Kenneth Sutton's aide-mémoire
The New York Times reports Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources.
A tip of the hat to Philocrites.
Andrew Sullivan posts about “a challenging analysis” of the U.S. position in the Middle East with reference to gas and oil sources, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. The pertinent sentence from the portion of the Star-Telegram article he quotes:
Any group, nation or coalition of nations able to dominate this region would hold the keys to domination of a world economy dependent on these fuels.
As soon as any nation becomes independent of these fuels (which we all, eventually, must), they escape this domination. Instead of focusing on being the dominant force in the world, the United States would do well to ensure that we are not subject to the vagaries of oil and gas production, in the Middle East or anywhere else.
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)
The farmers market at Boston City Hall resumed this week, and today I bought a loaf of whole wheat bread and a dozen beautiful, large, brown, free-range, local eggs. Woot!
I was at a panel tonight at the Museum of Science, part of their “When Science Meets Art” series. Tonight’s topic was “The Art of Living a Second Life.” John Craig Freeman, an artist in Second Life, made one comment that really stuck with me: “The internet is a prosthetic memory.”
I sent an email to my congressional representatives, and I hope you will too.
A great article at Incharacter.org by Bill McKibben.
We’re used to independence as the prime virtue — so used to it that three quarters of American Christians believe the phrase “God helps those who help themselves†comes from the Bible, instead of Ben Franklin. “Love your neighbor as yourself†is harder advice, but sweeter and more sage. We don’t need to live on communes (though more and more old people are finding themselves enrolling in “retirement communities†that are gray-haired, upscale versions). But we will, I think, need to figure out how to stop relying on both oil and ourselves, and instead learn the lesson that the other primates and the other human cultures never forgot: we’re built to rely on each other.
I was personally struck by some of his ideas. I do happen to know my neighbors, but only the ones who live in my building. I barely even say hello to other people I see as I walk down our little residential street. And when I go to the farmer’s market? No, I don’t talk to people. But the idea that I might (especially if I were going every week) is compelling. And come to think of it, there is one vendor at the City Hall farmer’s market that I’ve talked to — and at a supermarket or Harvest coop, I wouldn’t do even that.
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
Longer excerpts of the interviews I conducted with members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life have been published as a companion to the story I wrote. The excerpts include one interview that was cut from the edited story.
If you look at the lists of presenters at conferences on web design, you might think there is no diversity. But that’s not true, and the discrepancy is pointed out now and again. There’s currently another go-around about it on and between a number of blogs. Jeremy Keith of Adactio has a good post: The diversity division. I don’t agree with every detail of what he says, but it’s a good statement. I particularly appreciate his comments distinguishing between sex and gender.