MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

A Strange Place to Call Home

A Strange Place to Call Home: The World's Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals That Call Them Home by Marilyn Singer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another beautiful children's book I picked up at the museum store. This one combines poetry, biology, and beautiful collage to talk about animals which live in strange and dangerous habitats. The scientific details about the animals are at the back of the book, but each page is a beautiful work of art with a poem. The poems are also in various forms, which the poet discusses at the close of the book. So it is also a way to teach about poetry. Science, poetry, art, all together. Very nice.

View all my reviews

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Over Thanksgiving weekend I visited Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas with Mom and Michael. While browsing the books, I saw this title from Michael Pollan. I had heard of it before, but had not considered it. This time it arrested me because I was about to begin a sermon series for Advent focused on desire. Hmm, would there be sermon illustration material in the book? I bought it.

And, yes, I used some of his stories of apples in my sermon the First Sunday of Advent. Clearly the illustration worked, as people talked to me about it through the following week, and even one church member posted on Facebook, "Am I the only one who has been thinking about apples all week?"

The main point of Pollan's book is that plants have evolved to match human desires and, thus, have succeeded at the evolutionary game. In other words, playing off of human desire has been good for some plants.

The book focuses on four desires and four plants, with interesting excursions and tangents in every chapter. Sweetness and apples; beauty and tulips; intoxication and marijuana; and control and potatoes. The book is one part exploration of human culture and one part exploration of botany. It is a joy, revelation, and delight.

Here is the story of Johnny Appleseed, tulipomania in Holland, and the potato famine in Ireland. There are excursions to Kazakhstan for the home of the apple and Peru the home of the potato. You learn about agri-business and the drug war and genetics.

Each chapter contained much of interest. I learned much about the development of marijuana and how the drug war has resulted in even more potent versions of the plant as growers have developed incredible new techniques. This chapter spoke about many of the hypocrisies of the drug war, often covered material, but within the context of a larger human desire. We need to be able to forget most of the information that we receive every day. There are natural processes built into the human brain to do this, but we can still become overloaded and have sought plant chemistry to help us with this. In fact, we use many different plants to alter our systems (caffeine, chocolate, chamomile, etc.). He also discusses how the plant-based high was perceived as a pagan threat by Christianity and connects the oppression of witches and sorcerers with their gardening abilities. Modern medicine is simply the controlled professionalization of this use of plants.

In the final chapter, on the potato, he discusses genetic engineering and modern agri-business. Wendell Berry is quoted a few times. It was also interesting to learn some of the history of the potato, particularly how it my be the one thing most responsible for the shift of power in Europe from the south to the north in the early modern era.

I recommend this book to all my friends interested in food, everyone who has read Wendell Berry, those who garden, and those who like history from the perspective that isn't focused on politics and government.

View all my reviews

Brief history of life on earth

An anthropologist studies evangelicals

A church member gave me a copy of a paper from the journal Current Anthropology entitled "A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind" by T. M. Luhrmann.  Here is the abstract:

This article argues that there is an epistemological style associated with much American evangelical Christianity that is strikingly different from that found in never-secular Christianities.  This epistemological style is characterized by a playful, self-consciously paradoxical framing of belief-claims in which God's reality is both clearly affirmed and qualified.  One can describe this style as using an "epistemological double register" in which God is described as very real -- and as doubted, in some way.  The representation of God generated by this complex style is a magically real or hyper-real God, both more real than everyday reality and in some way fictive.  The article goes on to argue that these epistemological features can be understood as generated by and generative of particular theories of mind.  The article argues for the development of an anthropological theory of mind in which at least four dimensions are important: boundedness, interiority, sensorium, and epistemic stance.

Luhrmann claims that evangelicals because they live in a pluralistic "deeply shaped by the awareness of doubt' have developed a "deliberately playful, imaginative, fantasy-filled experience of God" that is unlike anything previously seen in traditional cultures.  This is a supernaturalism that is "both vividly, concretely real and, at the same time, as playful as a kitten."

Luhrmann, who spent months engaging with members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, cites many examples of this playfulness.  One of the most vivid is the pastor who encouraged church members to pour a cup of coffee for God and act as if they were sharing that morning ritual.  God becomes the imaginary friend.  Luhrmann argues that this playfulness requires the congregants to "straddle multiple epistemic frames simultaneously."

In a section I found some affinity with, partly because it draws from C. S. Lewis (as much I did not find affinity with the theology revealed in most of the article), to experience God, one has to "live that romance, to recover the imaginative vividness of childhood, and through that fantasy to feel alive once more."  Or "You must go on a quest for God that is foolish and irrational not only in the eyes of the world but in your own."  Notice the use of "quest," which I obviously enjoy.  I too have defended the irrational aspects of faith, but more from the perspectives of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Hauerwas, etc.

A concise conclusion is drawn, "It was as if people overreached to make what they reached for more real."  Jamesian over-belief?

Luhrmann writes that the playfulness has developed because the congregants have to convince themselves to overcome the doubts that obviously confront them in a modern, pluralistic society.  They know they have doubts, so the hyper-real, fantastical playfulness is supposed to move them beyond those doubts.  She writes, convincingly that that is not the attitude of "never-secular Christianities" who have never had reasons to doubt their belief claims.

In the comments that follow the article, there is consensus that this is an important paper, even when the responders have some questions.  One comment, by Rebecca J. Lester makes an interesting point, that what is at issue is not doubt in God, but "doubt in one's capacity to fully atune to God."

In the replies to the comments, Luhrmann makes another interesting point, "I do think that the dramatic and deliberately cultivated range in the use of God concepts by evangelicals may serve a functional role in helping to protect them from the skepticism they feel around them."

Endeavor's final trip

Transgender Bird

If you've read the biology book Evolutions Rainbow, then this comes as no surprise, but scientists in New Zealand have discovered another transgender bird.

When did we become human?

An interesting post at the Cosmos & Culture blog by anthropologist Barbara King.  She goes over the key points in the timeline and asks the fascinating question if being "human" is a matter of anatomy or behaviour/cultural development?  If the latter, then were Neanderthals and Denisovans, who co-existed with us and engaged in complex behaviours also "human" even if they weren't Homo Sapiens?  And new research is revealing that our cultural activities date back to 100,000 years ago, much further back than earlier expected.

Big Freeze instead of Big Bang?

According to one new theory I read about here.  Very interesting:

How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so.

Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.

 

Altering fetuses has begun

In 2007 I was alarmed when Al Mohler suggested that Christians should alter fetuses in the womb to prevent them from being LGBT and wrote a series of blog posts on the topic.  I lectured on this topic at Wake Forest Divinity School in 2008.  

It now appears to be a reality.

I am deeply, deepbly disturbed.  This, folks, is far worse than Chick-fil-A.  We have cultural norms of gender, sex, and sexual orientation, and we are imposing those human-created cultural norms upon the diversity of God's creation.  The result is purging creation and the human species of those bodies and persons that belong naturally to it. 

Fossil hunting

I never dreamed it would be that easy.

Rick Brenneman, church member and scientist, collects fossils.  He has an entire room full at his house.  I told him I wanted to go with him sometime, and he invited me to go yesterday.

He and Felix picked me up early, and we drove to Griswold, Iowa to the East Nishnabotna River.  Rick had warned me to wear clothes and shoes that could get wet and muddy, as we'd be walking through the river.  And to bring along a backpack to store things I found and to carry them out.

As we began I would turn rocks over and look carefully at various things.  More than once I'd carry something over to Rick and ask, "Is this something."  He would very patiently say "No."

Then when we started finding things, it was so obvious that I felt stupid for having asked.  When a leg bone or a vertebrae is sticking up out of a sandbar, you don't need to ask, "Is this something?"  There was one sandbar where we wouldn't walk five feet without one of us finding something.

I came away with various leg and rib bones and some vertebrae.  My favourite bone was a verterbrae from an ancient bison hump.  The strangest find was a bone that Rick thought was a knuckle bone and surmised that it might be of a giant sloth, though he wasn't sure.  

He said I had the find if the day, when I located this jawbone of a large horse that Rick guessed was Ice Age era.  He thought all the bones were at least 10,000 years old and some maybe as old as 20,000.  

I never knew this would be so easy or so fun.