Larry Hurtado in Slate:

The idea of a real, personal resurrection—meaning a new bodily existence of individuals after death, in one way or another—did not originate with Christianity or with claims about Jesus. Instead, it seems to be first clearly reflected in Jewish texts dated to sometime in the second century B.C., such as the biblical book of Daniel 12:2. At the time, it was a genuinely innovative idea. (Alan Segal’s book Life After Death gives an expansive discussion of the origins of the idea of resurrection.) Many peoples of the ancient world hoped for one or another sort of eternal life, but it was usually thought of as a kind of bodiless existence of soul or spirit set in realms of the dead that might or might not be happy, pleasant places. In still other expectations, death might bring a merging of individuals with some ocean of being, like a drop of water falling into the sea.

The ancient Jewish and early Christian idea of personal resurrection represented a new emphasis on individuals and the importance of embodied existence beyond the mere survival or enhancement of the soul, although there was debate about the precise nature of the post-resurrection body. Some seem to have supposed it would be a new body of flesh and bones, closely linked to the corpse in the grave but not liable to decay or death. Others imagined a body more like that of an angel. But whatever its precise nature, the hope of resurrection reflected a strongly holistic view of the person as requiring some sort of body to be complete.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in CounterPunch:

Will there be no end to this tiresome “national conversation” as to whether a black man trumps a white woman, or vice versa, on our nation’s list of the wronged? One possible end might arrive, of course, when another white man is elected in November and American politics returns to business as usual. In the meantime, I would like to join the conversation, if only in order to bring to light the inanity of the relevant comparison, based as it is on a presumption of analogy between two social groups that are distinguished, conceptually and in reality, from the dominant group for entirely different reasons: in the one case, the distinction is based on a relatively short, 500-year history of economic subordination; in the other, it is a consequence of an evidently universal structural feature of human societies.

A few disclaimers. First, disciples of the Robin Morgan-school of feminism will probably fail to appreciate that the disanalogy between race and gender may be acknowledged without abandoning one’s feminist principles, even if these principles inform a feminism of a very different stripe: one that does not seek to justify masculine domination on normative grounds, but that nonetheless is genuinely concerned to take it seriously as a deep-rooted, rather than recent and superficial, phenomenon. Second, I confess I will be doing what, at least since Simone de Beauvoir, we have been told we must never do: conflating sex and gender. Of course, “male” and “female” are not just biological categories. They are also social categories, and they have vastly different connotations from culture to culture. They do not always correspond to the biological categories they are presumed to denote.

More here.

Will Drinker at Dan Drinker’s blog:

Dan has been following the presidential campaign with great passion.  He has been talking my ear off recently about Senator Obama and I decided, after his speech in our native Philadelphia, that it was time to ask Dan to share his thoughts.  I have always thought my brother to be an excellent judge of character and I feel his opinion is as valuable as the most famous or respected political authority because he speaks the truth and adds nothing more.

Dan Drinker Endorses Barack Obama from WDrinker on Vimeo.

[Thanks to Will Drinker.]

..
The Death of the Hired Man
Robert Frost

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table 
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.
“I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’
What good is he? Who else will harbour him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there’s no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’
‘All right,’ I say, ‘I can’t afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’
‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have to.’
I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there’s someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,–
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”

“Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.

“I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”

Read more »

From Nature:

Crave sweets? Well, stop blaming your sweet tooth. Researchers have found that mice prefer sugary water even if they lack a gene needed to taste it. Although the mice could not taste sweets, reward centres in the brain reacted when the mice drank water spiked with sucrose, but not when they drank water mixed with a low-calorie artificial sweetener. The results, published this week in Neuron ¹, suggest that mice can detect calories without relying on their taste buds — a finding that could change our understanding of the sugar cravings that can plague dieters and contribute to obesity.

The presence of a calorie-sensing pathway makes evolutionary sense, says study author Ivan de Araujo, now at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “The taste system evolved to allow animals to quickly detect what is worth eating versus what is not,” says de Araujo. “But the real reward that they need is not the taste itself but the calories.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one’s family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy. “There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

Lutz and his colleagues, including Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, director of the university’s Waisman Center for Brain Imaging where the study was conducted, took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators as well as 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Ezra Pound: Poet Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920
by A David Moody.

Pound’s early life story is in some respects not unlike that of T. S. Eliot, the man who in his dedication to The Waste Land called Pound “il miglior fabbro” (which can mean either “the better writer” or “the better craftsman”). They shared the same desire to escape from provincial gentility in America to Europe and perhaps especially to England, the same struggle to convince parents and family that the effort was one worth endorsing and financing, the same quixotic belief that poetry could be made to yield a living and that poets were a special class, and the same register of annihilating shock when in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.

It is always impressive to read of the sheer dedication and conviction with which Pound approached poetry, and of the immense hopes he entertained for its regenerative powers. In a single season between 1912 and 1913 in London, we find him taking up the Bengali master Rabindranath Tagore and advising the Irish genius Yeats. Moody writes:

The measures, melodies and modulations of the songs in their original Bengali, which he had Tagore sing and explain to him, interested him as a seeker after ‘fundamental laws in word music’ and seemed to correspond to the sort of metric he was working for in English. He went on to wax enthusiastic about the prospect of Bengali culture providing ‘the balance and corrective’ to a Western humanism which had lost touch with ‘the whole and the flowing’. ‘We have found our new Greece’, he declared. ‘In the midst of our clangor of mechanisms’.

More here.

Over at The Immanent Frame, Philip Gorski on Obama’s speech and civil religion:

In the context of Western, democratic, nation-states, there have been three main solutions to the “church-state problem”: liberal secularism, civil religion and religious nationalism. By liberal secularism, I mean a juridico-legal system that disestablishes churches and privatizes religion. (For purposes of the present analysis, I am treating republican secularism, such as one finds in France or Turkey, as an extreme variant of liberal secularism, of the sort that exists within the Atlantic world.) By civil religion, I mean a sacralization of the democratic polity and a celebration of the sovereign people that borrows heavily from theistic language and ritual. By religious nationalism, finally, I mean a sacralization of the national state and the election of the common people that glorifies blood sacrifice and rejects the restraints of the covenant…

The history of the democratic experiment in the United States can be narrated as an oscillation between these three “solutions” or, more precisely, as an ongoing competition between them waged by an ever-changing cast of politicians, parties and movements. These three solutions are, in fact, one way of defining left and right in American politics. The Democratic Party has typically embraced liberal secularism (Jefferson) or civil religion (Kennedy). The Republican Party has typically embraced civil religion (Lincoln) or religious nationalism, Bush the Lesser). Civil religion, then, is the “vital center” of the American tradition.

Insofar as the present political conjuncture involves a choice between civil religion and religious nationalism – I would like to dwell on them further and say a few words about the particular form that they have taken in the American context.

Over at the NYT, Oliva Judson’s third piece on mutations:

There are several reasons for this neglect of the benign [mutations]. One — dare I say it — is fashion. In the late 1960s, the geneticist Motoo Kimura proposed the neutral theory of molecular evolution. According to this idea, most mutations are either harmful (and will quickly disappear from the population because those bearing them die) or irrelevant. If this is the case, most genetic variation has no impact on fitness — the technical term for how good an organism is at surviving and reproducing. Kimura’s development of the neutral theory was enormously influential, and prompted a flurry of work investigating whether most genetic variation is irrelevant.

Then it was the turn of deleterious mutations, which became trendy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Deleterious mutations have been hypothesized to play a central role in a variety of evolutionary phenomena, including (and most prominently) sex. The argument is that organisms with a deleterious mutation rate above a certain threshold must reproduce sexually.

The reason is that sex purges deleterious mutations from the population: sex generates new gene combinations, and thus in each generation it creates some individuals with relatively few deleterious mutations and some with lots.

So it is with the Hotel Hiroshima. We checked in to a metaphoric Hotel Hiroshima—”we” as a culture—on Aug. 6, 1945, when the 16-kiloton atomic weapon detonated about 800 meters over a hospital here. (The hospital wasn’t the ostensible target; a nearby bridge was, but needless to say, the hospital and all those in it were vaporized.) Nearly 100,000 people died instantly or within hours from the original blast and the firestorms that followed (by the end of 1945, 140,000 were dead). Estimates of those who died over a longer period from radiation sicknesses, from radiation-induced cancers, and other disease sequela range far upward.

We checked in to the First Nuclear Age that day in 1945, and yes, sometimes we check out, in the sense of repressed memory, willed or unconscious denial, cultural amnesia. It’s happened for prolonged periods after the end of the Cold War. That all-too-brief “holiday from history” some called it.

more from Slate here.

Mr. Amis’s new book, “The Second Plane” (Knopf, 212 pages, $24), comes wreathed in a new controversy; but this time there is more at stake than teeth. Last year, the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, one of the more noxious presences on the academic literary scene, fiercely attacked Mr. Amis for comments he had made to an interviewer on the subject of Islam. Musing on how to combat Islamic terrorism in Britain, Mr. Amis had said: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms.”

The irresponsibility of this is only partly mitigated by Mr. Amis’s explicit disclaimer that such retributive measures were just “an urge.” But Mr. Eagleton put himself in the wrong when, rather than rebuking or rebutting Mr. Amis, he attacked him as no better than “a British National Party thug.” Mr. Eagleton went on to suggest that Mr. Amis had inherited his prejudices from his father Kingsley Amis, whom he characterized as a “racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals.”

more from The NY Sun here.

If it makes sense to speak of a Cold War culture in the United States—and it’s a concept that would have to accommodate a pretty wide assortment of artifacts, from Partisan Review to the transistor radio—then one of its classic moments was the comic-book inquisition. The event took place on April 21, 1954, at the Foley Square U.S. Courthouse (now the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse), in New York City, where a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee charged with investigating the causes of juvenile delinquency took on an imminent danger within: the comic-book industry. The hearings were televised.

An investigation conducted by senators has been compared to a court run by kangaroos, and the analogy is not unfair, except possibly to the kangaroos. The normal rules of evidence do not apply in congressional hearings: badgering is appreciated; the verdict has frequently been arrived at in advance.

more from The New Yorker here.

Other lessons by Porcaro available on YouTube.  More about Porcaro here in Wikipedia.

Tibetans’ rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Last week many western commentators scrambling to interpret the protests in Lhasa found that they did not need to work especially hard. Surely the Tibetans are the latest of many brave peoples to rebel against communist totalitarianism? The rhetorical templates of the cold war are still close at hand, shaping western discussions of Islam or Asia. Dusting off the hoary oppositions between the free and unfree worlds, the Wall Street Journal declared that religious freedom was the main issue. “On the streets of Lhasa, China has again had a vivid demonstration of the power of conscience to move people to action against a soulless, and brittle, state.”

This is stirring stuff. Never mind that the rioters in Lhasa were attacking Han Chinese immigrants rather than the Chinese state, or that the Chinese authorities have been relatively restrained so far, one cautious step behind middle-class public opinion – which I sensed in China last week to be overwhelmingly against the Tibetan ethnic minority.

As for religious freedom, the Tibetans have had more of it in recent years than at any time since the cultural revolution. Eager to draw tourists to Tibet, Chinese authorities have helped to rebuild many of the monasteries destroyed by Red Guards in the 1960s and 70s, turning them into Disneylands of Buddhism. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have even inspired a counterculture among Chinese jaded by their new affluence.

More here.

From Nature:

Boy meets girl. Sperm meets egg. Now, scientists are a step closer to understanding the climax of this eternal love story: how sperm and egg merge to create a brand new individual. “It’s really the defining moment in an organism,” says William Snell, a biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, who headed one of the teams that made the find.

Snell, along with a group in Britain, discovered that a protein called HAP2 is involved with the fusion of egg and sperm, and found it in a wide range of species. As well as shedding new light on fertilization, the discovery opens up a possible new avenue to tackling parasite-carried diseases such as malaria: targeting HAP2 with drugs or vaccines could perhaps stop a parasite’s sex cells from consummating their union, preventing them from replicating.

More here.

Virginia Heffernen in the New York Times Magazine:

The superfit walk among us. They saunter or strut, depending on whether they’re showcasing their magnificent agility or their oxlike strength. They ignore the chatter in the health media over treadmill technique and pedometer steps. They scoff even at seemingly rigorous practices like Mysore Ashtanga yoga and marathon training. They are America’s self-styled fitness elite, adherents of a punishing online exercise regime called CrossFit, which orders its followers to cultivate a distinctly martial — not to say paranoid — ideal of “physical preparedness.”

CrossFit has 450 chapters in 43 states (and several other countries). The network has a message for the merely healthy: “Your workout is our warm-up.” Every day, its members consult CrossFit.com like a Book of Common Prayer, receiving instructions for their workout rites and periods of rest. Performing caveman feats like hauling, clambering, trudging, snatching, hurling and deadlifting, CrossFitters deliberately overwhelm and distress their bodies, executing near-impossible stunts with as much weight as they can bear. A Workout of the Day, or W.O.D., might include 50 kettlebell swings, 3 800-yard dashes in rapid succession and 10 pull-ups. Then repeat. No breaks. No weight machines. All you need is a body built for discipline and a mind that can justify so much apparent self-abuse.

More here.

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:

When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign’s current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a kind of Hail Mary.

Any candidate trailing at the convention must employ divisive tactics, almost by definition. For example, much of the bitterness in 1980 arose from the floor votes Kennedy engineered to drive a wedge between Carter and his delegates. At one point, Kennedy forced a vote on whether each state’s delegation should be split equally between men and women. Carter counted many feminists among his delegates, but the campaign initially opposed the measure so as to deny Kennedy a victory. “You had women who were with Jimmy Carter who were crying on the floor,” recalls Joe Trippi, then a young Kennedy organizer.

The Kennedy strategy worked both too well and not well enough.

More here.

..

McFarland California
Amarjit Chandan

Pash lives here in the orchards
plums………………….apples……………………grapes
oranges……..apricots,
in the fields of wheat and cotton
The wind…the sun…..pigeons
the drowsy tractors
………………………….ask Pash:
tell us, what was it like as a child,
…………….and as a young man?

When cotton balls bloom like
clusters of stars in your dreams
don’t you feel restless?

When you remember the sun
sliding on the sand dunes in your village,
on the prison walls, in the dreams of the
sleeping prisoners, don’t you feel sad?

Pash stays quiet.
On a nearby line
children’s clothes sway
in the afternoon sun.

Poet Note: Pash: A Punjabi poet who lived in California in 1987
and was assassinated by Sikh fundamentalists in March 1988
in his home village in East Punjab.

Photo: Amarjit Chandran

..

Read more »

Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, Alex Tabarrok offers a reason as to why those who were right about the financial crisis and the Iraq war from the beginning get so little media attention, over at Marginal Revolution.

The answer is media incentives.  It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong.  The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher.  So what does the American public want to hear now?

The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots.  And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

Richard Dawkins and PZ Meyers discuss their trip to the screening of Ben Stein’s documentary defending intelligent design, Expelled.

Sean Carroll discusses the incident over at Cosmic Variance:

When Chris [Mooney] and Matt [Nisbet] talk to the PZ/Dawkins crowd, they do a really bad job of understanding and working within the presuppositions of their audience — exactly what framing is supposed to be all about. To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.

There is a more basic motivation:  telling the truth.