Yesterday I was on a panel in Second Life for a University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism fellowship program project. The fellows had researched and created reports on “Faces of Faith: God Sex Family” and decided to bring their reports into Second Life. As part of their weeklong exhibit, they organized this panel of SL religious figures (video). It was a real privilege to be on the panel.
Mainspring
I’ve been reading again, and I have some catching up to do with titles I’ve already finished.
First up: Mainspring by Jay Lake. This is in a strange, small category. It’s kind of Steampunk, but it’s also theology or fantasy. The closest thing to it I’ve read before are J. Gregory Keyes’s alchemical Ben Franklin and Newton books (which I read back in 2001).
In Mainspring, the protagonist is visited by an angel and sent on a quest to rewind the clockwork mainspring of the earth. I enjoyed it. Some interesting twists. I look forward to reading more of him. (Ooh—it looks like there may be a sequel.)
In praise of editors
You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted that Maria Callas perform “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” as the final aria in Bellini’s “Norma.”
Very intense optical illusion
Astronomy Picture of the Day rationalizes including this really good optical illusion by relating it to the virtues of non-human observation in science.
Find your daemon at goldencompassmovie.com
Fun, and strange
148 — Oh, Inverted World « strange maps. I subscribe to the RSS for the strange maps site. Sometimes what they find is just weird, but others it is mind-bending, like this one.
Reflections on God
Sometimes I read something that both makes my editor’s heart go pitter-pat and feeds my spirit. Doug Muder, a writer I’m glad to be getting to know better, has posted The Go(o)d Crutch at his blog Free and Responsible Search. I heartily recommend it.
Positive freedoms
Read an interesting interview with Francis Fukuyama about the difference between “negative freedoms” (freedom from) and “positive freedoms” (freedom to), and the challenges faced by modern liberal societies.
The practical problem is whether you can generate a set of values that will politically serve the integrating liberal purposes you want. This is complicated because you want those values to be positive and mean something, but you also can’t use them as the basis for exclusion of certain groups in society.
It is possible that we could succeed at doing one without the other. For example, the grounds of success of the American political experiment is that it has created a set of “positive” values that served as the basis for national identity but were also accessible to people who were not white and Christian or in some way “blood and soil” related to Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of the country.
These values are the content of the American Creed—belief in individualism, belief in work as a value, belief in the freedom of mobility and popular sovereignty.
Samuel Huntington calls these “Anglo-Protestant values,” but at this point they have become de-racinated from these roots. You can believe them no matter who you are or where you came from.
As kind of a practical solution to the positive value problem, it works pretty well.
As someone “ ‘blood and soil’ related to Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of the country,” I can’t really comment on whether the values he lists have become de-racinated, but I think he has captured the core “positive freedoms” of America.
(From NPQ—New Perspectives Quarterly—via A&LD)
Home again
Whew! The annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association was rewarding (who knew so many people like the magazine?), spending Monday doing tourist things was fantastic (I’d like to be able to visit the classical Chinese garden on a regular basis), but the flight home was absolutely terrible (American through Dallas-Fort Worth, with a night on a cot in the airport).
But at least I’m home, in the familiar heat and humidity of summertime Boston!
Article on Quakers in Second Life
My article on Quakers in Second Life has been published in the June issue of 2Life Magazine (pdf download).