"Ground Zeros"
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Hendrik Hertzberg ends his latest, masterful commentary on the mosque near Ground Zero with a passage culled from the correspondence of a Founding Father of the United States:
“In a famous letter—the one that holds that the United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens’—George Washington offered a benediction:
May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
Lower Manhattan is a little short on vines and fig trees nowadays, though there are some excellent wine bars. Washington’s point remains. His letter was addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. But, as he knew, Muslims are Abraham’s children, too. By the McCain standard, George Washington was a three-time loser: as President, he lived in New York City; the nation’s capital bears his name; and, even by the standards of his time, he was an élitist. Nevertheless: he was right.”
"Britney's Conversion Diary"
Trent Gilliss, online editor
For those of you who haven’t gotten to that late July issue in the stack of New Yorkers on your coffee table or just gave up and unsubscribed like me, Krista just clued me in on this satirical commentary by Andy Borowitz.
This series of mock diary entries about Britney’s conjectured conversion to Judaism experience all begin with “Shalom, Diary” until the final entry when she “abandons” the process because the rabbi won’t indulge her points system. Although it can seem a bit mean, Borowitz does get at the whole pop star conversion thing and the faddish tendencies of celebrities. Now, whether this is a publicity stunt or media speculation (based on this photo of her wearing a necklace with a Star of David pendant) to begin, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
A caution to more sensitive readers: the piece does contain a fair amount of foul language (and an excessive use of exclamation points for dramatic affect *grin*).
Secrets and Families
Kate Moos, Managing Producer
Honor Moore has a memoir coming out in May called The Bishop’s Daughter, which was excerpted recently in The New Yorker. It tells the story of her father Paul Moore, a prominent, progressive Episcopal bishop in New York who passed away in 2003, and it reveals what had been a personal and family secret: that this father of nine children and sitting bishop had many homosexual liasons and apparently at least one long-term relationship with a man.
Although Honor Moore’s account is understated, and written with remarkable compassion for her father, this story disturbs on so many different levels I’m not sure I can count them. It raises the spectre of the Episcopal Church’s deep division over the installation of an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, a few years ago. It reminds us of the destructive power of the closet. It begs the question of how Paul Moore managed this falseness and somehow kept his world from absolutely crumbling. And, it surfaces another in a fairly remarkable recent string of revelations about sexual secrets in the lives of powerful and famous men — men, in particular, for whom keeping such secrets had extraordinary and inevitable consequences.
Adding to the pathos, a letter from three of Honor Moore’s siblings in this week’s New Yorker questions the ethics of her posthumously outing her prominent father. Certain to sell books, but what are we really learning (anything?) about spirituality and sexuality, and secrets?
The Ineluctable Modality of Numbers
by Rob McGinley Myers, associate producer
Catching up on my New Yorker reading, I ran across this article from the March 3 issue about the way the human brain is hardwired for math. It reminded me of my own peculiar sense of numbers as a kid, especially the numbers 1-10. At some point, around 1st grade, my brain gave those numbers distinct personalities, genders, and even relationships with each other. The number 6 for instance was an awkward, nerdy boy, and the number 9 was a sophisticated young woman. 6 looked up to 9 like a cool older sister, but she couldn’t stand him, and whenever they were multiplied or added, 9 couldn’t wait for the computation to end. She much preferred the company of 4 and 8, both of them cool, confident boys, though 8 was more disaffected than eager, cheerful 4 (I could go on and on like this).
What’s fascinating to me is the author Jim Holt’s statement that, according to cognitive science, “We have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general.” To me, numbers feel like a human invention, just as alphabets and words are human inventions, but it’s apparently more like numbers are a part of nature. And according to this research, our brains grasp the rudimentaries of math as intuitively as we grasp hunger, thirst, and love.
It made me think of Janna Levin’s response on our show “Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth” when Krista asked her, “Does the fact that one plus one equals two have anything to do with God?” Levin said, “If I were to ever lean towards spiritual thinking or religious thinking, it would be in that way. It would be, why is it that there is this abstract mathematics that guides the universe? The universe is remarkable because we can understand it. That’s what’s remarkable.”
About the images: top photo by jbushnell/Flickr and second photo by Genista/Flickr
Reading The New Yorker on the Way to New York
Krista Tippett, Host/Producer
I am a “faithful” reader of The New Yorker - for all the kinds of writing and reporting they do. They’ve also by the way had some brilliant pieces on religion in recent years, as the whole field of journalism catches up with this subject, its importance in human life, and the intellectual and spiritual content that has been missed by traditional journalism for too long. But this kind of list still puzzles and throws me - an announcement of a New Yorker conference on “the near future”, with:
“theorists, designers, economists, philosophers, ethicists, animators, inventors, musicians, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, scientists, artists, politicians, engineers, financiers.”
Where are the theologians? Why this assumption that philosophers and ethicists can hold their own in pressing, intellectual conversation - and have relevant and essential insight to add to the mix - and not religious thinkers?
On a lighter note, I love this spiritually profound and true cartoon.
The Star Market
Kate Moos, Managing Producer
I love Marie Howe’s work, and her books What the Living Do and The Good Thief are favorites. Here’s a new poem I happened across in The New Yorker.
