Les Miserables: “To love another person is to see the face of God”

When Jean Valjean reenters French society after serving a 19-year sentence for stealing bread, his existence has become defined by retribution and the struggle to survive. So when a bishop takes him in, Valjean steals the bishop’s silver and escapes into the night.

But Valjean’s world is unmade when the bishop forgives him, gives him the candlesticks as well, and challenges him to become an honest man because, as the bishop says, “I have bought your soul for God."

“I am reaching, but I fall,
And the night is closing in,
And I stare into the void,
To the whirlpool of my sin,
I’ll escape now from this world,
From the world of Jean Valjean,
Jean Valjean is nothing now,
Another story must begin.”

With that, Valjean breaks his parole, adopts a new identity, and eventually becomes a businessman and mayor, and Inspector Javert relentlessly pursues him.

Javert’s and Valjean’s lives wind through and intertwine with a swirling mosaic of other characters. Fantine suffers harassment from the factory foreman and her coworkers, loses her job, sells her locket, her hair, and herself in an effort to support her daughter, Cosette. The Thenardiers ostensibly care for Cosette but are more interested in the money she might bring in—as a boarder…or a blackmail victim. A group of students foment an insurrection. But when Javert goes undercover to help put down the insurrection, his identity is discovered, and Valjean saves his life.

Valjean’s kindness and forgiveness shatter Javert’s world, which had been defined by the law, retribution, and his identification with the law:
“I am reaching, but I fall,
And the stars are black and cold.
As I stare into the void
Of a world that cannot hold,
I'll escape now from the world
From the world of Jean Valjean;
There is nowhere I can turn;
There is no way to go on....”

Valjean’s love and forgiveness change him and those around him. Javert, though he remains true to his principles, ultimately demonstrates the inadequacy of his understanding.

But it is not just a powerful story, deep character development, or great production that makes it soar—though Les Miserables has those things. There’s something about the world the characters inhabit and the way they relate to one another.

Because “love is everlasting,” those who love do so in the context of something greater than themselves. Something that has meaning beyond their lifetimes. And it inspires hope that real redemption is possible, not based on accumulated merit or happy endings but in relation to something more, so that—in Valjean's case—there's more to being human than survival—for Marius and Cosette—love is possible despite the loss that happens along the way and—in Eponine’s case—even unrequited love has meaning and dignity.

“Do you hear the people sing?
Lost in the valley of the night,
It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light;
For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord;
They will walk behind the ploughshare, the will put away the sword.
The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!”

It approaches though does not state explicitly what C.S. Lewis in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe called deeper magic—“…when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”

Or to borrow from another British literary figure, it inspires hope everything sad might someday come untrue.

Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s original French musical came out in 1980, based on Victor Hugo’s novel. Cameron Mackintosh heard the score in 1982, and in 1985, the original London production opened with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer and sets by John Caird. Mackintosh’s new 25^th anniversary production of Les Mis features some new orchestration, and the set design by Matt Kinley uses light and projection based on Hugo’s paintings and adds a powerful sense of place and motion through the story. Les Mis plays in Dallas, Tex. through Jan. 1, 2012.

Phantastes: Love and the "Good Death"

In his introduction to George MacDonald: An Anthology in 1946, C.S. Lewis wrote, “The texture of [MacDonald’s] writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it, there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament…. But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man.”

As Anodos encounters the danger and wonder of Faerie land and struggles with himself, the reader alternately and sometimes simultaneously experiences his joys, shame, sorrows, and hopes. Despite the weaknesses Lewis describes, or perhaps partially because of them, MacDonald’s work has a certain…Faerie…quality to it. In some ways, it’s not unlike what the protagonist, Anodos, experiences as he reads in the Faerie Queen’s library.

If, for instance, it was a book of metaphysics I opened, I had scarcely read two pages before I seemed to myself to be pondering over discovered truth, and constructing the intellectual machine whereby to communicate the discovery to my fellow men…. Or if the book was one of travels, I found myself the traveller. New lands, fresh experiences, novel customs, rose around me. I walked, I discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my success…. With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognizing the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.

When first Anodos arrives in Faerie land he only partly sees and vaguely understands its residents. He is cared for, threatened, rescued; he loves at first in a halting, possessive way; and he squanders the benefits others give him. Gradually others become visible to him not for who they are to him but for who they are in themselves; he experiences brotherhood and then humility.

…I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero will barely be a man, that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed my ideal soon became my life, whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal….

Writing of the first time he read Phantastes, C.S. Lewis said,

A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination….

MacDonald does acknowledge the incident of death—the cessation of life—but “good Death” as Anodos comes to long for it embodies the death to self that allows a person to truly and sincerely love. For MacDonald, this love is the preeminent reality of the universe. Thus, Anodos can say, “…I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good….”

Anodos’ struggle with himself concerns not survival and achievement but renouncing survival and achievement in order to see himself and his achievements in the context of others, and to measure his actions based on others' good. But MacDonald does something more for the reader. One comes not just to understand Anodos as a character in a story, but in Anodos' heart-wrenching regret and desire to love truly, one sees one's own heart exposed.

Niall Ferguson on civilization's "killer apps" and the rise of "The Rest"

The Elves Are Gone

The evening after Grandma's graveside service, I walked across the lawn in front of Grandma and Grandpa's house. Night was pushing dusk over the western horizon. It smelled like fall.

I used to look in and see Grandpa and Grandma reading or watching the evening news. They were always home. I could always go around to their back door, and they'd always have time to talk.

It's been almost eight years since I moved to Oklahoma City. But I could always go back and visit.

Now those windows are dark.

This idea of ending and loss, even in new beginnings, runs through J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings myth. Time and characters have a trajectory and a purpose. Tolkein imagines the history of Middle Earth in consecutive ages. Gandalf's purpose is to be the Enemy of Sauron. Events can be cyclical but not circular.

And the characters don't necessarily understand these changes and often experience loss in the process. After Bilbo's journey in The Hobbit, the characters do not recognize the full significance of everything they have experienced. In particular, they do not realize the full significance of the ring Bilbo found.

Somewhere toward the end of The Two Towers Frodo and Sam are working their way into Mordor:

"I don't like anything here at all." said Frodo, "step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid."

"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into? "

"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."

"No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it and the Silmaril went on and came to Erendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?"

"No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. `But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later or sooner."

Though loss can have meaning in this context, it still hurts. "I wish it need not have happened in my time." said Frodo (referring to the rise of Sauron). To which Gandalf responds, "So do I…and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given, us…."

Frodo and Sam eventually make it to Mount Doom and destroy the ring, but Gandalf's ethic comes at a price:

"Are you in pain, Frodo?" said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side (on the anniversary of a wound Frodo received on his quest).

"Well, yes I am," said Frodo. "It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today."

"Alas! There are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured," said Gandalf.

"I fear it may be so with mine," said Frodo. "There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?"

Gandalf did not answer.

The return of King Elessar and the defeat of Sauron ushered in a new age in Middle Earth history, but these goods did not erase the price paid to win them. And with the passing of the elves into the west, other things were lost as well.

There will be other joys…but not those. The hurt can heal, but there's no going back.

Better than most authors, Tolkein captures the art of the good ending, not just the happy ending. And in so doing perhaps echoes the Biblical sage:

It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.

For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fools;
this also is vanity.

Surely oppression drives the wise into madness,
and a bribe corrupts the heart.

Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

Inception and Reality

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate thief, using dream sharing technology to swipe secrets from people’s minds. But the game changes when a competing CEO hires Cobb and his team to plant an idea in Robert Fischer’s mind just as Fischer (Cillian Murphy) succeeds his father as head of a corporate empire.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) explores human creativity, how ideas take root in people’s minds, relationships, dreams, guilt, and the consequences. And it all happens in a swirl of action that threatens at any moment to break the spell and annihilate Cobb and his crew.

Reality for Cobb and his associates resembles a three-dimensional tapestry of interwoven events, ideas, and characters. And within this reality, humans can create but not from nothing. Dreams are real but dependent on realities outside our minds—and the accuracy of our deepest perceptions of those larger realities.

The story makes the most sense when experienced through Cobb’s eyes as he struggles to maintain his grip on reality so that he can reconcile his past and reunite with his family. And where other films have gotten bogged down in philosophical dialogue Inception explores the everyday implications.

The suspense is less about what’s going to happen and more about what’s happening, what’s real. And in the process, the story invites us to experience the story less as a complicated story arc and more as we experience our lives—in the ever-complicated present.

The Lives of the Na’vi: James Cameron’s Avatar

As Avatar begins, paraplegic Marine corporal Jake Sulley rolls off the troop transport shuttle and finds himself caught between the military culture he knows and the scientists more interested in Pandoran biology than in understanding him.

In order to function in Pandora’s atmosphere and study Pandora’s people—the Na’vi—Dr. Grace Augustine’s team developed technology that allows a human’s consciousness to inhabit a genetically modified Na’vi body.

The mining company funds Augustine’s research, but scientists don’t always share their patrons’ goals, and when Sulley shocks everyone by infiltrating the Na’vi, he finds himself caught between conflicting ideas of reality.

The vacuous bad guys allow anyone to dislike them and perhaps help the movie avoid becoming purely political. They also symbolize human technological sophistication and superficiality.

The Na’vi connect neurologically to other life forms; their civilization and culture are stored in a collective biological memory instead of libraries or hard drives; and daily life has a sacramental rhythm. The story doesn’t develop Na’vi theology beyond this point, but the contrasts between alienation and connection, between technology and organism, and even between knowledge and experience run throughout the story.

Taken all together, Avatar has enough of everything—beauty, character development, and story—to make for an engrossing 162 minutes, even if you think there’s something more fundamentally wrong with human society than greed or a lack of connection to one another and the environment.

Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

Reason, Faith, & Revolution is based on lectures Terry Eagleton gave at Yale in 2008, and he begins his criticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—or “Ditchkins” as he refers to them together—by asserting the atheists have made an error of genre. For Christians God is not a “mega-manufacturer” but “the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” God needs nothing for his own existence and creates the world out of nothing. Creation is the ultimate act of an almost reckless generosity.

“Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science.”

The scientist starts not only with matter but with the assumption of intelligibility, which means science isn’t talking about the same stuff Christianity is talking about. In a metaphysical sense, science does not go back far enough to explain existence.

For Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, God the Creator is not a hypothesis about how the world originated. It does not compete, say, with the theory that the universe resulted from a random fluctuation in a quantum vacuum. In fact, Aquinas was quite ready to entertain the possibility that the world had no origin at all. Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is. He imagines that it is either some kind of pseudo-science, or that, if it is not that, then it conveniently dispenses itself from the need for evidence altogether. He also has an old-fashioned scientistic notion of what constitutes evidence. Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places…. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Eagleton then describes how God’s independence from creation forms the pattern (because mankind is made in God’s image) and justification (because God by definition does not need humans) for human freedom. “God for Thomas Aquinas is the power that allows us to be ourselves, rather as the love of our parents allows us to be ourselves.”

According to Eagleton, “Jesus’s message is that God is on their side despite their viciousness—that the source of inexhaustibly self-delighting life he calls his Father is neither judge, patriarch, accuser, nor superego, but lover, friend, fellow-accused, and counsel for the defense.” On this basis, Eagleton interprets the crucifixion as an act of solidarity with “the destitute and dispossessed.”

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. This traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

In the second chapter, Eagleton further unpacks his Marxist hermeneutic. He sees “Ditchkins’” disdain for this graphic image of Christianity as bourgeois shock on the part of those who don’t have categories for depravity or redemption. He writes, “The religion Marx attacks betrays just the kind of sentimental, disembodied understanding of the spiritual that one would expect from a hard-headed materialist.” He writes:

The Enlightenment was deeply shaped by values which stemmed from the Christian tradition. But it was also right, as Ditchkins argues, to see actually existing religion as part of the barbarism and despotism it sought to face down….

At the same time, this enlightened liberal humanism served as the legitimating ideology of a capitalist culture more steeped in blood than any other episode in human history…. Only Marxism recounts the story of how these two contrasting narratives are secretly one. It reminds of the mighty achievements of Francis Bacon, but also of the fact that he believed in torture….

Eagleton points out the narrative of reason and Progress has not eliminated faith and transcendence. Instead, he sees new age religion and fundamentalism (both Christian fundamentalism and Islamism in the Muslim world) springing from the same historical ground as “Ditchkins”—new age being a form of religious escapism and fundamentalism a reaction by those Capitalism left behind.

He indicts modern Christianity, particularly American Christianity, for betraying its revolutionary beginnings. And then he draws some strained connections, particularly when he’s critiquing the American cultural response to 9/11 for which he relies perhaps too heavily on Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America.

These events, Eagleton says, indicate an insufficiency in modern Progress, which does not eliminate religion but makes it into an increasingly political ideology. Protestant or Catholic social teaching might describe this movement as displacement of the civil category by the religious—with the accompanying distortion of religion. As he says at the end of chapter 1 and discusses again in chapter 2:

What is distinctive about our age when it comes to religion, then, is not just that it is everywhere on the rise, from Islamist militancy and Russian Orthodoxy to Pentecostalism and Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America. It is also that this resurgence often seems to take a political form…. Postmodernity is the era in which religion goes public and collective once again, but more as a substitute for classical politics than a reassertion of it….

Thus, Eagleton is apparently not surprised when terrorists readily mix 21^st century weapons with what they claim is a pure historic religion. And though he discusses colonialism and subsequent policy as a political factor favoring the terrorists within the Muslim world, his thought leaves open the possibility a similar materialism lies at the root of Muslim terrorism and “Ditchkins’” belief in Progress.

He argues Western leaders misunderstand their enemies because they fail to recognize how Western ideas have robbed religion of its revolutionary transcendence and reduced it to materialistic, legalistic, political ideologies. The individualism the West depends upon to protect itself from oppression has erased “social solidarities” and undermined itself. It is not clear how Eagleton distinguishes his Marxist interpretation of Christ from other forms of politicized religion.

In the third chapter, he argues reason cannot reach “all the way down,” that it must draw upon “resources deeper, more tenacious, and less fragile than itself.” Here Eagleton compares faith to love:

If I am in love with you, I must be prepared to explain what it is about you I find so lovable, otherwise the word “love” here has no more meaning than a grunt…. But I am also bound to acknowledge that someone else might wholeheartedly endorse my reasons yet not be in love with you at all. The evidence by itself will not decide the issue. At some point along the line, a particular way of seeing the evidence emerges, one which involves a peculiar kind of personal engagement with it; and none of this is reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them.

If Jesus is not actually risen, Eagleton echoes the Apostle Paul, “Christian faith is in vain.” But faith is more than merely verifying a set of persuasive facts. And for Eagleton, this is also true for socialists or those who believe in individual freedom.

Thus, he believes “Ditchkins” fails to show people of faith are actually less reasonable or less rational. The disagreement actually involves different underlying assumptions, none of which can be proven in a way that would compel belief.

Postmodernism, however, distrusts certainty because the twentieth century’s murderous ideologies were characterized by certainty. But according to Eagleton, this reaction misses the way humans actually are, because these underlying belief systems involve more than intellectual persuasion or volitional choice. “It is more common to find oneself believing something than to make a conscious decision to do so—or at least to make such a conscious decision because you find yourself leaning that way already.”

In the Christian idea of “conversion,” Eagleton finds something closer to actual human experience.

In the fourth and final chapter of his book, Eagleton addresses how current pluralistic, multicultural democracy—or capitalism—requires a cultural consensus but at the same time cannot take these beliefs too seriously.

This presents a problem when pluralistic society runs into a full-blooded critique as it does when Muslims emigrate to European countries. Eagleton thinks of these issues in terms of “civilization” vs. “culture.”

Civilization means universality, autonomy, prosperity, plurality, individuality, rational speculation, and ironic self-doubt; culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances, as apparently as built into us as our liver or pancreas, in the name of which men and women are in extreme circumstances prepared to kill.

In these definitions and his subsequent discussion, Eagleton seems to conflate the idea of civilization as taking tea between meals, having a written alphabet, and refraining from cannibalism and the idea of civilization as a distinct group of cultures sharing some fundamental similarities that distinguish them from other groups of cultures. As a result, Eagleton tends to minimize the distinctions Samuel Huntington has described, and Eagleton’s definition of civilization ends up sounding Western rather than universal.

Postmodernism, he says, has made an absolute out of culture. Historic religion powerfully united the transcendent and the everyday, the universality and personal peculiarity. Modernism increasingly tore civilization and culture apart.

“Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?

Eagleton isn’t optimistic culture will be able to unite peoples where politics have failed—or where Marxism has been defeated, but he observes the radical impulse to bring civilization and culture together has migrated to theology.

We find ourselves, then, in a most curious situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the problem, as Ditchkins rightly considers, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which might contribute to some of the answers.

In conclusion, Eagleton contrasts his “tragic humanism” with “Ditchkins’” “liberal humanism.”

Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals did not continue to stand in its way.

Some might criticize Eagleton for his Marxist interpretation of Christianity or his westward-leaning definition of civilization, but Eagleton isn’t pretending not to have no viewpoint, and he apparently tries to be fair—from his perspective.

Gothic Cathedrals, Worldviews, and City Planning

G.K. Chesterton used Gothic architecture to illustrate aspects of a Christian worldview, including in his discussion of Christianity’s paradoxes in the sixth chapter of Orthodoxy.

Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral, the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced.

In a recent City Journal article, Theodore Dalrymple discusses the ideology and touches on the worldview of the architect Le Corbusier. He quotes Le Corbusier on Gothic architecture.

Gothic architecture is not, fundamentally, based on spheres, cones and cylinders.... It is for that reason that a cathedral is not very beautiful.... A cathedral interests us as an ingenious solution to a difficult problem, but a problem of which the postulates have been badly stated because they do not proceed from the great primary forms.

Dalrymple points out Le Corbusier’s vision went beyond just physical space and comprehended a whole view of society. He quotes Le Corbusier again.

We must create farms, tools, machinery and homes conducive to a clean, healthy well-ordered life. We must organize the village to fulfill its role as a center that will provide for the needs of the farm and act as a distributor of its products. We must kill off the old voracious and ruthless kind of money and create new, honest money, a tool for the fulfillment of a wholly normal, wholly natural function.

Then Dalrymple traces all this to Le Corbusier’s view of humanity. Dalrymple put it this way.

A terminal inhumanity—what one might almost call ‘ahumanity’—characterizes Le Corbusier’s thought and writing, notwithstanding his declarations of fraternity with mankind. This manifests itself in several ways, including in his thousands of architectural photos and drawings, in which it is rare indeed that a human figure ever appears, and then always as a kind of distant ant, unfortunately spoiling an otherwise immaculate, Platonic townscape. Thanks to his high-rise buildings, Le Corbusier says, 95 percent of the city surface shall become parkland—and he then shows a picture of a wooded park without a single human figure present. Presumably, the humans will be where they should be, out of sight and out of mind (the architect’s mind, anyway), in their machines for living in (as he so charmingly termed houses), sitting on machines for sitting on (as he defined chairs).”

Read Dalrymple’s full article.

"Undercover Mosque"

This controversial documentary aired on the United Kingdom's Channel 4. It does a good job documenting the "evangelistic" efforts of the Saudi religious establishment, and it confronts pluralistic secularism with a starkly different view of the worldview.

Some subjects make statements so radical that the context doesn't matter—the claim that the AIDS epidemic in Africa came about because of intentionally contaminated vaccinations for example. But the documentary does not attempt to differentiate degrees of radicalization or explain how individuals and organizations who publicly disavow terrorism can also advocate political jihad.

Rescue Atlanta: Church for the Homeless

Some churches have an outreach to the homeless. Rescue Atlanta is a church designed for the homeless. Watch the slide show or visit their website.

"Translation:" Different messages for different language groups?

Noah Tucker's analysis of the Muslim Uzbekistan website points out the difference in content between the English (international), Russian (international and local), and Uzbek (local) versions of the site, and Tucker draws preliminary conclusions about each version's target audience based on the differences in content from one to another.

Tucker's example, a website produced by exiles outside a country, raises further issues about how these dynamics would function differently, depending on whether a communicator speaks from inside or outside a country and whether the communicator is identified within the subject community or outside it.

Certainly newspapers and magazines have long published regional or language editions without the expectation that content would be identical, and sometimes these different editions come from a completely different set of writers. Thus, the key might be to identify which differences represent more than a differing emphasis or interest and suggest contradictory facts or intent.

Even then, further investigation would have to explore whether these apparent contradictions spring from differences in writers' worldviews, a deliberate attempt to project a different image to different audiences, a natural incongruity in the way writers communicate to different audiences, or something else.

My Sister's Keeper

As her sister, Kate, nears the final stages of leukemia, 11-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) files suit in order to avoid donating a kidney.

Through two thirds of My Sister’s Keeper, the filmmakers manage to paint a wrenching portrait of a family torn by one daughter’s battle with cancer and the conflict experienced by her sister—whom their parents had in order to supply bone marrow, a kidney, and stem cells.

The movie raises questions about genetic manipulation, a child’s freedom, parental rights, the right to receive or refuse medical treatment, and the limits of medicine’s ability to prolong life. But in the end, the complexity and depth of the characters suffer from the filmmakers’ attempt to resolve the whole story by affirming an individual’s right to control his or her own body.

The film does not paint over the realities of illness and death, and the story is still powerful enough to look for meaning in the other major theme—family relationships. But one can’t help wondering what the filmmakers could have accomplished had they stepped further outside the current individual self-determinism.

Jill Greenberg's McCain Photos for Atlantic Monthly Criticized

Hispanic Business
Sept. 15, 2008
Jessica Haro--Assistant Editor, Hispanic Business

"Atlantic Monthly was blindsided last week with the news that Jill Greenberg, the photographer who shot a recent cover image of Sen. John McCain, deliberately used unflattering lighting and only did minimal touchups in an effort to cast the presidential candidate in a negative light. Ms. Greenberg also took the opportunity to photograph Sen. McCain using a discretely placed strobe light to make him appear monstrous for pictures she later digitally altered and posted on her Web site."
Read the whole thing.

Al Jazeera says prisoner "party" breached code of ethics

Reuters
Thu Aug 7, 2008 9:31am EDT
"JERUSALEM, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Arabic television station Al Jazeera said on Thursday a July broadcast in honour of a Lebanese prisoner freed by Israel violated its code of ethics.

Israel said on Wednesday it would no longer assist the Qatar-based network because of the July 19 birthday party broadcast for Samir Qantar, who spent 29 years in an Israeli jail for a 1979 attack in which five Israelis were killed.

The network said in a statement that its editorial board concluded that the broadcast "violated Al Jazeera's Code of Ethics". The network said it "regards these violations as very serious and will assess what action is necessary". Read the whole thing.

Al-Jazeera director says western journalists unprepared

Organ Grinder Blog
Posted by Leigh Holmwood Sunday August 24 2008 15:43 BST
"...The director general of Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera has said western news organisations are not covering the Middle East properly as they don't fully understand the region.

Wadah Khanfar, giving the Worldview address [at Edinburgh TV Festival 2008], said the demands of 24 hour news meant reporters were often parachuted into the region with little local knowledge and put straight on air." Read the whole thing.