The Dark Triad Speaks Out

Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, has a compelling chapter on the so-called "Dark Triad," consisting of clinical narcissists, Machiavellians and sociopaths.  These are people so constructed that, although they may have "cognitive empathy" -- a great sense of how somebody else ticks -- lack the sort of emotional empathy that results in compassion.   They can be dangerous and destructive people, but they can also be brilliant debaters and even inspiring leaders.

Attorney, professor and author M.E. Thomas is, by her own confession, "a diagnosed sociopath."*  Indeed, she has begun carving out a little niche as the nation's public sociopath, creating a blog devoted to the subject, writing a book and most recently an article in Psychology Today (May/June 2013; not online yet).

Thomas is all about mythbusting.  As she says, often, she's not a criminal.  Not because she is restrained from crime by any feelings of guilt or compassion, but because she understands that a safe, well-ordered world is one in which she can prosper.  The same is true of most sociopaths, who may constitute up to 4% of the population.  (On the other hand, they make of 20% of the prison population, and "are probably responsible for about half of all serious crimes," according to her PT article.)

She says, several times, that loves her family.  This seems natural enough, although it is difficult to imagine what "love" means to somebody whose life is lived without empathy, as a constant exercise in manipulation.  (Indeed, she tells a repulsive, Mean Girls-esque story of a man who was romantically interested in her, and how she used his interest to create havoc for another woman who was interested in him -- not for any particular reason, but because it amused her.  It is unnerving to think that somebody like that might be married, or have children.)

Most interesting to us, though, are Thomas's reflections upon her work and, yes, her faith.

Under the heading "Why Trial Law is a Sociopath's Fantasy," she writes:

My sociopathic traits make me a particularly excellent trial lawyer.  I'm cool under pressure. I feel no guilt or compunction, which is handy in such a dirty business.  Misdemeanour prosecutors almost always have to walk into a trial with cases they've never worked on before.  All you can do is bluff and hope that you'll be able to scramble through it.  The thing with sociopaths is that we are largely unaffected by fear.  Besides, the nature of the crime is of no moral concern to me; I am interested only in winning the legal game.

It it hardly surprising that some successful lawyers are dirty and amoral.  What does fascinate us is not only that Thomas has religious commitments, but that she is a Sunday School teacher:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a sociopath's dream.  Mormons believe that everyone has the potential to be godlike -- I believe this includes me.  Every being is capable of salvation; my actions are what matters, not my ruthless thoughts, not my nefarious motivations.  Everyone is a sinner, and I never felt that I was outside ths norm.

She then goes on to describe scamming and stealing from her classmates at Brigham Young University ( who were "even more trusting than the average Mormon"), and concludes:

But I am functionally a good person -- I bought a house for my closest friend, I gave my brother $10,000, and I am considered a helpful professor.  I love my family and friends.  Yet I am not motivated or constrained by the same things that most good people are.

Her story raises any number of theological questions, not least about differences between Mormonism and Christianity, the nature of "goodness," and the existence of natural law.  Beyond that, it is fascinating for its sheer strangeness.  Here we have the rare chance to glimpse into the mind of a person whose mind works very, very differently from most of ours -- and to be shaken by the sheer funhouse-mirror vision of an alternative humanity.  We wonder whether a sociopath could enjoy such an experience.

_______________________________________________
*"Sociopath" is no longer a clinical diagnosis; it has disappeared into the category of "antisocial personality disorder."

Roosevelt on Sheep and Shepherds

we saw this years ago, in Edwin Morris' magnificent The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.  The blog Mountain & Prairie sources it to TR's 1885 Hunting Trips of a Ranch Man, p. 121:

Cattle-men hate sheep, because they eat the grass so close that cattle cannot live on the same ground. The sheep-herders are a morose, melancholy set of men, generally afoot, and with no companionship except that of the bleating idiots they are hired to guard. No man can associate with sheep and retain his self-respect. Intellectually a sheep is about on the lowest level of the brute creation; why the early Christians admired it, whether young or old, is to a good cattle-man always a profound mystery.

Try not to think of it as you write your Sunday sermon.  Stick to Austin Farrer, for mercy's sake.

Not to Sound Unsympathetic ....

... but when bungee-jumping, it is best to calculate the length of your rope very carefully.  And then use just a little less.

A 22-year-old man was killed in Utah, swinging by a rope from Corona Arch.  His rope was too long, he hit the ground and was dead on the scene.

Apparently, this a popular pastime, made more popular by YouTube videos. The authorities have put up a sign asking people not to do this obviously dangerous thing, but, as one representative says,  "There’s no way on Earth you can tell someone not to climb a mountain."

Body (of Christ) Ink

Queequeg, harpooner of the ill-fated Pequod

The subject of tattoos came up recently, courtesy of Pastor Joelle.

We are long past the generation in which Leviticus 19:28 was cited censoriously in this regard.  For that matter, we are past the days when Richard Gere's father could snort, "You've got a tattoo.  Officers don't have tattoos."  (Or when our grandfather could insist, as he did to his dying day, that "pierced ears are for Gypsies.")  Across the Western world, we are living in what is almost certainly a golden age of body modification.  Any part of the body that can be is now inked, studded, scarred or be-ringed, on a regular basis, and not just on drunken sailors.

As it happens, Father A.'s father and brothers all have tattoos, mostly of a very modest kind.  Your diminutive correspondent, countercultural to the last, remains tat-free.  (Also, and perhaps not coincidentally, hepatitis-free.)  His scars have been earned in the customary ways:  a combination of dumb stunts and minor surgeries.  These days, he tries to avoid both.  Needles, even in the most clinical situations, make him shudder.

But ... what if?

A number of Lutheran pastors expressed interest in mounting a Luther rose somewhere on their bodies. The image may be a little obvious, like flag pins on politicians, but one sees its appeal.  Luther's personal seal is pretty, colorful, and -- to the initiate -- instantly recognizable.  You could do worse.

We ourselves were reminded of a seminary classmate who had caused to be inked upon his shoulder the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God in Hebrew.  It was, when read in conjunction with that Leviticus, a forceful and ironic expression of our classmate's antinomian theology.

But, upon reflection, we think that we might go with the old Reformation-era monogram, VDMA.  It comes from "Verbum Domini manet in aeternum," the Word of the Lord stands forever.

But its history is complicated.  The motto and its initials were adopted by the Elector of Saxony, and became deeply identified the Lutheran side of the Reformation.  They were adopted by the Smalcaldic League, and one sees them inscribed on cannons, swords and that sort of thing.  These days, it has been taken on as a logo by The Lutheran Quarterly and various other churchy groups.

We have to admit that we are leery about the company this motto keeps.  Guns and cannon are the least of it.  The Quarterly is a fine historical journal, but it is also ... annoying.  For some people, it is still haunted by the specter of late editor Oliver Olson and his lifelong battle against the use of the Eucharistic Prayer.  A few of us still remember Louis B. Smith's stunningly uninformed and mean-spirited review of a book by Gordon Lathrop, many years ago.

But, a quick search of the interwebs assures us, the Friends of Forde Foundation is the least annoying of the groups to adopt VDMA.  Paul McCain has had it inscribed on his personal handgun.  A website called Gnesio (oy!) uses it to advertise the convocation of a Lutheran mini-denomination.  And so forth.

Still, abusus non tollit usum and whatnot.  It's a powerful motto, with deep resonance.  If, for some presently unimaginable reason, we were moved to get a tattoo, this might very well be the one.

Cardinals Innumerate?

There is nothing strange about a bunch of bishops who have been trained, extensively, in theology, philosophy and languages.  This is about what one might expect -- and desire.

Nonetheless, Anthony Judge seems disappointed.  He has created a roster of the cardinals, indicating each man's areas of education, both in "social" and "natural" sciences.  It's worth a read.   Judge concludes (or should we say judges?) that

... very few cardinals have any formal training in the "natural sciences", most notably in mathematics. It would be an exaggeration to claim that cardinals were dangerously innumerate -- as this might however be claimed by mathematicians (or by other faiths attaching greater significance to numbers and their symbolism).  

Only eleven cardinals have training in the natural science column.  One is an economist.  The most promising of those, regrettably, is O'Brien -- trained in chemistry -- who has resigned his duties.  Several of the others are emeriti, and none have been named among the papabili.

Judge seems to think that evident the lack of training in math and science is a problem for church leaders.  While we doubt that it poses any serious problem at the level of day to day operations, except perhaps at the Vatican Bank, Judge may still be on to something.

For since the 17th century, our society has been reshaped by the progress of the natural sciences, which (particularly in the case of physics) cannot be understood properly without the use of sophisticated mathematics.  This has become far more the case over the past 75 years than ever before.

It is at least arguable, then, that a meaningful engagement with modern society must involve at least a respectable grasp of math and science.  One doesn't want to push this idea too far; it is surely possible to engage, up to a point, without a specialized degree.  While we are in an era when scientists seem to pass themselves off as a new priesthood, priests need feel no need to pass themselves off as scientists.  Moreover, there are plenty of highly numerate Roman Catholics, priests among them, so it is not as though the church has no resources in that department.

Still, one can only believe that the Roman Catholic church (and any other church, and any other cultural institution) would be better equipped for its work with a cadre of senior leaders who could grasp the power of quantitative tools, and interpret them for those among the faithful who cannot.

Andrew Sullivan, from whose blog we were referred to Judge, takes this argument even further.  He says that

... the kind of priesthood that would include that kind of experience [i.e., of science] would not insist on celibacy. If women and married priests were admitted, the range of skills, backgrounds and experience would definitely help the church convey its message more effectively. 

This seems illogical.  If married men and women were admitted to seminaries, the only thing of which one could be certain would be that more married men and women would have theology degrees.

As it happens, our own seminary class included several chemists, a rocket scientist, and (if we are  not mistaken) a psychiatrist.  But this was a function of their late vocations, rather than of their sex or marital status.   In fact, compared to Protestants, Roman Catholic bishops have a fairly easy path, since they have more power to steer their most promising priests toward graduate study.  If they want more scientists, all they really need to do is make them.

Yesterday's Saint

What with our raging case of conclave fever (we're under medical treatment), we forgot to mention somebody yesterday -- somebody important, and too easily overlooked.  Her name is Gertrud Reichardt, and she was the first modern deaconess.

In 1836, a young Lutheran pastor named Theodor Fliedner, with his wife Friederike, opened the first "deaconess-house" in Kaiserswerth, thus beginning a movement that would sweep through the Protestant world.  Deaconesses, women consecrated to a life of Christian service, would quickly become a significant part of the Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches.  They cared for orphans and the poor, they nursed the sick and dying.  When Florence Nightingale was preparing to leave for the Crimea, she stopped in Kaiserswerth for actual training.  We have long argued that these deaconesses helped to create the modern professions of medical nursing and social work.

Gertrud Reichardt, then 48 years old, was the first woman to answer Fliedner's appeal.  Lavinia Dock and M. Adelaide Nutting tell the story in their 1907 History of Nursing:

Gertrude Reichardt, the first Kaiserswerth deaconess, was the daughter and the sister of a physician. She was born in Ruhrort in 1788 and was already a woman of mature years and of much practical experience as a nurse. In her father's home she had been accustomed to assist him with dressings and operations, and during the War of Freedom [i.e., the 1812-14 battle against French occupation] she had been his constant helper. When her brother became a physician she had gained further large experience in the care of the sick among his patients.  

She was admirably fitted for the work of the new hospital, and the Fliedners had long known of her and for a time had tried in vain to persuade her to take up the new and experimental post of deaconess. Finally, in the early autumn they had induced her to come and see the new hospital. It looked very bare and poor and she could not decide to remain; was, in fact, about to return home when a large bundle was brought in by post, which contained a quantity of new bed-linen, clothing, and ward fittings. This simple occurrence was regarded by her as a providential sign, and she promised to come in October. Two young women promised to come and assist, though not willing to become deaconesses. Gertrude remained in the service until 1855 when she withdrew to the House of Evening Rest (Feierabend Haus) for the old Sisters at the age of sixty-eight years.

On 13 February 1869, she entered the Church Triumphant.  (You can read other brief bios in English here and in German here.)

Let's be frank:  Without her combination of medical experience and devotion to God, Kaiserswerth would never have gotten off the ground.  Not only would the deaconess movement have been yet another forgotten Romantic-era flop, but it is quite possible that much of what it inspired -- nursing, social work, and public health -- would have developed very differently.  Many people owe a debt to Sister Reichardt who have never even heard her name.

Hawaii is Sinking

Slowly.

Still, it's an interesting story.  Apparently, the mountains in Hawaii are dissolving faster than the rate of soil erosion.  The culprit, according to some BYU scientists, is groundwater.  It's the enemy within, the hydrogeological fifth column.

So although the mountains will continue to grow for something like a million and a half years, after that it's all downhill, literally.

We'd evacuate now.

Scientism

Do you remember when scientists were, as a class, inclined toward intellectual modesty, restricting their public statements to observations, and sometimes speculations, on the natural world which were supported by evidence or at the very least mathematics?  How, then, did some of them come to be treated, in a line which runs at least from Einstein to Dawkins, as experts on things foreign to their expertise -- ethics for the physicist, religion for the geneticist?

If time permits, please read this essay by biologist Austin L. Hughes, in The New Atlantis.  Hughes is concerned to critique "scientism," the idea that natural science is able to replace the traditional work of philosophers in epistemology and ethics.  Although he writes much of Dawkins and Sam Harris, his real concern seems to be with the positivist school of philosophy, which made and makes dubious claims for the power of science, often in ignorance of the scientific method or its results.

Hughes has read widely, and thought deeply about the overreach of his colleagues, as well as what he calls "the abdication of the philosophers." The essay is a gem; here are a few of our favorite bits.

Defending Popper's definition of "science" as a method characterized by falsifiable claims about the natural world, Hughes says:

We have seen in recent years a growing tendency to treat as “scientific” anything that scientists say or believe. The debates over stem cell research, for example, have often been described, both within the scientific community and in the mass media, as clashes between science and religion. It is true that many, but by no means all, of the most vocal defenders of embryonic stem cell research were scientists, and that many, but by no means all, of its most vocal opponents were religious. 

But in fact, there was little science being disputed: the central controversy was between two opposing views on a particular ethical dilemma, neither of which was inherently more scientific than the other. If we confine our definition of the scientific to the falsifiable, we clearly will not conclude that a particular ethical view is dictated by science just because it is the view of a substantial number of scientists. 

The same logic applies to the judgments of scientists on political, aesthetic, or other nonscientific issues. If a poll shows that a large majority of scientists prefers neutral colors in bathrooms, for example, it does not follow that this preference is “scientific.”

Arguing against another, quite circular, understanding of "science" as any enterprise supported by "scientific" institutions Hughes makes several excellent observations.  He reminds us that the studies supported by the Soviet institutions, for example, produced readily falsifiable results.  In response to the proposal that science is self-correcting, and that its progress, while spasmodic is is always forward, he suggests that his own decades of professional experience do not support this, and warns against overconfidence.  He sums up much of the problem thus:

The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. 

Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett [who propose this definition] explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families ... are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.” 

This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, "Why, I resemble that remark."  But in fact, Hughes is here suggesting the sobering possibility that some scientists -- a smallish number, to be sure -- have claimed for themselves a place as arbiters of truth and makers of policy which is not, in the modern world, even accorded to priests or kings.

Bang, Zoom!

To the moon, Alice!  To ... the ... moon!*

It seems that a Gingrich presidency was never the only pathway into space.  All along, sneaky old Barack Obama has been hiding a secret plan to send manned missions to the Moon.  Now that he's been re-elected, the rockets should start flying soon.**

According to Space.com, the President has asked NASA to prepare plans for exploration of "the expansive space around the Earth-Moon system."  This seems to mean parking a manned craft at the Lagrange point, visiting the Moon and then a near-earth asteroid -- all to get ready for the push to Mars.

Sadly, the timeline for this is a little longer than we might wish.  Think parking at L2 in 2015 or beyond, Mars in the 2030s.  Still, if they're looking for a geriatric chaplain ....

The best part of the story, though, is that these plans really were kept more-or-less secret during the campaign.  Apparently, the Republican candidate might have argued that this was a big government program.  Which it is -- the kind we like.
____________________________________________
*For the record, we can't watch the Honeymooners anymore, just because of this repeated threat of spousal violence.  How infected are we by the dread virus of liberal angst?
** Sorry, Pakistan.  We didn't mean those rockets.  Sore subject, right?

NASA is Our Hero

We at the Egg are often heard harrumphing about the fact that we do not yet have the personal jetpacks we were promised for the Year 2000.  We are still reeling from the GOP's shortsighted decision to choose a presidential candidate who might win over Newt Gingrich, who promised to flame out in a spectacular fashion -- but also promised to build us the damned lunar colony we've been waiting for since 1969.

But you know what?  Real science is cool too.  And although the fact that we now live in the era of commercial spaceflight, of Chinese space stations, and of a decommissioned space shuttle fleet may sometimes make NASA's glory days look like a thing of the past, it ain't necessarily so.

In a few hours -- 5:31 a.m. on Sunday, GMT, which is 1:31 a.m. in New York -- NASA will land the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.  If you haven't been following the story, this may sound ho-hum:  What, another robot buggy looking at rocks?  But there's so much more to it than that!  For one thing, this robot buggy is nuclear-powered truck.  For another, the thing is going to climb a 3-mile-high mountain.  And for a third, the new thinking is that Mars may have as much underground water as Earth does, which makes the search for evidence of life (and the prospect of colonization) a lot less impractical.  But the biggest thing, for us, is the landing itself.

Forget the airbags.  They're going to drop this sucker onto the surface using retro-rockets and a freaking space crane.  How's that for pushing the edge? (Here's a text description from iO9, our source for pretty much everything we know.)  

Here's a mock-up video.  It's 11 awe-inspiring minutes of what NASA hopes will happen:

Mind you, there's always room for error.  The distance is such that the landing can't be controlled by human beings; this is all going to be done on auto-pilot, and we won't even know if it has worked until a few minutes after the fact.  Some people at NASA describe the incredibly complex maneuver as "seven minutes of terror." Everybody knows that it may fail, which is -- of course -- one of the risks of exploration.

Today, we read (also at iO9) that they're even planning to film the landing from a second spacecraft, already in orbit.  It's an iffy proposition -- Curiosity will be hurtling toward Mars at hundreds of mph, the other craft is moving, the controllers are hundreds of millions of miles away.

But you know what?  Even if there are no pictures -- heck, even if there is no landing -- this is one of the most ambitious pieces of space exploration ever attempted.  The engineering skill involved is immense.  So, sure, SpaceX shot some cargo up, the Chinese managed to dock with their own station, and we need the Russians to give us a boost getting to ours.  But when any of those guys can build a 2000-pound nuclear robot truck, send it into space, then drop it with pinpoint accuracy into a crater on Mars using absolutely new technology, all the while taking pictures from your other orbital craft -- well, let them give us a call.  Until then, NASA is our hero.

The Infidel Particle

The Higgs boson, long predicted, seems to have been identified by experiment.  This is enormous news in the world of physics, since it validates the so-called Standard Model of the universe.  The press loves it, because of the name inadvertently given to the thing by a Leon Lederman, when editors rejected the original title proposed for his book, which would have been "The Goddamned Particle."

As an aside, we note the different situations in two neighboring nations, each with a partial claim to Higgs-related glory.

The word "boson" was coined by Paul Dirac, giving credit to the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), who worked with Einstein and directed the physics program at Dacca University.  The Indian press (here, here, here) has been eager to make sure that we all know this, and just a bit miffed that this Higgs fellow is getting all the press.

Mind you, a Pakistani physicist also deserves some credit, which his homeland prefers to deny him.  Abdus Salam (1926-1996) was one of the two physicists who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, and shared his Nobel prize with Steven Weinberg, the other.  He was an important figure in Pakistani science and government until 1974, when his religious community, the Ahmadi sect, was declared to be heretical, and subjected to intense persecution.  Salam left Pakistan, and could not return safely.  Even after his body was returned for burial, the tombstone -- reading "First Muslim Nobel Laureate" -- was defaced.

Please do note the difference between life, culture and religion in the world's largest democracy, which wants to make sure that one of its heroes gets a place in the world's textbooks, and Pakistan, which has literally had one stricken from its own.

The Future of Wine

Wine is doomed! Global warming has imperiled the international wine industry. By the end of the century -- and maybe much sooner -- the fabled wines of France, Italy and Iberia will be little more than a memory.

Or, on second thought, maybe not. At the moment, high-quality wine grapes are growing in places like Britain, where they have not grown since the later Middle Ages. At the same time, there is no evidence that the flavors of the great European vintages (or Napa Valley) have been affected. In other words, there is more good wine in circulation than ever before; we are living in the golden age of viticulture.

These are the competing conclusions drawn by John McQuaid, in an article posted at Yale's environment360. In an age of sound bites and over-the-top alarmism, it may seem mealy-mouthed on McQuaid's part to resist confidently projecting a single scenario, whether of doom or of comfort. It took us a moment to remember that serious journalism, like any other sort of serious fact-based discussion, used to routinely resist following after Chicken Little. What a strange place the past is, even for those of us who have been there!

Anyway, the article is interesting for anybody who cares about wine. And why shouldn't we? After all, it is a sacrament.

Note to self: stock up on tawny port. Just in case.

Octopi Wall Street!

That was one i09 reader's comment on this astonishing piece of video:

Yes, that's right: a walking octopus. An octopus that hauls its gelatinous body out of the water, crawls across the land, drops a crab off with some onlookers (at 2:08), and then flops back into the drink.

We knew they were clever creatures, easily the smartest of the invertebrates -- apart from an occasional bishop -- but we had no idea they could walk. Frankly, we find the idea disturbing.

A couple of other i09 readers made Cthulhu jokes, which were inevitable, but another told an absolutely freaky story about a science teacher who thought kids were stealing fish from his tanks. So he set up a camera, which filmed the nocturnal shenanigans of an octopus. This monster of the deep was able to squeeze itself through a quarter-sized hole, crawl along a counter, climb into another tank, eat a resident, and then escape back the way it had come -- covering its tracks.

We at the Egg, for one, welcome our cephalopod overlords.

The Incredible Shrinking Dark Ages

Nothing in my many years of reading about the Middle Ages had led me to suspect that the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day.

Nor was his science just a sidelight. According to a chronicler who knew him, he rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in the Christian Church “on account of his scientific knowledge.”

To my mind, scientific knowledge and medieval Christianity had nothing in common. I was wrong.

This is from a fascinating Religion Dispatches interview with Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Abacus and the Cross, a biography of Gerbert d'Aurillac (c. 946-1003), who reigned as Pope Sylvester II.

As regular readers know, we at the Egg are fascinated and impressed by the importance which traditional Christianity attaches to the systematic study of the natural world -- in other words, to science. You know: churches as solar observatories, Galileo on the pope's payroll, that sort of stuff. As we have often pointed out, the existence of the Vatican Observatory is an anomaly only to those who don't really get what Christianity was about before the rise of Fundamentalism.

Brown is a science writer with an interest in the Middle Ages, and even she was surprised by the extent of Sylvester's scientific interest. A Frenchman sent for advanced training in Barecelona, and therefore exposed to the wonders of Islamic science, he

... was the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero. He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. ...

Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority. He experimented. To learn which of two rules best calculated the area of an equilateral triangle, he cut out square inches of parchment and measured the triangle with them. To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models and devised an equation. ...

Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and constructed globes on which their positions were recorded relative to lines of celestial longitude and latitude. He (or more likely his best student) wrote a book on the astrolabe, an instrument for telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert and his peers knew very well was not flat like a disc but round as an apple.

Sylvester sounds remarkable, and Brown's enthusiasm for him seeps through the interview. Even if you plan to buy the book tomorrow, though, read the interview, if only for her fascinating description of what it takes to look at a rare manuscript in a French library.

Here, though, is what all this has us thinking about: the "Dark Ages."

Anybody who reads history knows that this term is unpopular and misleading. (Regine Pernoud's book on on why this is so, published in 1977, remains in print and is especially popular with religious conservatives.) But the term lingers in the popular imagination, and not without some cause. After the eclipse of Roman power, the societies of Western Europe certainly did have a rough time of it compared to, say, Byzantium and the Caliphate. For beautifully-imagined description of how this may have felt, read Iain Pears's Dream of Scipio.

When Fr. Anonymous was a boy, his sixth-grade textbook still spoke of the entire period between about A.D. 500 and 1400 as the Dark Ages, teaching us tots that all was ignorance and barbarism until the Renaissance. We quickly learned that this was nonsense; history is full of little "renaissances," like those of Charlemagne and especially of the 12th Century. For a long time now, we have seen historiography divide the period into "Low" and "High" Middle Ages, with the pretty clear implication that the "High" Middle Ages -- basically, starting in the 11th century -- were the period of the glorious Gothic churches, the advent of Aristotle upon the Christian world, and polyphony. In contrast, the "Low" Middle Ages were, umm, still pretty dark.

Sylvester's story confuses the picture a good deal. Consider this:

Pope Sergius IV, who had been Gerbert’s papal librarian, wrote his epitaph [posted at St. John Lateran]. It reads, in part: “The emperor, Otto III, to whom he was always faithful and devoted, loved him greatly and offered him this church of Rome. They illuminated their time, emperor and pope, by the brilliance of their wisdom. The century rejoiced.” Upon Gerbert’s death, Sergius said, “the world was darkened and peace disappeared.”

How prophetic those words, written in 1009, now sound. Less than a hundred years later, a pope would launch the first Crusade, and The Scientist Pope would be branded a sorcerer and devil-worshipper for having taught the science that had come into Christian Europe from Islamic Spain.

"The world was darkened." That says a lot, dunnit? One of the great scientists of the tenth century was branded as a sorcerer in the 11th -- and, by the way, the brand stuck; only recently has Sylvester's reputation begun to recover.

In the same way, we have sometimes observed, the Renaissance gets a free pass. Witch-hunting, for example, was not (as some people still imagine) a product of the early medieval era; it began slowly in the 1300s and reached its fever pitch during the 16th and 17th centuries. That is to say, during the Reformation, and among Protestants as much as Papists.

So when were the really dark ages? We suppose it depends upon definition. But the era of the Crusades, especially the period from 1202 forward, look pretty damn dark. So, much as we hate to admit it, the Reformation -- at least when considered as a run-up to the Thirty Years' War. For that matter, the brutalities of the colonial period, which began in the Renaissance and continued until 1960, are dark as a dungeon. Nor do Nazism, Sovietism and the two World Wars look really bright. And, hey, the endless peril of nuclear and biological terrorism is no day at the beach, either.

So, really, we're living in the Dark Ages right now, aren't we?

Yup. That's what sin gets you, friends. All ages are dark, more or less equally so, because we human beings are what we are. But then, all ages are bright and full of new life, too, because God is what God is.

A Dinosaur in the Church

And no, this isn't a joke about all those cardinals too old to vote.

The beautiful Mother Anonymous once served a parish whose church building had a dinosaur in its stained glass windows. The members were quite proud of it, and rightly so. How many church windows can there be that are devoted to the evolution of life?

Still, the Cathedral of St. Ambrose, in a town near Milan called Vigevano, goes the wife's old church one better. It has an actual dinosaur skull built right into it.

This wasn't done on purpose. The cathedral was built in the 16th and 17th centuries, using marble from a quarry now noted for its abundance of fossils. But it was only recently that a paleontologist, Andrea Tintori, identified the skull, which is embedded in a section of the altar rail. Story and pics here.

This is a neat discovery, made a bit more amusing by the hue and cry of Anglicans the world over, claiming that they have dinosaurs too, you know.

Every Pastor's Dream

No, not a parish with no vestry meetings. Better. Way better.

A researcher at Temple University has discovered a way to dramatically improve the brain's ability to recall names.

Good news: it really works, no baloney. Bad news: it involves electrical stimulation to the brain's anterior temporal lobes. We're not sure, but this doesn't sound like the sort of thing one does at home. Still, get us a transcranial direct current stimulation machine, maybe with a decent bottle of merlot, and we'll give it a shot.

More Data Points, ET Edition

Last post, we connected some dots in the world of religion. But how about the world of an imminent extraterrestrial invasion?

Consider, if you will, these recent developments:

• Last week, the Times of London wrote about the United Nations' first Ambassador to Extraterrestrials. Oh, the UN denies it. They say she watches the skies ... for asteroids. Right.
• This week, group of retired Air Force personnel spoke to the National Press Club with remarkable frankness about UFO sightings in the 1960s. Apparently, the flying saucers kept buzzing our nukes.
• The Keck Observatory and astronomer Steve Vogt have discovered the first Earth-like planet outside our solar system. It's called Gliese581g, and given the vastness of space, they found it pretty darn quickly, huh? Almost as if they had been ... told where to look.

Hmm. Add it all up, and what do you have?

Now, we're not saying that the secret One World Government, having known about the existence of alien visitors to Earth for decades, has recently been told that these visitors are ready to reveal themselves publicly. We're not saying that, because it would be crazy. But if, let's say, Zork of the Interstellar Abyss had recently sent Ban Kee Moon a memo to that effect, what would Ban have done? Obviously, begged for a few weeks to get Earthlings ready for the greatest shock in human history.

And we're not saying that the OWG (or Trilateral Commission, or Knights Templar, or Skull and Bones) has started a slow release of "new" facts to the media, slowly preparing us to reconsider the very the claims it has spent half a century discrediting. That would make us sound like the sort of paranoid crackpot who holes up for days on end in a cramped basement, talking to himself and running off mimeographed newsletters that he sends to PO boxes without names attached. (Which, come to think of it, is exactly what blogging amounts to).

Nope. We're not saying that. All we're saying is what a wise newscaster has already said:

"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."

"Quantum Flapdoodle"

The phrase comes from physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It is used by psychologist and professional skeptic Michael Shermer to describe Deepak Chopra's abuse of quantum physics as an argument for the existence of God.

We don't know much about Chopra. We have always figured him for the guest-on-Oprah type, Dr. Phil or Marianne Williamson with a veneer of Eastern exoticism. We knew that he was a physician, and that a little bit of science worked its way into his schtick, but we didn't know quite how far he went. Nor do we now, apart from Schermer.

But if Shermer is to be believed, Chopra is one of those people who read The Tao of Physics as a youth, and took it a little too seriously. That is, he does not merely use the natural world as a metaphor for God, but as a guide to God's actual being. God acts in strange ways; so do subatomic particles; ergo -- goes this line of reasoning -- elementary particles reveal God to us.

This confusion of Creator and creation is an old error, and an easy one to commit, but theologically dangerous. It is one thing to say, as we ourselves did in a sermon once, that the Deus absconditus is like dark energy, vast and unknown. It is quite another to say that dark energy is God. That's a crass confusion of spititual and phyisical realities, a bit like the medieval notion that Purgatory was an identifiable geographic place, to which access could be gained by entering certain caverns. (The picture is just that, from the Hours of the Duc de Berry).

The reference to Purgatory touches on Shermer's point, which is that Chopra uses the language of physics to replace the language of medieval Christian theology, while describing a God who is to all intents and purposes the God of the Scholastics. Shermer calls this "God 2.o,"and even has a handy chart:

God 1.0	God 2.0
omnipresent fully man/fully God miracle leap of faith transubstantiation Council of Rome supernatural forces heaven hell eternity prayer the Godhead the Trinity forgiveness of sin virgin birth resurrection	non-local wave/particle duality wave-function collapse quantum leap Heisenberg uncertainty principle Copenhagen interpretation anti-matter dark energy dark matter space/time continuum quantum entanglement general relativity special relativity quantum erasure quantum decoherence virtual reality

We note the presence of the virgin birth but the absence of the Incarnation and atonement, which reminds us of one weakness of this sort of thinking: physics has no language for sin or forgiveness. Without these, the rest of theology is pretty much crap.

Now, the study of the natural world does indeed have a place in theological studies, and a larger one than Protestantism has usually given it. This was clear to the medieval Church, which designed some of its churches as solar observatories, to more precisely date Easter. It was far more clear to the Church during the Renaissance. People often complain that Galileo was put on trial; they usually forget that he was working for the Pope at the time. In fact, the Pope still employs an astronomer, a Jesuit who is an expert on the mathematics of alternate universes (as the joke goes, in case they need to be evangelized).

But the flapdoodle approach, while useful for wowing people who toggle between Oprah and the Discovery Channel, won't hold up to any serious examination, either by theologians or by physicists.

The Hebrew Universe

As described in the Old Testament and rendered by artist Michael Paukner. Click the link above to learn more, at i09.

"A Protestant Atheist"

Philip Pullman writes a book; Christopher Hitchens reviews it. When Richard Dawkins reads the thing, we suppose, the circle is complete.

The book in question is called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and it proposes that Mary -- the one you and I may sometimes call a Blessed Virgin -- gave birth to twin sons. One of these is Jesus, a charismatic teacher given to making the occasional over-the-top statements about leaving one's home and family to follow him. The other is Mary's favorite, to whom she gives the private pet name Christ. This, um, Christ makes it his business to write down the things that his brother says and does. Encouraged by a nameless Greek fellow, Christ takes ever greater liberties with the truth, turning more-or-less ordinary events (people sharing food so that everybody eats) into supernatural ones (a miraculous feeding).

We have not read the book, and yet Hitch's description seemed instantly familiar. Of course it did -- we had learned it all in seminary. (Or rather, since our own seminary prided itself on a neo-orthodox disposition, we learned there to dislike it.) This is the Gospel according to the Jesus Seminar. It is little more than story told by two centuries, and more, of theological liberalism. Heck, PBS even made the same point, with a series called "From Jesus to Christ." Get it? Cuz they're different.

Once you hypothesize an "historical Jesus" who can be distinguished from the Jesus described by Scripture, and start making claims about him which are not supported by Scripture, you arrive pretty quickly at the place where Pullman seems to be: believing that "a good man" has been betrayed by a cabal of priests and schemers who, for their own purposes, turned him into the Son of God. Pullman even claims that his character's logia are "much closer to what Jesus would have said." Closer, apparently, than the Bible.

Hitchens gets this, and sums it up quite nicely:

This is ... to raise the possibility that Christianity can be salvaged from itself, or at any rate from its later accretions, by a sort of “back to basics” revisionism. The difficulty that Pullman never quite confronts is that this involves ... an unmediated contact with the original message. Atheist though he is, Pullman turns out to be a Protestant atheist.

This is a clever turn of phrase, even if owes a debt to Leslie Wetherhead's "Christian Agnostic." Indeed, it seems pretty clear the Pullman and Wetherhead do drink from the same fonts, the difference being only in how they respond to what we may call, for lack of a less ugly phrase, "the liberalist hypothesis" concerning Jesus. One, concluding that the stories don't fit with a credible reality, concludes that they matter for other reasons; the second concludes that the whole thing has been a vicious sham which he will now unveil. (Paging Bart Ehrmann, as well as every other disappointed fundamentalist.)

Anyway, the review is modestly interesting, if only as further testimony to something we have long believed, which s that much (but not all) of the "New Atheism" is really just the howling of disappointed Christians. It has less to do with truth and falsehood than with their own emotions and experiences.