Book meme redux

Marvin also tagged me for this book meme, which I’m pretty sure I did a while back, but maybe it’d be interesting to do it again without looking at my old answers. Here goes:

1. One book that changed your life:
Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. Reading this book as an undergrad was the occasion for my seriously considering that Christianity in more-or-less its traditional form (rather than some attenuated or watered down version) might actually be true. Or at least that it was a live option.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
Cash: The Autobiography, by Johnny Cash

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
I guess I should say the Bible, right? Or maybe the collected works of Shakespeare? Or something clever like “How to Escape From a Desert Island”?

4. One book that made you laugh:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

5. One book that made you cry:
I can’t really think of a time this has happened. Maybe I’m just a cold-hearted SOB.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
How I Changed My Mind, by Saul of Tarsus

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
I’m with Marvin here: I’m enough of a Millian liberal to be for the untrammeled expression of ideas. Though the world probably would’ve gotten by fine without Luther’s Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants and On the Jews and Their Lies.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
A Moral Climate, by Michael Northcott (just came yesterday!)

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts. I’ve had this one on my shelf for months.

(Eco)culture wars

Via Jeremy, a smart post from Patrick Deneen on the way Left vs. Right thinking is driving a lot of people’s reactions to environmental and resource challenges.

I continue to be somewhat amazed at the glib dismissal of global warming and other environmental problems on the part of many conservatives. There is almost no attempt to actually engage the issues except occasionally by cherry-picking experts like Bjorn Lomborg who take a contrarian view (though even Lomborg concedes that human caused climate change is a reality). As Professor Deneen quotes from a Salon.com article by Andrew Leonard, the “very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.”

Deneen concludes:

What may be most productive in coming years is to stop calling this cadre of economic libertarians - what we now call “the Right” or even conservatism - conservatives. There is nothing they want to conserve - nothing in the natural or moral ecology. They are rapacious exploiters who want to use every last natural and cultural reservoir for their own immediate profit - even at the price of leaving nothing for their children. Recall, it was Dick Cheney who said “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Probably true, but it’s a damned good place to start, and we fool ourselves if we think we are not going to need substantial reservoirs of personal and political virtue in coming years.

Soon, if not soon enough, I predict, there will be a party of conservatives and a party of “live now’ers.” Live now’ers have original sin on their side, and are likely to win a lot of votes until it’s clear that the grasshopper was wrong and the ant was right. Then they will tell us it’s time to get the guns. Are you sure that’s the side you want to be on?

The Lutheran Song

I’d be a bad Lutheran if I didn’t link to this (well, I might be a bad Lutheran anyway).

(I don’t think Adam Sandler has much to worry about, incidentally.)

Movie memery

This one comes by way of Marvin.

1. One movie that made you laugh
The Princess Bride

2. One movie that made you cry
Big Fish

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Back to the Future

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Ghostbusters (many, many times)

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
They’re just movies - why be embarrassed? I have had people tell me I should be embarrassed for enjoying National Treasure so much, yet I continue to fail to be.

6. One movie you hated
Closer

7. One movie that scared you
The Exorcist

8. One movie that bored you
The House of Mirth

9. One movie that made you happy
The Iron Giant

10. One movie that made you miserable
American Beauty

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
Atonement (I could’t work up the courage to sit through another pretentious period flick based on a Very Serious and Important book)

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Stranger Than Fiction

13. The last movie you saw
Iron Man

14. The next movie you hope to see
Bubba Ho-Tep (waiting in a Netflix envelope)

Tag five people: I tag, should they choose to accept the mission, Christopher, Josh, Fr. Chris, Jeremy, and Eric. Pluse anyone else who wants to play along.

Big questions

ATR favorite Keith Ward also has a new book out - The Big Questions in Science and Religion. You can read a lenghty excerpt here (I haven’t read the book or the excerpt yet).

I’m guessing it will cover a lot of the same ground as his recent Pascal’s Fire, though it looks like this one takes a more “comparative religions” approach.

Northcott’s A Moral Climate

Michael Northcott, a Scottish theologian, has a new book out on theological ethics and climate change. Northcott previously wrote a good book on the environment and Christian ethics, and this new one got a glowing write up in the Christian Century by Duke University chaplain Sam Wells. I’ve already ordered the book; it looks like it’s right up my alley: theology of creation, environmentalism, political economy, and animal rights thrown in for good measure.

The value of abstaining

One objection you sometimes get to vegetarianism is that there’s no point in bothering because a single person giving up meat isn’t going to make a dent in the meat industry and, in all likelihood, isn’t going to save any animals.

While this question might rest on some dubious premises (are we sure that no animals are saved by your going veggie?), it’s enough of a puzzle to cause me some consternation.

So, I was interested to come across this paper by philosopher Tzachi Zamir called “Killing for Pleasure.” Zamir concedes that eating animal flesh is not “causally connected” to animals’ deaths, but argues that there are alternative ways of understanding the act which show why refraining from it is a good thing.

Zamir argues that we should see killing the animal and eating its flesh (when the animal was killed in order to produce the meat) as two parts of the same action. Thus, the eating is the completion of the action:

the consumption is a completion of the initial action. By “completion” I refer to a temporally extended action, in which the part of the action done in the past, foresaw and was predicated on an unspecified individual who will function in a particular way. By becoming that individual, one completes the action, making it whole (another way of articulating this thought, suggested to me by Stan Godlovitch, is that by consumption one is commissioning the killing).

Consumption, Zamir says, is not “distinct from the initial wrong, but [...] a carrying out of it.”

A second way of thinking about the act of meat eating that Zamir identifies is “participating in a wrong practice, even when one’s consumption does not increase suffering.” In other words, the entire nexus of raising and killing of animals for food is something one does well to extricate oneself from as much as possible.

Clearly, this argument rests on the premise that it is, in fact, wrong to kill animals for food, something that most people - even many who abhor factory farming - won’t concede (though Zamir goes on to argue that it is).

But it also helps to show why avoiding the products of factory farming can be a good thing even if one doesn’t expect thereby to meaningfully reduce the total amount of animal suffering. And, for that matter, it might help illuminate other moral dilemmas where we sense that we ought to refrain from participating in a particular activity even if we don’t expect our abstention to have a practical effect.

Chronicles of woe

So, I’ve been working on one of those read-through-the-entire-Bible plans off and on for a while now. It’s actually pretty good because it alternates, roughly, half of an OT book with half of a NT book, which breaks things up nicely.

However, I cheated a while back and skipped ahead to Romans, which means that I’m looking down the barrel of 1st and 2nd Chronicles back-to-back.

Currently I’m about halfway through 1st Chronicles and, while I admit to skimming many of the genealogies, my impression so far is that it’s basically the same stories as contained in the books of Samuel and Kings with most of the good bits taken out and a much less critical perspective on the monarchy. Plus, did I mention the genealogies? It’s rough going. Any of my more biblically literate readers want to offer an appreciation of these texts?

Of course, the James Dean/Ricky Nelson duet was inevitable

Nice appreciation of the great Howard Hawks/John Wayne flick Rio Bravo as a kind of “cinema of democracy” and John Wayne as something quite different than the symbol of rugged indivdiualism.

Note: the author is neither Charles Taylor the canadian philospher nor Charles Taylor the evil dictator, but Charles Taylor the film critic.

If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

Christopher speculates a bit about life after death. I’ve never understood or been much interested in a version of Christianity that omits hope in the resurrection. After all - isn’t the entire religion founded on the belief that a man was raised from the dead? Christopher’s both/and approach seems eminently reasonable to me.