Soul Survivor

Philip Yancey is presently THE Christian writer for me. I've never bought so many works by the same author in so short a time, given my meager student allowance. And even if I’m now on my 7th book by him, he never fails to inspire, enlighten, surprise and refresh me with each new book and article I get my hands on.

Here's a really short and wanting biography: He’s a journalist who serves as editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. He has written twelve Gold Medallion Award-winning books, including Where is God When It Hurts?, Disappointment with God, and The Bible Jesus Read. The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace? were both awarded the Christian Book of the Year. He is also the author of Reaching for the Invisible God. Four of his books have sold a million copies each, and, fortunately, he also happens to be found everywhere from Cang's Inc. to National Bookstore. Articles by him can be found at christianitytoday.com, and a personal website, philipyancey.com.

Given the sensitive nature of writing Christian books, I noticed that he never writes about anything that he doesn't really know about, except when he writes to admit that he doesn't really know much about a certain subject. Seemingly an act of copping out, it is his remarkable authenticity that affords his writings a sense of dispensation of truth and grace that any reader readily appreciates, without compromising, of course, an exceptional writing caliber. A culture-savvy Christian, every stroke of his pen is not without a clear sense of literary purpose:

"Every writer has one main theme, a spoor that he or she keeps sniffing around, tracking, following to its source. If I had to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer, yet still landed in the loving arms of God. Yes, I went through a period of rejection of the church and God, a conversion experience in reverse that felt like liberation for a time. I ended up, however, not an atheist, a refugee from the church, but as one of its advocates."

What allowed him to ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion? It takes a whole book to answer that. Entitled Soul Survivor, that book profiles thirteen unlikely "mentors" who went a long way toward answering that question. These mentors range from the scatterbrained journalist G. K. Chesterton to the tortured novelists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to contemporaries such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Annie Dillard, and Robert Coles. He teases:

"If I were invited to a convention full of skeptics, or representatives of another religion, and asked to explain my faith, these are the companions I would want along. I could simply point to these strong witnesses and say, 'Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive. This is what they look like.' Each stands at the top of his or her field, and they credit personal faith as one of the reasons why."

Perhaps I am especially drawn to Yancey through my own bitter experiences with the church, or more aptly, certain church people, whom a well-meaning friend of mine once bluntly dubbed as church a-holes.

Everyone has different grievances against people claiming to be ambassadors for Christ. These range from bad and unkindly relationships, physical assault, emotional harassment, dishonest conduct of finances, hypocrisy, and even sexual violation.

Yet however much I can accuse people, I can but justly point the questions back to myself and ask how many times have I myself misrepresented the one whose name I religiously bear, in both my public and private life? If I claim to be a victim of and an activist against church politics and hypocrisy, am I actually assuming to be on a better moral standing than my perpetrators? In recovering from church abuse, have I failed to heed W. H. Auden's warning that "those to whom evil in done, do evil in return"?

Yancey reminds me that against the backdrop of God’s glaringly perfect holiness, I'd actually look no better than any other person standing beside me, whether Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler. I know that for every wrong act that I can observe from fellow Christians and especially from certain church leaders, I am just as accountable and guilty as them for my inner, subterranean struggles and sins every day, running along the lines of pride, arrogance, lust, unforgiveness, et cetera. For instance, in writing this seemingly "spiritual" blog entry, as well as anything that can get published, I get cephalomegaly in actually having written it, expecting a pat on the back or two.

Personally, it is one such (rather stubborn) struggle to dispense love, grace and mercy to a church that, I witness, never fails to churn out spiritually wounded patients more than anything else. It is just insufferable to someone who knows that it is.

My thoughts drift into how God would run the infinite distance between God-ness and humanity through Jesus Christ, to be butchered and slain for sins even as seemingly inconsequential as a stolen penny, a careless whisper or a smug twist of the shoulder; all in the ultimate act of loving forgiveness. I often waver between holding my grudges and letting them pass—to forgive freely, as I have been forgiven in the same manner.

Apparently, God isn’t done with me yet.

Largely, the church that I was born into has, for all its contributions, terribly lost its sense of urgency and relevance in this generation. And it only goes to show that the Church (I am now referring to the collective institution wherein affiliation entails being called a Christian), as in all human organizations, is understandably flawed and imperfect. And with its over 1 billion strong membership, failure rates will unsurprisingly soar.

And like Yancey, I write this as one seeking to redeem those experiences that gave me reasons to step out of Christendom, and hopefully turn them into words of assurance to save another soul just a little bit of trouble.

If I were to write my own Soul Survivor in the far future, the name Philip Yancey would easily make it to the top my “mentors” list.


-Nigel Uno

Futurist Thoughts on Mass Communication

Look at this blog. It's not very popular, most of the people who read it are people we know personally. But it wouldn't be very difficult to make it go "mainstream": all it woudl take is to re-name it with a few searchable keywords, strategically narrow our posts to something with a characterisable niche, and then comment on other people's blogs. Maybe add a bit of multi-media content to attract the ADHD crowds of the web world. Then the blog becomes a true form of mass media.
We live in a world where mass media in it's traditional forms is simply not sexy anymore. "Sexy" isn't a superficial qualification, by the way, not in our generation. Noel kept telling me about how looking good is so important, sometimes even more important than actually being good. I can't disregard that anymore, the evidence is overwhelming. However, in my mind, you can't cross the line of ethics. But I'm digressing from my point. Traditional forms of media are not sexy in that they are no longer streamlined and attractive to today's generation. Chuck Palanhiuk, author of Fight Club talked about our attitude towards television on a lecture on YouTube (spot the wit :) He said that we are so sick of reality shows, especially those damn house-switch decor things that seem to be on every channel. Two hundred channels on cable television and we can't find anything to watch, because the simple truth is that we've seen it all.
Aside: I'm liking "Heroes" because it's unpredictable and the characters the interesting and blended right. Who would anticipate String Theory, a guy who can paint the future, and... don't want to spoil it for those who haven't seen any of the episodes yet.
Communication, information, ideas. Entertainment, self-realization, education, socialization... the core processes by which the human mind develops are undergoing a rapid and fundamental change. I say I live in my head, don't we all? Because if you really think (hehe) about it, our perceptions are our realities. We live in worlds constructed in our minds. Those worlds come about through the information we imbibe as we develop. This idea is an unholy alliance of Kant and Dev Psych. Ain't it cool?
So what is so drastic in the difference between a kid who grew up watching television, radio and comics-- and a kid who grew up with Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Friendster, YM and BitTorrent? The difference is in the fundamentals of communication.
The older paradigm is a one-way process, a single channel of some big institution (like the government or a media company) generating content and communicating it to a mass audience. The biggest restricition of this sort of communication is the peculiar way that information becomes dumber the wider you spread it. A television program can only be 30mins long, interjected by a mess of 10-30 second commercials. Another set-back is that you can't customise content. It's very capitalist, all these companies screaming at you trying to get your attention to look at them. But you can only get whatever they give you.
The new paradigm changes this. I can search online for content that I want; if it's not there, I can generate it myself. Think TIME magazine's person of the year for 2006: YOU. It's about the individual. It's not about plugging a faceless audience to a profit-driven company; it's about connecting one individual to another. Everyone has their own space, their own personality. Just look at those Friendster profiles. When you deal with people online, it's not a mass; its a friend network. When people comment on YouTube, you see their faces, you know their tags. It's a different society, and suddenly, information is liberated and placed at the fingertips of the users.
If you want a glimpse into society, human organization and politics of the future, I suggest you look at the blogsphere. This collection of online geeks are the future.
So there.

300 Misrep

The movie "300" gives a highly stylized account of the battle of Thermopylae fought in 480 BC by three hundred Spartans under the leadership of King Leonidas. I don't need to go into the details of the battle itself, or even the description of the movie; what I want to focus on is the sort of message the movie sends. Throughout the film, there are constant reminders of the value of freedom.

"It is not a question of what a husband, or a Spartan, or a king should do. Instead ask yourself, my dearest love, what would a free man do?"

"We are with you sire! For freedom! For Sparta!"

"When this battle is over, the world will know that few stood against many, that free men stood against a tyrant, and that even a god-king can bleed."

"This is the dawning of a new age, an age of freedom. And all will know that three hundred Spartans gave their last breath to defend it."

Freedom and fighting against tyranny (in various forms: mysticism, subjugation, corruption) is the basic idea behind the film. While I have always believed in personal freedom, I also believe in honesty. And here is where "300" begins to tread on dangerous ground. Your average movie-goer may not understand that the whole point of why Spartans made a culture out of warfare was because of the vast slave population that drove their economy (the Helots, as their were called in Sparta). The city-state of Sparta was fed by slave labour, slaves who were fellow Greeks. It's ironic to think that Spartans would be fighting for the idea of freedom, when they themselves were the most active slavers in ancient Greece.
One can argue that the point of the film isn't really about being historically accurate, but presenting something entertaining. But I think this is beside the point. In the culture of today's generation, film is a powerful medium for expressing information; its persuasive power makes it very political (the idea is Foucauldian), and its even more dangerous because it isn't overtly political, but it masquerades as "mere entertainment". As a student of communication, I've come to the realization that nothing on the media channels is mere entertainment.
The falsehood of Spartan ideals in the film "300" is further reinforced when the film presents the Persians as the ultimate slavers, worshipping a megalomaniac god-king, bound by superstition, and completely opposed to the values of freedom, democracy and equality. This isn't a misrepresentation per se, because the Persian Empire wasn't really known for free elections or participative governance; but to use it as a contrast to a western culture that is made out of be one based on "reason" and "justice" is highly misleading. If anything, the ancient Greeks were just as unreasonable and unjust as the ancient Persians.
Today, we still have that outdated and ancient mode of thought that dictates our identity along geopolitical borders: East vs. West. A lot of the discourse on religion, governance, economies, and philosophies are divided and opposed along these geographical demarcations. This idea of a divided world is part of the problem of terrorism, neo-imperialism, and the sort of close-mindedness that has hindered development and conflict-resolution. What a film like "300" does, with its packaging and message reinforcement, is to catapult a discourse of division into the minds of the audiences. What makes it especially eye-brow raising is that we celebrate this movie as a valuable contribution to our culture.

--keep_traveling

Philosophy Bites

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stagename Molière was a 17th century French dramatist, director, theatre manager and actor. In one of his plays, a man discovered one day that he had been "speaking prose" all his life without knowing it. Similarly, implies GSU professor Mark Woodhouse in his Preface to Philosophy, all of us have been doing amateur philosophy all our lives. In a sense, philosophy is just hard thinking about the important issues of life. Look at the following illustrations and try to see how virtually every human activity has philosophical implications:

1. A neurophysiologist, while establishing correlations between certain brain functions and the feeling of pain, begins to wonder whether the "mind" is distinct from the brain.

2. A nuclear scientist, having determined that matter is mostly empty space containing colorless energy transformations, begins to wonder to what extent the solid, extended, colored world we perceive corresponds to what actually exists.

3. A behavioral psychologist, having increasing success in predicting human behavior, questions whether human actions can be called "free."

4. Supreme Court justices, when framing a law to distinguish obscene and nonobscene art forms, are drawn into questions about the nature and function of art.

5. A theologian, in a losing battle with science over literal descriptions of the universe (or "reality"), is forced to redefine the whole purpose and scope of traditional theology.

6. An anthropologist, noting that all societies have some conception of a moral code, begins to wonder just what distinguishes a moral from a nonmoral point of view.

7. A linguist, in examining the various ways language shapes our view of the world, declares that there is no one "true reality" because all views of reality are conditional and qualified by the language in which they are expressed.

8. A perennial skeptic, accustomed to demanding and not receiving absolute proof for every view encountered, declares that it is impossible to know anything.

9. A commissioner, while developing new zoning ordinances, begins to wonder whether the effect or the intent (or both) of zoning laws makes them discriminatory.

10. A BIR director, in determining which (religious) organizations should be exempted from tax, is forced to define what counts as a "religion" or "religious group."

11. A concerned mother, having decided to convert her CPP-NPA communist son, is forced to read the Communist Manifesto and to do some thinking about Marxist and capitalist ideologies.

We could continue the list indefinitely. But already you can see that given a particularly relevant problem, even the "nonphilosopher" is lured into a modest amount of philosophical thinking. In examining possible responses, that person will probably discover a commitment to certain philosophical theses.

Heroes: A Sword to Protect

What makes the hero? A quick analysis of this question would reveal that in every hero story, there is someone who, sometimes by choice (like Achilles or Bruce Wayne) or by uncontrolled circumstance (like Frodo or Peter Parker), is forced to rise above the ordinary and go beyond the limits of those around him or her. A hero/heroine is someone who has dared to fly, to live for something greater. This is our common idea of the hero/heroine. Joseph Campbell, the guru of mythology studies, talks about the archetype "hero" in terms of a formula: the Challenge, the Journey, and the Return. The hero identity, according to Campbell, fulfills each step in this formula in one way or the other.

However, the question of "What makes a hero?" is, in my opinion, neither formula nor feat. At the core of every true hero is a driving force, a power behind the true Hero, that brings an individual to reach into the stars. It is the motive energy that fuels the feats of greatness that set the Hero apart from everyone else.

Himura Kenshin, fictional swordsman of the Meiji era. Unparalleled prowess in combat, he became known as the legendary "battousai" or man-slayer. But for all of his skill, Kenshin is not a hero simply because of the lightning speed of his sword. Behind that sword is a belief, a philosophy, a motive power.

Peter Parker, free-lance photographer for the Daily Bugle of New York City. Because of a freak accident of radioactive energy, Peter Parker gained the amazing powers of a set of super-spiders: a proportional strength, lightning reflexes, the ability to leap great distances, an almost psychic "spider-sense", and the ability to produce super-strength strands of spiderweb from his wrists (some people say its natural, others say Parker developed them artificially). But for all these fantastic powers, they are not the core of why Peter Parker believes that with great power comes great responsibility.

Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi. At the end of the trilogy, Luke faces his father, now the twisted Sith Lord Darth Vader. The Emperor, Darth Sidious, watches the final battle between Luke and Vader with amusement: it is apparent that the Force is even stronger in Luke than in Anakin, and soon, Darth Vader is begging for mercy. The Emperor bids Luke to kill Vader, and complete his transition to the Dark Side. But Luke finds a strength within himself, a hidden power that overcomes the overwhelming influence of the Dark Side. Instead of cutting Darth Vader down with a final blow, Luke turns to the Emperor and throws away his lightsaber, the symbol of a Jedi's skill in combat and the constant conflict that rages between the Dark and the Light. He tosses it, and proclaims his identity as a Jedi, and becomes a hero.

I could probably go further with illustrations from heroes in pop culture (Cloud from Final Fantasy VII, Leonidas from 300, Al Simmons from Todd McFarlene's Spawn comics), but let's stop with the three I've already discussed.

It wasn't simple power or skill that truly made them heroic; even the bad guys have power and skill. Neither does ideology make a hero either: Kenshin had his philosophy of samurai honor, Peter Parker has the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" mantra, and of course Luke is a Jedi, a Star Wars Knight's Templar. My point is that anyone can develop a skill, and anyone can hold on to a philosophy. Something else is at work here, something deeper.

Kenshin fought, not because of his ideals, but to protect those he loved. Peter Parker, constantly leaping from his window, everyday comes back to Mary Jane. Luke, for the love of his sister and his father, found the strength to resist the Emperor.

It was because of a developed sense of selflessness and love that drove these characters to become great. Not everyone understands the concept of love; take Anakin, whose love was actually based on selfish possessiveness of Padme. It takes trial, it takes persistence and time for love to truly become the power behind the hero.

Love is ultimately the core of what makes the Hero different from any other great individual. The title of Hero is a title of someone who has done something because of love.

-Quark

Politics by Lottery: A modest proposal

One of the first complaints to be heard by anyone familiar with the institution of Philippine government is that our government structure is simply borrowed from the United States, without addressing the peculiarities of the native Filipino culture. Of course, this disparity between our governance system and our local political culture has given birth to a web of corruption and inefficiency, a network of thieving bureaucrats and a properly sabotaged public trust. In thinking about ways to close the gap between the cultural norms of the Filipino public, and the expected attitudes articulated in our government’s constitution, we must examine what particular “pinoy” traits can be incorporated into our body politic. I have a modest suggestion.

Gambling is part of the national consciousness. From cockfights to sweepstakes, Filipinos love the uncertainty and excitement of a good bet. A deeply religious culture, the idea of swerte or luck in the Filipino mind is equated with either the blessing or curse of God. The national cliché of bahala na is a bright neon light displaying the national belief in the will of the Divine.

This gambling nature of the Filipino could be easily incorporated into the national election system for the selection of a President. How?

By using the randomness of the lottery machine. My proposal is as follows: after a normal election via popular vote, the COMELEC selects the top three contenders (three is a magic number, and much more diplomatic than a simple binary) whose names are put into a lottery machine, with all the little spinning plastic balls. Now, it’s a question of the will of God. Whoever gets selected in this final stage of the election can then truly claim that God placed her there, without all the hubris of self-proclaimed Divine will.

Now, it is understandable that this may seem a bit loony. But if we think about it, it actually begins to make more sense. The top three candidates are democratically chosen, by having garnered the majority of the votes. The policy of a gamble also ensures that candidates cannot guarantee their victory by simply spending more than their opponents; you can’t buy swerte. And last of all, it means that the deeply religious (perhaps even superstitious) Filipino public can trust that God was the final part of the decision of who is to become the leader of our country.

And of course, one cannot create an Opposition to the will of God.

-9th_wanderer

The Unity of Study

After briefly reading the first few chapters of a textbook on urban sociology (by Dr. Efren Padilla of California State University Hayward), it struck me on how the process of learning, particularly that in university, could be geared towards something more thematic rather than specialist. In Silliman University, where I'm studying right now, we divide the departments according to their different fields, such as engineering, history, computer science or management. Although this is a good model for producing engineers, historians, computer scientists or managers, it's not exactly the best arrangement to produce people who can integrate, innovate and basically move the body of knowledge further. What if an engineer understands how physical structures impact the social arrangements within a city? What if the historian can articulate a new paradigm of historical thought based on quantum mechanics? What if the computer scientist integrates biological principles into a program? What if the manager has a firm grounding on ethical philosophy and its relationship to public relations? What if students are constantly challenged to break through the limits of their fields of specialty and approach learning-- not as a rote discipline of mechanistic obedience to the doctrines-- but as a playground of ideas and a melting pot of exploration?

A unified approach to knowledge is more powerful, because it goes beyond the status quo. It gets people to change the way they think, to change their approach.

As a student in the College of Mass Communication, I've found myself trying to break through the barriers of my field. It's common enough to equate my college with journalism, but even this can be taken beyond its usual focus on training a "journalist". Communication is an exciting theme that invades so many other fields of thought: language, economics, philosophy, physics, computer technology, urban society, psychology and more. If I had to approach communication as an integrated course, i'd be enrolled in more classes than the students of the College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences. And at the end of my four years here, I'd be on the path to being educated, rather than having simply recieved vocational training.

To make knowledge relevant in this post-modern world, we need to integrate and unify, instead of remaining within the comfort of our little exclusivist niches of specialization.

- Quark