Part of what is rolling around in Egypt is the question of how religious and political diversity can be worked through. Part of what toppled the Morsey government was it’s unwillingness to facilitate an open public square. What is in the struggle are the basics about how religious and political differences are negotiated.
This posting by an atheist blogger nicely illustrates the western approach.
“Ignorance Bisexuals Contend With” http://feedly.com/k/129YWIT
“Mapping the Debate (RJS)” http://feedly.com/k/12ICjdc
For me the conversations around this are fascinating. They reveal what in the west are some of our deeper political commitments. Brooks’ observations about substance vs. process are helpful, but also limited. Political partisans always rub against this. Think about the NSA information question. Isn’t that a violation of process (privacy) justified by substance (security)?
Jenee Woodard is a bustling, blueberry-muffin-making 54-year-old “mama,” she says, to Jaie, a biophysicist pursuing her Ph.D. at Harvard, and Phil, whose autism is about as severe as it gets.
Woodard rarely eats breakfast, and sleeps only in snatches, when Phil does. She is uncomfortable in crowds, or talking about herself.
She listens to audiobooks and knits. She plays her acoustic double bass or her beloved 1975 Fender P-Bass in her spare time, when she’s not getting her son through the day or leading classes in biblical studies.
But all of that happens only when she’s not holed up in the sunny little hardwood-floored office in her ranch-style house in Jackson, Mich.
That’s where she studies biblical texts — often in Greek, Hebrew or Latin. It’s where she trolls the Web for Christian commentaries, articles, artwork, music and sermons.
And it’s where she created and single-handedly operates The Text This Week, (often called by its url, Textweek) a website that generates two million hits a month — four million near Easter — mainly from ministers and educators.
http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=3190
“By any measure, most congregations are small” (p. 17), writes Mark Chaves in Congregations in America, in which he describes the findings of the 1998 National Congregations Study, a survey of 1,236 U.S. churches, the majority of them Christian and Jewish. “Fifty-nine percent of U.S. congregations have fewer than one hundred regular participants, counting both adults and children; 71 percent have fewer than one hundred regularly participating adults” (p. 17–18). These are stunning figures, but perhaps even more startling is another statistic Chaves cites: that 10 percent of U.S. congregations—the largest ones—contain half of the nation’s churchgoers1. “Even though there are relatively few large congregations with many members, sizable budgets, and numerous staff, these large congregations contain most of the people involved in organized religion in the United States” (p. 18).
I found the piece complaining about not enough women in Star Wars interesting.
This is a common complaint today made in pursuit of representation of women, ethnic/cultural groups, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc.
It got me thinking about what kind or representation would look like. We’ll start with our planet of course.
Country of Origen (which is not identical with ethnicity of course).
If we had a cast of 100 people this is how it would break down:
Age: http://www.indexmundi.com/world/demographics_profile.html I guess Hollywood has the age thing right. Very much a “young” orientation.
| Age structure | 0-14 years: 26.2% (male 950,474,013/female 887,057,234) 15-24 years: 17.1% (male 615,201,010/female 581,500,831) 25-54 years: 40.5% (male 1,434,672,361/female 1,407,874,923) 55-64 years: 8.2% (male 282,837,253/female 295,889,006) 65 years and over: 8% (male 249,318,537/female 312,187,796) (2012 est.) |
| Median age | total: 28.4 years male: 27.7 years female: 29 years (2009 est.) |
Affluence:
How “representative” is ANYTHING we watch on TV or in the movies?
The Modesty Meme and the Meaning of Hell
I read an interesting piece on Qideas from Rachel Held Evans about the modesty conversation. She makes these three points:
Point 1 is dead on. Point 2 is correct but in point 3 we are beginning to get into the complexity of the matter.
The reason point 1 is true is the same reason point 3 has issues. If the men must deal with their own problems in point 1 (which is true), you can’t simply dismiss the challenge for the women in point 3 to deal with theirs and implicitly make men or male context finally responsible. Context matters but it finally cannot govern. That is why point 1 is right.
If we can’t say (as we shouldn’t) “immodestly dressed women are responsible for male lust and/or inappropriate behavior” neither can we say “we make women ashamed of their bodies” in such a quid pro quo fashion. If men must take responsibility for what they do with their minds, so must the women. To say that we can expect the men but not the women to be responsible is to say that women are somehow less responsible or able to be in control of their minds than the men. I really don’t expect many women today to say such a thing.
What we want to talk about is the relationship between identity and context. This is no small subject in our cultural conversation.
Responsibility for an Inclusive Community
Soft context is a big deal in our culture. Scan news items that I read just this week:
We make major efforts enforced by law to insure that work places and other public spaces are “safe” for various groups that are not in power. This isn’t a bad thing, it is a part of hospitality.
Evan’s point 3 in fact appeals to this entire effort. It bears witness to the reality that context and individual behavior within communities matters.
We Naturally See Our Selves Through Others Continue reading →