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Henry Imler August 29th, 2007
SILVER LAURENCE FISHBURNE somehow uses his powers to destroy GALACTUS.
IOAN GRUFFUDD
Wait, did he just use the very powers granted by Galactus to destroy Galactus? That makes no sense.
JESSICA ALBA
They cast a brown-eyed, Mexican brunette as a blue-eyed, white blonde. This movie doesn’t even try to make sense, dude.
Henry Imler August 29th, 2007
When I started this program last year, my primary training had been in philosophy. My view of the study of religion consisted primarily of the study of what W.Z Smith’s calls systems. As such, I actually thought that my time in the program would consist of intimately learning about the various systems of ideas (whoops). The ensuing reality has been quite a departure from this earlier perception.
An influential axiom from undergrad was Aristotle’s dictum that “without the same set of definitions, nothing can be agreed upon.” As such, a universal definition of “religion” is highly desired. Such a definition would make the study of religion all the easier. W.C. Smith does a good job outlining not only the commonly used definitions of religion, but also outlining a history of the development of those ideas in the “West.” However, as W.C. Smith points out, any such definition of religion encounters problems. Not only is the term polyvalent and therefore without careful distinctions there is confusion, but also the hard categories ascribed within the term often do not correlate with what others would call “religion,” indeed, if these others even have a similar term in their language. In ancient Rome, religion primarily meant something like “duty” and this duty to the gods was not for personal gain, but rather for the good fortune of the community. Similarly, the closest term to religion in Sanskrit is “dharma” and while its meanings are more polyvalent than the West’s “religion,” none of the possible reasons closely resembles the definitions ascribed within the term religion. After all of this (and more) is considered, there is no easy, hard definition of what religion is, this leaves in its wake a considerable conflict with this paragraph’s opening dictum.
Not only are there the pragmatic concerns with the defining of religion, there is, in addition, moral concerns that need to be addressed in the creation of the definition. Primarily, there are moral implications of the effects of the definition on that which is defined that have been and easily can be overlooked. The process of the defining religion inscribes it with certain attributes. When one then studies the “religions” of other peoples, these certain attributes are then inscribed onto the people studied. This inscription of attributes onto the essences of other peoples raises white flags. What if these inscriptions are rejected by the people they are inscribed upon? What if no one bothers to ask them if they accept or reject these attributes? How does one name the other? Does one ask the subaltern for their permission? These are still do’s and how’s. There are still should’s that need to be considered. If one says that an atheist couple is performing a religious function when they are getting married at the courthouse and if you were to ask them and they deny it, what happens then? Are they merely deluded, fools, or worse? Is W.C. Smith right? Should one disavow the term religion?
Despite the above problems, it would be hasty to drop the term completely. While W.C. Smith is correct in saying that the term has a slippery definition, he is not correct in calling for its removal. The need for careful distinctions, subtlety, and nuance with a term is not warrant for dropping it from use. That is tantamount to intellectual laziness. J.Z. Smith rightly notes that religion is a term that describes a particular aspect of what the scholar is studying, not a wholly independent category. Operating from this approach allows the scholar engage people in a much more valuable manner.
Henry Imler August 29th, 2007
While I feel bad for the people that were looking forward to it, I can’t help but to laugh in a “I kick kittens” sort of way.
What’s the Burning Man? Well, I feel like it is some way of getting back at Ayn Rand,
whom I want to love. It it not, but that is what I like to think. To
enter into some realishness about the Burning Man, check out the wikies and the pedies, or the Burning Man website.
Henry Imler August 27th, 2007
What does the below passage mean?
dear John I want a man who knows what love is all about
you are generous kind thoughtful people who are not like you admit to
being useless and inferior you have ruined me for other men i yearn for
you I have no other feelings whatsoever when we’re apart I can be
forever happy will you let me be yours Gloria
Read more to see what it really says…
Henry Imler August 27th, 2007
Guess how much I spent on pens today.
Seriously. Guess
Wait for it…
Nope, it gets worse….
11 something.
It has been recommended to me that I learn the various declensions
of nouns and conjugations of verbs by associating them with different
colors. So, that meant I have to get 6 colors of pens. There was a 7-pack of the colors I needed in the kind of pen I love. It came to over 11 dollars.
Wow.
(I love the pens though; they even came with a nice little case!)
Henry Imler August 18th, 2007
Earlier this week, I posted on 5 possible reasons a man would be standing in my apartment with my wife’s iPod in his hand while wearing no pants.
That post generated a considerable amount of curiosity in the form of
bewildered emails, phone calls and even a couple of comments. Here is
the narrative form of the story. Its a bit long, but bear with me.
Henry Imler August 15th, 2007
1) The half naked (the lower half is naked, mind you) is
a diabetic and in need of some insulin. Mistaking the iPod in a pink
case for a first aid kit, attempts to get insulin from it. All he
really gets is some Fergie and a pissed off husband of the owner of the
iPod. After all, red+white does equal pink. However, if the blood sugar
turns out to be normal, more questions will ensue.
2) The man is a burglar and so crafty that he breaks
into people’s apartments with a cover of no pants. That way if he gets
caught holding the iPod by the angry husband, he can just act as
incoherent as Sean Vanity arguing immigration reform and no one will
suspect that he was actually trying to steal the iPod. Unfortunately
for him, this leads to a choice between leaving with the cops and going
to the hospital.
3) The man loves milk and yet does not know where to get
any. He figures that if he fiends confusion and breaks into someone’s
house and “looks” like he is stealing their iPod, then perhaps the
owner of the iPod’s angry husband will take pity on him and offer him
milk and an apple while trying to figure out where he lives. The man
has no car, so the man uses the public health transportation service to
get a quick ride to the hospital, where I am sure someone will give him
a ride to his home, or at least help him remember where he lives. This
approach to obtaining milk will net him a pair of my shorts, but little
else.
4) Perhaps the man was at a bar drinking. Perhaps
someone takes an unhealthy interest in the man and slips a little
hoo-haa into the man’s drink. The man, in the middle of the unhealthy
encounter decides to leave sans pants. Man is still drugged and is
attempting to get home, find his keys, find his phone, etc. The
druggedness of the man is responsible for his claims to my wife’s iPod,
to my apartment, then to the apartment of a very large Irish former
bouncer who likes to play board games, and to claims that his pants,
keys, phone are still inside my apartment. In this case, the man gets
to the hospital and escapes any sort of charges related to breaking and
entering.
5) The man actually works for the police and is part of
a little-known, but very effective program aimed at reminding people to
lock their doors even if they are at home. This program involves lots
of theatrics, having the police, firetrucks, and the paramedics show up
at people’s houses, and exposes the general public to people with no
pants. Despite this, it is quite effective in reminding people that
they should always keep their doors locked. All it costs the public is
the cost of sending emergency personnel to private citizen homes and
one pair of shorts to give to the undercover agent. This is probably
the most likely scenario.
I am not sure which of these possible reasons was behind the man
whom Meredith and I caught in my apartment holding my wife’s iPod and
wearing no pants. Meredith and I were home tonight when we heard our
door shut. I left the room we were in and entered our living room to
find a man holding her iPod and wearing no pants. As I talked to him,
he made not one lick of sense. He did get to leave with the paramedics,
however.
Henry Imler August 7th, 2007
I have been re-hashing some of my lecture notes from my class on the Reformation last semester lately. Here are five things I learned, in no particular order of importance.
1) Theology in the Catholic Church was incredibly diverse and tolerant before the Council of Trent… for in house disputes Before Trent, the Catholic Church’s theology was incredibly diverse. As a moderately educated protestant, I had always assumed/heard that the Catholic Church always had a strict, uniform theology and that was one of the things that Luther was rebelling against. Hardly the case. Luther got most of his theology from other Catholics; as a matter of fact, one of Luther’s most trusted mentors was a Catholic through and through. The Augustinian Order maintained a very similar theology as Luther did, but they never made the dispute a public matter. The Catholic Church was a watershed of differing theologies. There were constant, fierce debates on major theological issues. All of the theological differences were, of course, in house disputes, much like the Calvinism/Arminianism debates of today. As long as these disputes were kept “in house” then there were no charges of heresy. It was only when a disputed theological position was taken to the uneducated people, whom were not able to deal with the nuanced arguments and therefore were susceptible to being snatched away by the devil, was a person and idea considered heretical. Trent changed all of this. The council decided that one of the things to blame for what happened in the 1500’s was the lack of enforced unified doctrine. So they corrected this flaw in their system. Some people call Trent the end of “Catholic Reform,” the universalization of doctrine and practice ending the methods of traditional Catholic reform.
2) Man is born in filth, lives in filth, and dies in filth. Actually, filth is too much of a euphemization, properly stated, filthh should be sh!t. While I hesitate to use that more accurate word because I am afraid some will bypass the content and only glare at the cultural taboo, I include it because that is the closest word we have to how they characterized it. As crude as this sounds, there was a weird preoccupation with fecal matter, to euphemize the term even further. It was the predominate metaphor for the human condition. Sanitation systems were non-existent compared to today’s standards. Humans lived in filth. They used this term and the ideas connected with it to describe the human condition. Just about every writer, Luther, Erasmus, etc used this term constantly.
3) Human behavior, for Luther, could not be improved Luther thought that humans were so morally corrupted by the “sh!t of sin” that they could never become clean in the world. Justification was another matter, but when it came to morally lived lives, it was impossible. There was absolutely no possibility for an improvement of human behavior for Luther. As such, there should be no onus on the person, church, and governments to mold human behavior. Just keep the peace. This was a sticking issue with some of the other reformers, such as the hard-line Zwingli and Calvin. they believed that holiness could be successfully pursued… at least it should be. Hence, churches and governments should make people to live sinlessly.
4) For Luther, the only thing worse than a Catholic was a literalist Luther, along with Augustine, thought that biblical literalism was one of the worst ways to interpret the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I don’t know their views on Israel’s history, but I do know that both of them thought that only the foolish thought that Genesis should be taken literally. This goes for the six day creation and perhaps the flood, but I am unsure on that last point. What is funny, is that it is often the literalists that hold up Luther and Augustine as heroes of the faith even though these heroes would berate them for certain cherished positions. This is not a polemic against literalists, after all I am half of one, but more of a lesson on how divergent people can be in their views of scripture and still be Christians.
5) The Catholic Church before and during the Reformation was full of preaching One of the polemics that the Reformers leveled against the Catholic Church was its lack of preaching in the vernacular. They were so successful in this polemic that for centuries it was assumed to be true by the “winners” of the Reformation struggle, the West, the Protestants. It was only until recently that scholarship realized that this charge was polemical. Ironically, it was one of the after-effects of Trent that allowed for this discovery. With the standardization of doctrine after Trent came censures. The effect of this was the redaction of thousands of documents, including sermons. When the Vatican opened some of its vaults 10-20 years ago, they invited scholars to help categorize and index their contents. The scholars found thousands of redacted sermons that were given by Catholic priests leading up to and throughout the Reformation period. Contrary to popular conception, the Catholic parish priests, not just Bishops, were vigorously preaching in the vernacular. The Mass may have been in Latin and incomprehensible to the laity, but the sermon after the Mass was given in German, French, and Spanish. For the priesthood, it did not really matter what language the Mass was given in, for it was a ritual between the priests and God on behalf of the laity.
Henry Imler August 6th, 2007
Whew! I can’t believe how hot and humid it is. For the last few days
we have had temperatures in the upper 90’s with over 75% humidity and
no rain! When you look outside, there is a constant haze (and there is
barely any air pollution here in Columbia)
This morning when some friends of mine went for our morning run, it
was as if we were running for the first time in weeks, despite the fact
that Friday was our last trip out. On our first leg we were all getting
winding spikes in our sides - it was as if we just could not get enough
oxygen into our bodies.
Anyway, just wanted to complain ’bout that.
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