by Mark Tatulli.
So, is summer shorter for the kids or the parents who have to find ways to entertain and otherwise engae the lil nippers?
July, 2008:
Who’s afraid now? Academic intellectualism and the rejection of God.
This is a little essay I wrote back in 2003 after I attended the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, my alma mater. Various discussions recently brought the incident back to mind. I had thought of submitting this to something like Harper’s but never did, so now I offer it to the Wed, still lacking in polish (more like dull, really, when I reread it, very spotty), but still relevant.
“I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”
A portion of a letter from Virginia Woolf to her sister Vanessa Bell, Saturday, 11th February 1928.1
This summer [2003] I have had the enviable opportunity to go back to college with all the joys of learning and collegiality but without the worries of a GPA to maintain and snow through which to plod. Eleven and a half years after graduating from Cornell University I have returned to this “holy mountain” to take part as a student in the School of Criticism and Theory, an amazing institution established (in their words) “by a group of leading literary scholars in the conviction that an understanding of theory is fundamental to humanistic studies.” Over the course of six weeks we, the students, meet in bi-weekly seminars with preeminent scholars of philosophy, literature, and other humanistic disciplines in order to read and discuss works of theory and their application. In addition to these seminars prominent guest lecturers present their work, giving us a “master’s class” experience that is unforgettable. And it is a wonderful experience. I must emphasize this because I now want to present an event and an pervasive mindset exhibited during this session that might imply that I have not enjoyed or are ungrateful for my experience. That is certainly not the case, but it is unfortunate that such a positive experience has been marred in the way I am about to described. That having been stated, I am fully aware that I am most moved to reflection and composition by thoughts and ideas that most grate and irritate me. I might compare this process to the formation of a pearl, but I am certain that the piece I am producing here is hardly of any great worth. Still, it is a small chapter of a story to which I feel compelled to contribute.
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III: 1923-1928, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1977), oo, 457-8. [↩]
How would you like to date Targum Neofiti?
Maybe just the two of you, a nice dinner, maybe a little candle light…I am afraid I am talking about a different kind of dating.
A friend pointed me to this YouTube video by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill. (I will give Driscoll credit, I see that his blog has a series on Charles Spurgeon, who I agree was one of the greatest preachers ever to live.) There are lots of things that we may quibble point out are wrong in this video on the Trinity, but shall we just start with the title topic, “Targum Neofiti?”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6mVLmSMRMU
The first is the date. TgNeof is most likely late second century CE not BC(E) as Driscoll states. Furthermore, his entire argument rests on an erroneous translation. He says that TgNeof Gen. 1. reads “In the beginning with the Firstborn God created….” It should be “From the beginning, with wisdom, the Lord created…” The text reads מלקדמין בחכמה ברא {ד}ייי I do not have a critical edition to hand and the text I just copied comes from the Accordance module, but I see no variants noted (other than the dalet in ד}ייי} ).
So the term “with wisdom” seems certain and it is certainly nothing like “firstborn,” .בכורא What Neof is doing is referring to Prov. 3.19 “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens.”
Feel free to offer other comments on the video. For the first time I have actually left comments on a YouTube video because I think this is so egregious. And for those who don’t know me as well and to be open and clear, I do believe in the Trinity, I just abhor bad sermons and errors.
Academic Sacrilege
Remember the “Frackin’ Cracker” debate? A biologist from U of MN mocked the Catholic community’s response to a student having removed a consecrated host from a service. Well Myers made good on his promise to destroy, mock, and desecrate a host if sent to him. Inside Higher Ed has a good round up of the results.
Myers is a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris who has a national following for Pharyngula, the blog on which he regularly exposes and lambastes efforts by creationists to undermine the teaching of evolution. A few weeks ago, he wrote a blog entry in which he defended a University of Central Florida student who protested the presence of religious groups on his campus by taking a Eucharist — the small wafer blessed in Roman Catholic services and then seen as the body of Christ — and removing it from the service rather than consuming it. Myers, in an entry entitled “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker” — questioned why this was such a big deal.
Ever since, Myers and his university have been bombarded by e-mail and other messages attacking him and calling for the university to punish him for insulting Catholic teachings.
On Thursday, Myers responded by staging what he called a “great desecration.” For the desecration, he took a communion wafer (sent to him by a supporter in the United Kingdom, who removed it from a church there), and pierced it with a rusty nail. (“I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date,” Myers quipped on the blog.) He then threw it in the garbage with a banana peel and coffee grounds, symbols of refuse. But to show that he wasn’t picking on Catholics, Myers added to his mixture some ripped out pages of the Koran. As a proud atheist, Myers isn’t a member of a faith that he could desecrate at the same time so he took a text he does cherish — The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins — and tore some pages out and added them to the trash.
In a blog posting that describes the attacks he has received and then features a photo of the desecration, Myers finishes with a call to question everything….
The university has since removed a link to his blog from his department’s website, but will do not other action claiming academic freedom. I am not sure that this really falls into that category, at all. While I do not condone the extreme behavior Myers reports receiving in emails from certain Catholics I do think his actions are unduly aggressive and boarder on “hate speech.” I agree with the analogy in the statement from Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
It is a sure bet that UMN would not tolerate a white professor who worked a comedy club on weekends trashing blacks.
I don’t know that such a situation would result in dismissal and removal of a tenured professor, but I do think it would bring about severe action, rightly so. This sort of clearly stated hatred of religion apparently does not warrant the same response.
Now I want to be clear about my position as well. I am reformed enough in my theology and secure enough in my faith that his actions don’t disturb me or even strick me as “sacriligious” (especially since one has to have a sense of the sacred in order to do something sacriligious and Myers clearly does not view the world in such a way). I do find it rude and disrespectful of other people. This gets back to Drew’s post which first brough Myers to my attention, “Should Atheists ‘Respsect’ Religion?” Of course Myers and others of his sort say “no,” since religion is lunacy in their view.
A major part of the academic enterprise is not just the freedom to say what we like, but the patience and willingness to listen to ideas other than those we agree with. Myers seems unwilling to be a part of a broader community, one that is diverse not just in gender or ethnicity but in world views.
