presence of the religious in economics from the perspective of Max Weber's social science." Koshul's paper winds up with "with some remarks on the relevance (and perhaps necessity) of an investigation of the economic from a religious perspective—and vice versa—in the contemporary cultural milieu." It is available at The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, No. 5.2 (Aug. 2005).

Eric Bridges of Baptist Press has penned an interesting piece entitled "Debt's Damage to Missions" which appears over at Crosswalk.com. While college age missionaries may lack maturity and experience, they more than make up for in boldness, risk-taking, teachability and rapid language-learning. This doesn't matter, though, if the need to service school or personal debt won't let them get to the mission field. It is an aspect of debt well-worth considering.