A fascinating video watches a newt as it develops from a single cell.  

A very nice reflection on C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by Lev Grossman (whom I met once).  An excerpt:

But I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.

The whole modernist-realist tradition is about the self observing the world around you—sensing how other it is, how alien it is, how different it is to what’s going on inside you. In fantasy, that gets turned inside out. The landscape you inhabit is a mirror of what’s inside you. The stuff inside can get out, and walk around, and take the form of places and people and things and magic. And once it’s outside, then you can get at it. You can wrestle it, make friends with it, kill it, seduce it. Fantasy takes all those things from deep inside and puts them where you can see them, and then deal with them.

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alexievich interviews Soviet women who fought in the Second World War. Apparently many women did, in all sorts of roles. These stories had not been widely told before she set out to capture these stories in the 1980's.

This edition, which came out in 2017, includes material censored in the original publication.

This book was initially difficult for me to get into, in a way that her Voices from Chernobyl was not. But it soon became difficult to read. I have taken longer to read it than a book of its size should have taken me, because the material was so often difficult to read.

Today I was fewer than 100 pages from the end, so having the day off I decided to push through unto the end. And sometimes after reading a story, I was crying. At least once I yelled at the pain. One rarely is exposed to such evil and suffering.

Near the end of the book, Alexievich writes, "I don't see the end of this road. The evil seems infinite to me. I can no longer treat it only as history." I was glad to read this when I did, as I was feeling overcome.

Her final interview subject, Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, who was a junior sergeant in the guards, is one of her most eloquent and profound storytellers. She speaks of how after the war, the people who fought in it were looking forward to peace, for surely now people will be changed for the better and start loving one another. "People still hate each other. They go on killing. That's the most incomprehensible thing to me."

And she speaks the words that make reading this book and enduring the pain it reveals a worthwhile experience. She said, "Yet this must be preserved, it must. We must pass it on. Somewhere in the world they have to preserve our cry. Our howl . . ."

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American Primitive by Mary Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today I had the day off, so I spent the day reading a wide array of things, including this early volume of Mary Oliver's poetry. As always, there are some great lines and passages ("Joy is a taste before it's anything else"). And I admired where the homoeroticism was strong in this work and puzzled how even with that she was America's favourite poet for so many decades. Her ability to describe wild nature--in the outside world and in our own bodies--is exceptional.

We'll be doing a four week worship series based on Mary Oliver poems this summer, concluding with Pride Sunday. She was not only America's beloved poet, she was one of our greatest spiritual writers and greatest queer writers. So interesting that she combined all of those in one person.

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As we were preparing this year's Lenten worship theme Kondo's show was all the rage, so we decided to draw on some aspects of it--tidying up, sparking joy, etc. I've read the book in preparation for Lenten worship and have found some handy tidbits to quote. And a few ideas to put into practice in my own life. But I can't see how this ultimately could work in a busy life, in a marriage with two people with very different attitudes toward stuff, and with a preschooler and dog. Plus, even if I found a place where everything belonged the husband, kid, dog, houseguest, or cleaning lady would move it.

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An article at The Guardian argues that Americans have a false map of the nation in their heads and need to include all the territory the US controls.

Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard M. Rorty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some essays deserve five stars, for their engaging and witty explorations of pragmatism.

A few essays deserve one star. In particular I disliked "On Heidegger's Nazism." I have a negative view of Heidegger to begin with, but was open to being persuaded by Rorty. Not only did his argument not persuade me to change my mind about H, it confirmed my pre-existing opinion and made me think less of Rorty.

Reading Rorty I feel disabused of errors, but also left with very little. His social hope is that we will engage in incremental problem-solving and institution-building. On the one hand, this is what I spend much of my time doing as a minister, teacher, activist, and author. Rorty believes it is the only tool we have approaching a more egalitarian society. And it is fragile. But in these days of trouble (which he presciently predicted in the essay "Looking Backwards from the Year 2096") I wonder if this is enough. If Rorty is correct that social hope as he describes it is our only tool, then we are probably in for a lot of trouble.

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Today I attended the funeral of Anne Boyle, former Public Service Commissioner and Chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and husband of former Mayor and current County Commissioner Mike Boyle.

Michael and I met Anne and Mike shortly after we moved to Omaha when she was running for Lieutenant Governor.  And then whenever we saw them, usually at some sort of public event advocating for progressive causes, especially LGBT equality, they greeted us warmly as if they had known us for many years.  They helped make us feel at home in Omaha.

It was immediately impressive to us, who had been LGBT activists in Oklahoma in the Aughts, that these prominent public officials were such staunch advocated for LGBT equality.  That had not always been the case even with Democratic politicians in the first decade of this century.

Sometime last year our family was out to dinner at La Buvette and Anne entered the restaurant.  She saw us, her face lit up, and she came over to chat.  My mother was with us at the time, and she had a nice chat with Mom, but what I remember most was how she engaged 3-year-old Sebastian in conversation.  Even he remembers it, as I showed him Anne's picture and asked if he remembered when he last saw her.

Anne was a political force but always kind and compassionate.  Her funeral was filled with memorable stories and observations on her character.  I appreciate Jeff Koterba's cartoon in the paper this week, where a young girl asks her Mom, who is preparing to read a bedtime story, "Instead of a story, can you tell me more about Anne Boyle?  About her boldness and advocacy, her integrity and compassion?"  Those are four virtues I'd like to be remembered for.

I Know What Heaven Looks Like: A Modern Day Coming of Age Story by Lawrence T. Richardson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I heard Lawrence speak at the annual meeting of the Iowa Conference of the United Church of Christ. His vulnerability, resilience, and humor blew me away. He's coming to preach for us at First Central on Feb. 17, so I wanted to read his book ahead of time.

It is, at times, a harrowing read, as he recounts his childhood experiences of poverty, neglect, and abuse. But it is also a story of finding faith and a calling to ministry and how those brought healing and hope. Then it is also the story of a gender transition and the violent reaction that initially generates from family and his faith tradition.

This is a powerful book. I recommend it.

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Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works: Part 48 Harvard Classics by Blaise Pascal
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I had looked forward to the Pensees, though as I began to read it I was struck by how awful it is and my recurring thought was, "Why is this in the canon?"

Of course the answer is Pascal's wager, so I eventually quickly skimmed/skipped ahead to that portion and read it. But even it is only okay. I then skimmed/skipped through the rest of the book.

Pascal is a bad thinker, overwhelmed with a religious fundamentalism and what seems either an inability or a refusal to see the wide variety of possibilities.

He is also overwhelming pessimistic, such as this line, "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." I was surprised that he isn't more popular with the nihilists. There's this:

"When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, and should awake without knowing where he is, and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair."

Egads.

I was surprised that this paragraph isn't famous:

"What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?"

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A thorough survey of the dispute in philosophy of science on whether or not truth is the goal of science. This author ultimately argues that it is and characterizes truth as follows:

Scientific truths are the resilient and robust outcome of a plurality of scientific perspectives that, over time, have meshed with one another in their (tacit, implicit and often survival-adaptive) normative commitment to reliably produce scientific knowledge for us as humankind.

Then she makes one further point of note:

That is why, far from being an insufferable hindrance to scientific pluralism, truth is in fact its best safeguard in tolerant, open and democratic societies that are genuinely committed to the advancement of scientific knowledge in the very many faces it comes with.

Sisters in the Wilderness: The challenge of Womanist God-Talk by Delores S. Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finally read this classic theological text after years of reading other books that discussed it (there are still many classic theology books I haven't read, as I spent graduate school reading the philosophical canon).

I was interested in the places where she argues for something (such as her criticisms of traditional atonement theory) that have since become standard. In this way you see the influence of her work on the wider discipline.

I'm drawn to the concluding remarks on the survival strategies of black women: an art of cunning, an art of encounter, an art of care, and an art of connecting. I would like further constructive theology on these, which I think would be helpful for pastoral care and preaching. A key point is that simply enduring is itself "an act of defiance, a revolutionary act."

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An incomplete manuscript of Rene Descartes' entitled The Search for Truth is a dialogue that makes standard Cartesian arguments for the method of doubt in pursuit of certainty, the cogito as the foundation for knowledge, and the argument that we are thinking things and not our bodies. The book is motivated by the idea that all "the items of knowledge that lie within reach of the human mind are all linked together by a bond so marvellous, and can be derived from each other by means of inferences so necessary, that their discovery does not require much skill or intelligence."

I enjoyed reading this unfinished work.  It includes some humor not as evident in Descartes' other writings on the same topics.  And there are responses to some of the arguments against his views that appeared after earlier works.  It could have made for a great text to use in intro classes if it were finished.

3o of Europe's top intellectuals, including philosophers and Nobel-prize-winner authors, have written a manifesto defending Europe against the rise of nationalist populism.  Read it here.  Some excerpts:

Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight. It has been abandoned by the two great allies who in the previous century twice saved it from suicide; one across the Channel and the other across the Atlantic. The continent is vulnerable to the increasingly brazen meddling by the occupant of the Kremlin. Europe as an idea is falling apart before our eyes.

And

Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at stake forbids us from giving up.

Jake Sullivan's revealing piece in the Atlantic on how we should advance American foreign policy going forward.  An excerpt:

This calls for rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism from both its chest-thumping proponents and its cynical critics, and renewing it for the present time. The idea is not that the United States is intrinsically better than other countries, but rather this: Despite its flaws, America possesses distinctive attributes that can be put to work to advance both the national interest and the larger common interest.