I have a friend who has been studying the interface between what he calls the Persian models and the Arabist models of Islam in the subcontinent and surprise, surprise: the Arabist models are misogynistic, authoritarian, unitarian and the Persian models are much more plural and tolerant.
This is a fight on two fronts - on the one hand we are struggling against the kinds of oppression dominant in Muslim patriarch societies and, on the other, Western perceptions of Islam as necessarily monolithic, and confusing the ideals of Islam with the reality of Muslim lives.
If we read the Koran as a totality rather than pulling out random verses or half a line, that opens all kinds of possibilities for sexual equality.
Norani Othman from Malaysia says,
Perhaps the only distinctive difference peculiar to Muslim feminists is that we are caught in the cross-currents of modernisation and a changing society, due to a modern economy on the one hand and the global resurgence of political Islam on the other.
Political Islam wants to impose a world view about the gender order that is not consistent with the realities and the lived experiences of Muslim men and women in contemporary society.
In these days when distorted views of Islam are being distributed in swing states, its good to be reminded of what Islamic women are actually saying.
Technology is enabling new forms of family connectedness that revolve around remote cell phone interactions and communal internet experiences.
Although some commentators have expressed fears that technology pulls families apart, this survey finds that couples use their phones to connect and coordinate their lives, especially if they have children at home. American spouses often go their separate ways during the day, but remain connected by cell phones and to some extent by internet communications. When they return home, they often have shared moments of exploration and entertainment on the internet.
A majority of adults say technology allows their family life today to be as close, or closer, than their families were when they grew up.While new communication technologies have increased the amount of time some people spend at the office or working from home, few people see them as having a negative impact on family closeness.
Indeed, 25% of our survey respondents feel that their family today is now closer than their family when they were growing up thanks to the use of the internet and cell phones, while just 11% say their family today is not as close as families in the past. A majority of adults downplay the impact of technology entirely: 60% feel that new technologies have not made their family any more or less close than families in the past.
This is true of my experience as well.
After a day's work of theological reflection, I went for an evening walk with my binocs and saw an unidentifiable hummingbird and several Acorn Woodpeckers. According to sources, the Acorn Woodpecker range is Southern Oregon south through California. The bird stores nuts in individually drilled holes in trees called granaries. The acorns are jammed in so tight that even squirrels can’t pry them out. Some of these granary trees have up to 50,000 holes drilled by extended woodpecker families. 
More information here.
Here I am in Pasadena for a few days at a consultation held at Fuller Seminary. It starts tomorrow so I've been walking around in beautiful weather this evening discovering places like Vroman's, an independent bookstore.
Monday, October 20, 2008
at 7:00 PM
Holman Hunt is the subject of a new exhibit at the Manchester Art Gallery reviewed in the Guardian. Here is "The Finding of the Savior in the Temple" (1854-60) which Hunt saw as the Child's first consciousness of himself, as a revelation or conversion.In his pictorial demonstration that God works in mysterious ways, the painter represents the girl's seducer as the ironically unintended means of her salvation. In singing Moore's "Oft in the Stilly Night" with her, the man unintentionally awakens "the memory of her childish home"; in response she suddenly breaks away "from her gilded cage with a startled holy resolve, while her shallow companion still sings on, ignorantly intensifying her repentant purpose" (II.430).
Hunt's Protestantism stresses internal conversion: here we see that of Christ and a woman, the model for which was Annie Miller.
"Oft in the Stilly Night" was also used by James Joyce. Here are the lyrics:
Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends, so link'd together,
I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
"We have not had a single accident since," Muthee said in one widely published sermon. "In fact, since that woman moved out of Kiambu, the entire atmosphere has changed. Whereas people used to be afraid to go out at night, now we enjoy one of the lowest crime rates in Kenya."
She says she didn't own a pet python and she's never left her compound, located about a half-mile from Muthee's immense new church. Last week Women's eNews interviewed her there, next door to the Superkid Solid Foundation Faith in Every Footstep daycare center just off Kiambu's main street.
In 1942 he joined the Army as a chaplain. It was on April 15, 1945, that the formative event of his life occurred. He later described how he was told to report to the colonel. He said: “We have uncovered a concentration camp. It is horrible, ghastly, sickening. Most of the inmates are your people. You should go there now. They need you.”
As Hardman said, he had never felt more needed in his life. He immediately set about trying to bring comfort to the survivors and then saying the memorial prayer, the Kaddish, over the dead as he tried to persuade the bulldozer drivers who were thrusting the bodies into a pit to bury them with some kind of dignity.
The amazing thing, he recalled, was the effect his uniform had on the inmates. “They saw the Star of David on my cap and my tunic and they at first couldn’t understand it. Then, they regarded me as a kind of messiah.”
One woman who was so emaciated that he at first found it difficult to be with her, begged him not to leave her. He recalled that he spent an hour talking to her in Yiddish before conducting prayers, the first they had heard for years.
Hardman spent the next half century or more speaking about his experiences at Belsen.
“Far too many people have got away,” he would say. “They have hardly scratched the surface of the enormity of this evil.”
At one time he went on record saying that he had lost his faith at Belsen, an astonishing confession from a rabbi. He later amended that: “I didn’t lose my faith, but some of the words of the prayers I said at Belsen stuck in my throat. I couldn’t understand how the God I worshipped could permit this.”
The Government has a responsibility to our Armed Forces to ensure casualties are kept to a minimum: pursing a more flexible strategy may be one way of doing that.
She went on to state that "after slavery was formally abolished, [the church] continued for at least a century to support de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination."
The historic gesture of remorse drew hundreds of Episcopalians, both black and white, to St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia October 3-4 for the Day of Repentance -- a two-day solemn observance which included presentations that examined racism in the past, present, and future. Jefferts Schori's complete homily is here.
I can see that some people might think that Pullman's "The Golden Compass" is anti-religion but what is the "religious viewpoint" of "And Tango Makes Three"?
Last week the second-century insulae, or housing complexes, were presented to the public through the European Heritage Days program, in which each member country of the Council of Europe promotes new cultural assets and sites that have mainly been closed to the public.
“Over all, this is the most important ensemble of second- and third-century frescoes in the world,” Angelo Pellegrino, the director of excavations at the site, now called Ostia Antica, said in an interview.
The buildings, in the western part of the ancient city, were built around A.D. 128 in a housing boom during Emperor Hadrian’s reign. With demand for accommodations growing, new multilevel homes resolved issues of space and expansion. Although only the ground floors remain, evidence that buildings stood taller than one story has emerged from the rubble.
If it weren’t for Ostia Antica and its multistory houses and apartments, “it would be difficult for people to imagine how people lived in that era,” said Norbert Zimmermann, president of an international association for ancient mural painting.
