Books

My friends are publishing books faster than I can read them these days, which is probably a good thing; to wit:

• Rupert Read, Philosophy for Life.
• Andrew Basden, Philosophical Frameworks for Understanding Information Systems.
• Martin and Margot Hodson, Cherishing the Earth.
• Dave Bookless, Planetwise: Dare to care for God’s world.

On Saturday, I went to a day-conference ‘What is the world coming to? Ecological crisis and Christian hope’ at Redcliffe College, organized by the John Ray Initiative. Speakers included Ernest Lucas, Margot Hodson, and Dave Bookless.

On Sunday evening, we had a united service at the cathedral Christ Church, Oxford, for the centenary Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, with Bishop William Kenney (Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Birmingham) preaching.

“For I bless the PRINCE of PEACE and pray that all the guns may be nail’d up, save such are for the rejoicing days.”
–Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

Wow! Here’s a reading of Christopher Smart’s long, crazy, devotional poem “Jubilate Agno.” The readers are Frank Key and Germander Speedwell.

“It was written between 1758 and 1763, during which time Smart was incarcerated in Mr Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green.”

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Mr. Key’s Hooting Yard is at present my favorite podcast. If you like his reading voice but not his original writing, he’s also read a couple stories as part of the Escape Pod series, How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas and Hesperia and Glory, both of them worth a listen.

 

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Will the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali this week give us Contraction and Convergence? Then, will it be implemented as carbon rationing or personal carbon trading? Will the decresing annual ration give a form of demurrage (negative interest; with thanks to Cllr Dr Rupert Read)? By the way, the Joint Public Issues Team of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, and the United Reformed Church urges Britons to write their Members of Parliament about the Climate Change Bill.

Following Clive Lord et al.’s idea about citizen’s income, in this issue of New Left Review, Robin Blackburn proposes a universal pension of 1 USD per day. Can we have a universal ‘human rights’ income, on the strength of Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? (Dream on.)

In this week, as European Union heads of governments signed the Lisbon Treaty, I read the draft constitution of Corsica by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with thanks to Dr Bob Purdie).

‘Home economics’ is a redundant phrase.

I just discovered this article by Janine Schwab in PeaceWork Magazine. It’s about living in a foreign country, poetry and activism. It includes the author’s own translation of a poem by Viennese refugee Erich Fried.

Whosoever
from a poem
awaits salvation
should rather
learn
to read poems

Whosoever
from a single poem
expects no salvation
should rather
learn
to read poems.

Three important reports appeared this fortnight:

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Fourth Assessment Report ‘Climate Change 2007’: Summary for Policymakers
• UNAIDS: The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS: 2007 AIDS epidemic update
• United Nations Development Programme: Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world

My grandmother’s grandmother was said to be a Kavalan. Recently, a dictionary of the Kavalan language appeared (ISBN 978-986-00-6993-8). On pages 52 and 53, there are some proverbs (narrated by Ulaw Pan, reinterpreted by Abas, and recorded by Paul Li):

kua, aimu qa-rimk =ka haw!
sikawma=pa=iku timaimu.
qnaRu zin-na sikawman-ku timaimu: assi =ka trapus haw.
snaquni zin-na 'lak si, mai =ita q<um>nut.
nia-niana zin-na -ta nani na 'lak si, mai =ita paq-sukaw tu anem.
snaquni zin-na =ita na 'lak si, qa-nngi-an -ta anem -ta haw.
m-ati =ita sni-sni, mai =ita s<m>ap-sapang haw.
mangay =imu snaquni haw.
paqa-qa-nngi =ita m-atiw ta 'lak-an haw.

Alright, you do keep quiet, please!
I shall talk to you.
Because I shall talk to you[:] do not forget about the old teachings.
No matter what other people do to us, let’s not get angry.
No matter what other people say to us, do not feel sad.
No matter how other people behave to us, we should be nice to them in our heart.
Wherever we go, we should not be mischievous but behave ourselves.
You should watch out [for] what might happen.
We should be careful when we go to other people’s place.

The Kavalan people were evangelized by Saint George Leslie Mackay.

Recent books from Verso:

Slavoj Žižek (2000) The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For? ISBN 978-1-85984-770-1.

Terry Eagleton (2007) Jesus Christ: The Gospels. ISBN 978-1-84467-176-2. This is the New Revised Standard Version of the Gospels introduced by Eagleton and edited by radical cleric Giles Fraser. It is pretty cool that Verso is following the Gideons. On this note, I might mention that recently, I bought the Revised English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. My copies of both of these are with the Apocrypha (though the collection there is different), and the NRSV is the ‘Anglicized’ text; both are published by the Oxford University Press. I thought each of these represented very wide (as wide as allowed in the current climate) ecumenical English-language translation work in either side of the Atlantic.

I talked with Bob about this paragraph he wrote, and he said (among other things), ‘Life is messy.’

There is no liberty that is more important to liberalism than the freedom to form, embrace, criticize, reject, and revise theories of every sort, especially political theories. For this reason it is misguided to suppose the liberal defense of civil liberties is well served by drawing a perimeter of privacy around “comprehensive moral views,” about which disagreement is expected, leaving theories of justice in the public realm, on the other side of the perimeter. Read the rest of this entry »

Altruism, in the sense of regard and care for the good of other persons, is a crucially important aspect, but only one aspect, of the sort of regard for the goods of human life that is characteristic of the kinds of social and personal relationships it is best and most excellent to have. An ideal of altruism as antithetical to self-love, to be realized in a community in which each person would care for the good of all the others but not at all for her own good, is bizarre. It is as bizarre and inhuman as an egoistic ideal to be realized in a society in which each would be moved only by prudent self-interest. A more excellent sort of altruism will be one in which one enters sympathetically into a concern that one hopes, and in most cases believes, that the other person has for her own well-being. It will also not exclude a concern for the excellence of human lives, and human relationships, for their own sake. The relatively abstract notions of altruism, benevolence, and self-interest may bring a useful precision to our thought in certain contexts. I suspect, however, that the totality of an excellent concern, admiring as well as nurturing, for human good, relational and shared as well as individual, is better summed up in the richer biblical terminology of loving other people as oneself.

– A Theory of Virtue by Robert Merrihew Adams (ISBN 978-0-19-920751-0)

Last week I visited the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square, not far from Saint Paul’s Cathedral (sadly I did not get out in time to attend the Evensong). The trading floor (at the old site near the Bank of England) has been abolished for two decades, so now at this site there are only a couple of television studios, a few conference rooms, and some office space. The main tasks of the company now is to operate the stock exchange (which is totally computerized) and to regulate it. The computer servers would be too vulnerable to be kept on this site. So at Paternoster Square, as far as I could tell, only the consulting and public relations functions are left. Nonetheless, the presentation given to our group from the Chartered Management Institute was interesting. Of course, since now the Exchange itself is listed on its own Main Market, one could ask the question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?; but I refrained from so doing. Read the rest of this entry »