(h/t Alex Ross)

Andrew Sullivan makes the case against Pope Benedict XVI and his handling of the child rape scandal:

The AP's story on Joseph Ratzinger's direct involvement in delaying for six years the defrocking of a priest who had confessed to tying up and raping minors ends any doubt that the future Pope is as implicated in the sex abuse crisis as much as any other official in the church.

The facts are as clear as they are damning. From the documents, the priest fits exactly the model of arrested development I sketched out here. He seems to have been pressured by a bossy mother to become a priest, and was interested only in hanging out with children around the ages of 11 to 13 (the age of the boys he raped). He had no genuine impulse to ordination, but the church was so desperate for priests he was acceptable.

When confronted with the charges, the priest pleaded no contest to tying up and raping two pre-teen boys in 1978 in the rectory of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City. There were, apparently, several more victims. There was no dispute as to his guilt. The priest, Stephen Kiesle, personally requested he be defrocked. His legacy is horrifying:

Kiesle, now 63 and recently released from prison, lives in the Rossmoor senior community in Walnut Creek and wears a Global Positioning System anklet. He is on parole for a different sex crime against a child. Numerous accusers have said he abused them as children at Our Lady of the Rosary, Santa Paula (now Our Lady of Guadalupe) in Fremont and Saint Joseph in Pinole, where he served in the mid-1970s, then returned in 1985 to volunteer as a youth minister.

Yes, this rapist was subsequently allowed back into the parish where he tied up and raped children seven years later as a volunteer youth minister. Even after his eventual defrocking, in 1987, he continued to work with children at the parish for another year.

Whose fault was this? In this case, it is absolutely clear that his remaining a priest was entirely the fault of the Vatican, and the person directly responsible for the delay in defrocking him was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Kiesle himself requested he be defrocked. The local bishop desperately wanted him to be defrocked and petitioned Raztinger first in 1981 that it happen expeditiously. The bishop, knowing that what the hierarchy cared about was bad press, not the protection and welfare of children, argued that there would be more “scandal” if the priest were kept in ministry than if he were fired…

Over at Room for Debate in the NYT:

A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field of literary theory.

“At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift,” the article said.

Does this research — “neuro lit” is one of its nicknames — energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don’t understand what the scholars are saying?

William M. Chace, English professor at Emory College, Elif Batuman, author, “The Possessed”, William Pannapacker, English professor at Hope College, Marco Roth, founding editor of n+1, Blakey Vermeule, English professor at Stanford, and Michael Holquist, comparative literature professor emeritus at Yale dicuss.

Caroline Baum in the Sydney Morning Herald:

WHEN I get a text message from Elif Shafak that reads “Meet me at Starbucks”, my heart sinks. Not just because of the coffee but because it’s such an un-Turkish place for an encounter in Istanbul with the country’s best-selling female author. I had hoped for something more exotic. A steamy hamam (bath house), perhaps?

Luckily, Starbucks is too busy to accommodate us and Shafak leads me instead to a cafe inside a department store where shoppers whirl around us with dervish-like frenzy. “This is where I write,” she says, settling at the communal table. “Here with the noise, the music, the bustle. I find it stimulating.”

It makes sense. Her writing throbs with vitality on the page. Her stories are social. In her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, published in English three years ago, families and friends eat, argue and love. But they do so mostly in the domestic, private sphere, not in public places. Which is why it’s a surprise to hear that Shafak considers Istanbul a feminine city. In the week I have been here, I have noticed groups of men on street corners talking, men in cafes playing backgammon, men fishing on the Galata bridge. It does not feel like a feminine city to me.

“In old Ottoman poetry, Istanbul is always referred to as ‘she’ – the virgin who has been married a thousand times. Ankara is masculine, geometrical, straight but Istanbul is curvy, round, mysterious, a labyrinth,” insists Shafak, who is a confirmed feminist. “Women are claiming the public space more and more. Secularisation and modernisation have been taken to the furthest point, through the abolition of polygamy and other legislation. Ataturk was good for women but now we have to go further still.”

Noticing groups of young women laughing and talking together, some veiled and some not, I ask about her attitude to the veil. She hesitates. “There are six or seven words for ‘veil’ in our language, so it has a different nuance or emphasis. Its meaning can be religious, cultural or political but you can’t lump all those together. Some women here and abroad get very tense and strident about this question but we need to find a way not to generalise or simplify. Not just about the present but also about the past.

Brotherhood
…..Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
The stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

by Octavio Paz

from The Collected Poems 1957-1987;
Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1988

………………………..

Hermandad
….Homenaje a Claudio Ptolomeo

Soy hombre: duro poco
y es enorme la noche.
Pero miro hacia arriba:
las estrellas escriben.
Sin entender comprendo:
también soy escritura
y en este mismo instante
alguien me deletrea.

From The New Humanist:

Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.This grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

‘How I love the English boldness!,” Voltaire said. “How I love those who say what they think!” Superficially, this was a light-hearted remark, in a letter to a friend, about the literary daring of Swift’s Tale of a Tub. “It is a treasure house of jokes,” he said, “of which the rest of the world has no idea. Pascal only makes jokes at the expense of the Jesuits, but Swift entertains and instructs us at the expense of the whole human race.” But of course, it was not just a light-hearted remark: if Voltaire loved English boldness, it was because at home, in 18th-century France, he could not say what he thought; and that, in a sense, was what the French Enlightenment was really all about.

If in England and Scotland it was about science or philosophy or economics, in France the central political issue was freedom of speech. French intellectuals such as Diderot, Rousseau, Maupertuis and Montesquieu were of course exploring new worlds of ideas, but they were much less free to say or write what they liked than were Newton or Locke or Adam Smith across the Channel. “It is impossible,” said Voltaire in mid-century, “for a writer who thinks freely, not to be persecuted in France.” He himself had already twice been imprisoned in the Bastille and he spent his life in conflict with the repressive authorities of the ancien régime. He was first imprisoned, in his early twenties, for writing verses that were recklessly critical of the Regent, Philippe, Duke of Orléans. There was no trial and no conviction; yet he spent a year in the cells, entirely at the Duke’s pleasure.

Nine years later, in 1726, he was again thrown without trial into the Bastille, this time for quarrelling in public with an offensive young nobleman; but he so feared another long and indefinite sentence in the dungeons that he immediately volunteered to go into exile in England instead; the authorities, short-sightedly, accepted his offer.

More here.

I'd meant to post this earlier: Daniel Cressey in Nature News:

Scientists and campaigners for the reform of Britain's libel laws were celebrating today after leading science writer Simon Singh won a crucial appeal in a court battle with the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).

Emerging triumphantly from the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Singh said that he hoped the strongly worded appeal judgment would also spur reform of British libel laws that, in their current form, may stifle scientific debate. “It's not good news, it's great news,” he said.

The BCA is suing Singh over an article he wrote for The Guardian newspaper in April 2008. Singh was appealing against a May 2009 judgment, which ruled that the article was an assertion of facts, not opinion — and could be interpreted to mean that the BCA knowingly promotes treatments that do not work. A libel case fought on this basis would be nearly impossible to defend, Singh and his lawyers have said.

Today's ruling by the Court of Appeal allows Singh to argue that his words represented an expression of opinion. This means that he can use a “fair comment” defence under British libel law.

Although the BCA may appeal the ruling, and the libel case will continue if both parties decide to fight on, today's judgment is widely seen as a significant victory for Singh. “After two years of fighting an uphill battle we've got the wind behind us,” he said. But, Singh added, wider issues with British libel law remain. It was concerning, he said, that many writers censor their articles; or settle libel actions out of court before they get to a trial, due to the prohibitive costs of fighting court cases.

Mark Buchanan in New Scientist:

SUPPOSE we had a theory that could explain everything. Not just atoms and quarks but aspects of our everyday lives too. Sound impossible? Perhaps not.

It's all part of the recent explosion of work in an area of physics known as random matrix theory. Originally developed more than 50 years ago to describe the energy levels of atomic nuclei, the theory is turning up in everything from inflation rates to the behaviour of solids. So much so that many researchers believe that it points to some kind of deep pattern in nature that we don't yet understand. “It really does feel like the ideas of random matrix theory are somehow buried deep in the heart of nature,” says electrical engineer Raj Nadakuditi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

All of this, oddly enough, emerged from an effort to turn physicists' ignorance into an advantage. In 1956, when we knew very little about the internal workings of large, complex atomic nuclei, such as uranium, the German physicist Eugene Wigner suggested simply guessing.

Quantum theory tells us that atomic nuclei have many discrete energy levels, like unevenly spaced rungs on a ladder. To calculate the spacing between each of the rungs, you would need to know the myriad possible ways the nucleus can hop from one to another, and the probabilities for those events to happen. Wigner didn't know, so instead he picked numbers at random for the probabilities and arranged them in a square array called a matrix.

The matrix was a neat way to express the many connections between the different rungs. It also allowed Wigner to exploit the powerful mathematics of matrices in order to make predictions about the energy levels.

Bizarrely, he found this simple approach enabled him to work out the likelihood that any one level would have others nearby, in the absence of any real knowledge. Wigner's results, worked out in a few lines of algebra, were far more useful than anyone could have expected, and experiments over the next few years showed a remarkably close fit to his predictions. Why they work, though, remains a mystery even today.

Lucan Way by way of Monkey Cage:

The nature of the transition in Kyrgyzstan, in which the Bakiev regime rapidly collapsed in the face of just a few thousand protestors (armed mostly with rocks), does not augur well for the future of Kyrgyz democracy. In our book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (to be published by Cambridge in August), Steven Levitsky and I argue that democracy is less likely to emerge in cases of “rotten door transitions” where opposition seizes power from a weak autocratic regime with a weak ruling party and/or state.

Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Americas have recently witnessed several examples of “rotten door” transitions, in which protesters essentially knocked down doors that had already rotted from within. In such cases, even a small opposition push was sufficient to trigger regime collapse. In Georgia (2003), Haiti (2004), and Madagascar (2002, 2009), as well as Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010, presidents fell because security forces would not or could not put down relatively small protests and were thus left defenseless as opponents overran the state. In Haiti, Aristide was toppled in 2004 by a “rag-tag army of as few as 200 rebels,” and in Georgia, police surrounding parliament dissolved so quickly that Shevardnadze was forced to flee mid-speech—leaving his tea on the speaker’s rostrum for Saakashvili to gulp down after storming the building. In Kyrgyzstan in 2005, a few hundred protestors were able to take over regional governments before Akayev abandoned power in the midst of an antigovernment rally of about ten thousand in the capital.

Rotten door transitions are often easy, in the sense that they require little opposition mobilization. Yet rotten door transitions often do not lead to democracy, for several reasons. First, they often take place in a context of extreme state weakness, in which state agencies cannot enforce the rule of law across the national territory. Although such conditions may aid protesters seeking to storm the capital, they are hardly favorable to stable democratization.

Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” isn’t even the best work of art called “The Age of Anxiety”: if I’m a junior minister in Auden’s world, I’m barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I’d accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem “fascinating and hair-raising”. From the time he read “The Age of Anxiety” in 1948 “the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality”, he wrote, describing an “extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith.” Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how “difficult and problematic” faith had become for Bernstein. Like the poem, the symphony is divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative, untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while “The Masque” – the bit in Rosetta’s apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance for dear life. Bernstein’s daughter Jaime called it “ridiculously difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written”, and it does magnificently what the poem can’t do – spins the characters out beyond reason in their desire to blot out the dismal world.

more from Glyn Maxwell at The Guardian here.

Not so very long ago we humans thought of ourselves as a separate creation—the pinnacle of God’s work—that had been granted dominion over nature. But then along came Darwin, and we discovered that we are related, through descent, to other animals. Despite this blow to our dignity we long maintained a polite fiction that we’re special enough to merit classification in our own scientific family—the Hominidae. In our minds at least, we thus maintained a comfortable distance from the apes. But the analysis of DNA put an end to that, with the demonstration that only 2 percent of our genetic code differs from that of the chimpanzees. Now we and chimps must share a twig in the family tree, and the Hominidae has been expanded to encompass the other “great apes”—chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.

more from Tim Flannery at the NYRB here.

Mark Liberman in Language Log:

I'm going to venture to disagree with my colleague and friend John McWhorter's diagnosis of “What does Palinspeak mean?” (TNR, 4/6/2010).

Of course, I don't disagree with John's observation that Sarah Palin's speech style is folksy and informal. As for his comment that “Palin […] has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete”, we could quibble over details — how much of the difference is in what public figures say, as opposed to what gets transmitted and reported? — but let's grant that John is right about this as well.

Where I think that John may go wrong is in his analysis of that and there.

Now, there's no doubt that Sarah Palin tends to use certain demonstratives more often than most other public figures, and also tends to use them in a different way. In “Affective demonstratives”, 10/5/2008, I noted differences as great as 15-to-1 between her and Joe Biden in the 10/4/2008 vice-presidential debate. Her demonstratives often seemed qualitatively as well as quantitatively different, in characteristic examples like “Americans are craving that straight talk”. Straight talk was John McCain's slogan, but “craving that straight talk” was pure Palin.

The voice explains a lot. You think, how could any woman live with the famously moody writer Norman Mailer for 33 years, and then you hear Norris Church Mailer’s soft, authoritative, Marilyn Monroe-ish voice, with its 61-year-old Arkansas twang still intact, and you have a revelation about men and women. It is important to remember that “A Ticket to the Circus” (Random House: 432 pp., $26) is Norris’s own memoir, not Norman’s — not even Mrs. Mailer’s. It is the story of a girl, born in Arkansas in 1949, who came of age in the 1960s and struggled to find her way of contributing to the world, which was still a man’s world. She was very tall and, by all accounts, beautiful — that made life both harder and easier (probably in equal measure).

more from Susan Salter Reynolds at the LAT here.

Reading Ian Buruma makes you feel parochial. In “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents,” he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States. And beneath every cliché — about American religious fervor, French intolerance or Japanese godlessness — he uncovers ironies that wreak havoc with popular stereotypes. Buruma shows, for instance, that the trendy, anti-imperial multiculturalism favored in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom actually echoes those countries’ policies of colonial indirect rule, in which native cultures were segregated and preserved so they could be dominated more easily. He suggests that America’s militant Christianity and Europe’s militant secularism stem from parallel anxieties about the pace of cultural change. And he explains why the jihadist fanaticism taking root among some of Europe’s Muslim young is more European than Middle Eastern, more modern than traditional, more political than religious. One can quibble with some of Buruma’s claims about the United States. Dinesh D’Souza notwithstanding, it’s an exaggeration to say that “American Christians . . . sometimes feel more akin to conservative Muslims than to secular liberals.” It would be truer to say that the Christian right moved from an apocalyptic struggle against a godless foe (Communism) to an apocalyptic struggle against a god-fearing one (“Islamofascism”) without missing a beat. Nor is it true, as Buruma claims, that Ronald Reagan “was not very religious.” Reagan may not have attended church much as president, but religion saturated his upbringing; while his faith was at times quirky, it was also deep.

more from Peter Beinart at the NYT here.

Study of Two Pears

I

Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modeled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
from the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yelllows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears
are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
as the observer wills.

by Wallace Stevens

from Collected Poems, 1923
Random House

Rudolph P. Byrd interviews Alice Walker in Guernica:

After a little over a year in office, fierce and often unfounded attacks, and the painstaking process that eventually led to a victory for health care reform, perhaps now is a good time for President Obama to revisit the words of the open letter Alice Walker published the day after he was elected. Along with respectfully telling the soon-to-be president that he will never know the profoundness of his being elected president for “black people of the Southern United States,” Walker offers him some advice: make sure to make time for rest and play with family because, “From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many people in the world really want,” and to “remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing” and not to take on other people’s enemies, offering the Dalai Lama’s model for coexisting. It is, perhaps, a look into the evolution of an American icon known nearly as well for her fierce opposition to all forms of oppression as for her award-winning writing.

Walker, the lauded poet, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize winner for The Color Purple, has led a life that rivals the creative intensity of any of her literary creations. From her birth in 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia, the youngest of eight siblings and the child of parents who made their living as sharecroppers, to her involvement with the civil rights, Black Arts, and feminist movements in the decades that followed, Walker has established herself as one of the most important and inspirational public intellectuals in America. She not only gave voice to the complex experience of African American women in what scholars term the renaissance in African American women’s writing of the nineteen seventies, but also made that voice heard in public conversations over issues as diverse as gender equality, racial and economic justice, and war and peace.

More here.

Garry Wills in The New York Times:

In 2004, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state’s candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President Bush do a double take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it spelled “Obama,” not “Osama.” Bush shrugged: “I don’t know him.” She answered, “You will.” Not long after this, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and many people suddenly knew him. It happened so fast that he seemed to come out of nowhere. The truth was more intriguing — he had come out of everywhere. His multiple points of origin made him adaptable to any situation. What could have been a source of confusion or uncertain identity he meant to turn into an overwhelming advantage. As he told a Chicago Reader interviewer in 2000:

“My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people.” David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made the same or similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show that he has more direct ties to Africa than most ­African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother’s Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. He is a bit of a chameleon or shape-shifter, but he does not come across as insincere — that is the importance of his famous “cool.” He does not have the hot eagerness of the con man. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people’s narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.

More here.