Well-tuned Fundamental Constants in a Highly Strange Universe

Nov7

Physicists are apparently having trouble explaining to themselves (much less the rest of us) what the Higgs Boson, for the theory of which two physicists were recently awarded the Nobel Prize, actually means.

“One possibility has been brought up that even physicists donâ€™t like to think about. Maybe the universe is even stranger than they think. Like, so strange that even post-Standard Model models canâ€™t account for it. Some physicists are starting to question whether or not our universe is natural. This cuts to the heart of why our reality has the features that it does: that is, full of quarks and electricity and a particular speed of light.

This problem, the naturalness or unnaturalness of our universe, can be likened to a weird thought experiment. Suppose you walk into a room and find a pencil balanced perfectly vertical on its sharp tip. That would be a fairly unnatural state for the pencil to be in because any small deviation would have caused it to fall down. This is how physicists have found the universe: a bunch of rather well-tuned fundamental constants have been discovered that produce the reality that we see.”

No comment. You probably know what this conundrum indicates to me, anyway, given my presuppositions.

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 3

Oct28

My notes on the first panel I attended at the conference, “Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century.” I’m not going to put the presenters’ names here because they might google themselves (what would Percy have made of that ability to “find ourselves” while losing ourselves on the internet?) and find these ramblings and tell me that I’ve committed some egregious error of academic etiquette.

Panelist #1: Percy “liked to write about people in the shadow of catastrophe.”
I like to read about people in the shadow of catastrophe. It should be a good match, me and Percy. Writer of catastrophe and reader of catastrophe. So why did The Moviegoer make me want to shake Binx Bolling until he woke up and quit the navel-gazing? Now that I think about it there is no impending catastrophe in The Moviegoer. Binx lives in the shadow of self-absorption, a catastrophe to be sure, but not the sort of calamity that leads to enlightenment.

Panelist #2: Said something to the effect that escape from this broken world may be necessary or even laudable. We escape into amnesia or narcotic refuge or compartmentalization or media (movies mostly). Amnesia can be a restart, an escape from the past and from self-preoccupation.
I escape into books. But with Percy’s books, at least the two and a half that I’ve read, there is no escape because I keep being reminded of how annoying is the self that I want to escape from.

Panelist #3: The joke-title guy. “I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.” This guy is the only other non-academic at this conference! He used to write self-help articles and lead personal growth and sales conferences. He points out the disconnect between self-help books and actual help or self-change. Percy in Lost in the Cosmos tells us all of the things in which we try to find meaning but are disappointed: science, work, marriage and family, school, politics, social life, churches. But Percy begs the question: where can the self find help or meaning? Then joke-title guy also begs the question. He doesn’t know where the self-help section is either.

I maintain that the “disconnect” is the power of the Holy Spirit. I can only change and become an authentic self if I receive “help” from an outside source, from God. The existentialists say that I can create my own meaning by making passionate, authentic decisions. But they never get there because they (we) are paralyzed by the inability to know what the right decision is. Jesus said to die to self, take up your cross, and follow Him. This death of self is the only way to get off of the merry-go-round of self-absorption and introspection. Follow Him. Die to self.

At this point in the conference I started thinking about Percy in comparison and contrast to C.S. Lewis. I’ve been reading a biography of Lewis, and in fact I brought it with me to NOLA and finished reading it there.

Walker Percy: The problem of boredom/lostness.
C.S. Lewis: The problem of longing/loss.
These are very similar issues. We experience what Lewis called “joy”, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” But after the momentary and unsustainable experience of joy is over with, we either search for it and try to reclaim in art, literature, nature, religion, diversion, politics or any other of the many things we think will satisfy that elusive longing. And we become bored or lost or both because nothing really satisfies. Or we give up the search for this ineffable joy and resign ourselves to (Walker Percy) “depression in a deranged world.”

Walker Percy: “devised a transaction with the world” (according to one panelist).
C.S. Lewis: made a “treaty with reality” (according to McGrath’s biography).
Lewis’s treaty with reality was his way of coping with the horrors of war. He gave himself up to be a soldier but determined not to think about the war, not to write about it, not to make it the focus of his life. (This war experience was before Lewis became a Christian.) Later, Lewis came to believe that Christianity was the best “treaty with reality” that explained both the world’s miseries and its longing for redemption and joy.

Percy’s transaction with the world was also Christian, specifically Catholic Christianity. “The self is problematic to itself,” Percy wrote, “but it solves its predicament of placement vis-Ã -vis the world either by a passive consumership or by a discriminating transaction with the world and with informed interactions with other selves.” His discriminating transaction was an acceptance of Catholicism with all its teachings about sin and death and Christ and sacrifice.

Walker Percy in Esquire, December 1977, “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself”: “This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer â€œScientific humanism.â€ That wonâ€™t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I donâ€™t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.”

And so I contemplated the intersection of an AngloIrish scholar of medieval literature who came to Christ at Oxford University and remained a lifelong member of the Church of England and a Catholic novelist from southern Louisiana whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. They would not seem to have much in common.

The Rest of the Story: Phan Thi Kim Phuc

Sep12

The late Paul Harvey had a feature on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” in which he would tell familiar stories of well-known people and events or commonplace tales of ordinary people–and then tell “the rest of the story”, the part that not many people know or the part that gives the true story an ironic twist. I’ve been reading a lot of unusual stories with unexpected endings myself lately, and I decided to share a few of them with you here at Semicolon.

On June 8, 1972 nine year old Kim Phuc was with her family in her village of Trang Bang near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam when a South Vietnamese pilot mistakenly dropped napalm near the outskirts of the village. Photographer Nick Ut took a picture of the resulting scene, and the photo won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the World Press Photo of the Year in 1972. It is not a exaggeration to say that this photo of children attacked by America’s own allies in an already unpopular war helped influence American opinion against the war in Vietnam to such an extent that the Americans left Vietnam less than a year after the photo was taken.

'Kim Phuc - The Napalm Girl In Vietnam' photo (c) 2007, David Erickson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Mr. Ut took little Kim Phuc to a hospital where she received extensive treatment for her burns, and she survived and grew to adulthood in what became the Communist state of Vietnam. She was recruited by the Vietnamese government as a propaganda tool, the “napalm girl” who survived American and South Vietnamese wartime savagery. But it is the book that she discovered when she was a second year medical student in Saigon and what she did as a result of that discovery that make the rest of the story of Kim Phuc so intriguing and inspiring.

Want to read more about Kim Phuc and her amazing story of healing and forgiveness?

The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong.

No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner

Jul21

Jamie Langston Turner is one of my “go-to” authors for Christian-themed fiction. So when I saw a copy of a novel by Ms. Turner that I hadn’t yet read while I was perusing the shelves at Half-Price Books, I bought it without a second thought. And I’m glad I did.

No Dark Valley is a little more “religious” than some of Ms. Turner’s other novels, although all of them are about how ordinary people find redemption and strength through faith in Jesus. Nevertheless, just like the characters in her other books, the characters in No Dark Valley are real. I can imagine meeting these people, talking to them, understanding them. There are no pasteboard saints in this story, although Ms. Turner does indulge in a meta-fiction thread that runs through the novel about how Celia, the protagonist, imagines that her life and the people in it would never be believable as fiction:

“Another reason her life would make a bad novel, Celia had decided, was that the characters would seem so stereotyped. Nobody would believe that one person could have so many rigidly religious relatives, all stuck in the rut of such predictable, countrified ways of viewing life, all trekking to church several times a week, all so unaware that the twentieth century had come and gone. You could get by with one or two characters like that in a book, for quirky splashes of color, but not dozens and dozens of them. The whole thing would turn into a farce.”

Of course, the funny thing about No Dark Valley was that I found the characters to be quite plausible and true to life–my life in the South, in the Bible Belt. I’m not sure if Ms. Turner was actually worried that readers would find her Christian characters stereotypical and so wrote her concerns into the book, or if she was simply having fun with Celia and her own rigid ways of thinking. (Celia is a champion at projecting her own rigidity and prejudice onto her relatives and others.) Either way, Celia’s interior monologue, and later in the novel when the point of view switches to Celia’s neighbor, Bruce Healy, his thoughts, are both relatable and authentic.

No Dark Valley is both a romance story and a conversion story. Jamie Langston Turner’s prose is intelligent, vivid, and sometimes crosses over into the poetic. I really enjoy Ms. Turner’s novels. If they can be classified as “Christian chicklit”, it’s excellent, smart Christian chick lit.

Jamie Langston Turner’s other books:
Suncatchers
Some Wildflower in My Heart (1998)
By the Light of a Thousand Stars (1999)
A Garden to Keep (2001)
Winter Birds (2006)
Sometimes a Light Surprises (2009)

And if you like a series of novels with recurring and overlapping characters, Ms Turner’s novels, like those of another of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, have characters from one novel that reappear in later books. In No Dark Valley, Eldeen Rafferty from Suncatchers makes a (loud) appearance. Margaret Tuttle, from Some Wildflower in My Heart, is the friend of a friend. And Elizabeth Landis from A Garden to Keep becomes a friend and mentor to Celia as the two women play on a tennis team together.

And now I have to admit that Ms. Turner and I have a little bit of a mutual admiration society going here, and I am pleased to read that she has a new novel coming out in 2014.

Links and Thinks: May 31, 2013

May31

Today is the birthday of poet Walt Whitman. I tend to think of Mr. Whitman as a rather self-indulgent poet (song of myself, me, me, ME!), but I rather like this particular snippet and use it frequently to explain (or not) myself. (And who am I, blogger that I am, to accuse anyone else of self-indulgence and egotism?)

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Do fish feel pain? My vegetarian daughter and I had a discussion recently on the advisability and morality of killing and eating animals. This article touches at least tangentially on some of the things we were discussing. Bottom line: “Whether fish, fowl or mammal, neurological pain happens to us all. It’s the capacity for suffering that remains up for dispute.” Other bottom line: I’m still a carnivore, and my daughter is still vegetarian.

Then another kind of fish story: The Golden Fish: How God Woke Me up in a Dream by Eric Metaxas, in CHristianity Today. Mr. Metaxas is now a leader at the ministry, Breakpoint, that was begun by the late Chuck Colson. The article I linked to tells the unusual story of how God showed him his need for Christ in a dream . . . about a fish.

Tomorrow is beginning of June. Get a head start on June Celebrations, Links, and Birthdays.

Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

May10

Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

“In the pages that follow, I share what happened in my private world through what Christians politely call conversion. This word–conversion–is simply too tame and too refined to capture the train wreck that I experienced incoming face-to-face with the living God.”

This conversion story, written by former lesbian professor Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, contains wisdom on a lot of different subjects. Here are a few quotes that illuminate some things that God taught Mrs. Butterfield.

Fear-based parenting:
“I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness. When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack on to it. . . . We in the church tend to be more fearful of the (perceived) sin in the world than of the sin in our own heart. Why is that?”

Sermons:
“I came to believe that my job was not to critique and ‘receive’ a sermon, but to dig into it, to seize its power, to participate with its message, and to steal its fruit.”

Conversion:
“I didn’t choose Christ. Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.”

Betrayal:
“Betrayal deepens our love for Jesus (who will never betray us). Betrayal deepens our knowledge of Jesus and his sacrifice, obedience, and love.(Jesus was betrayed by his chosen disciples and by all who call upon him asSavior and Lord by our sin). Finally, betrayal deepens our Christian vision: The Cross is a rugged place, not a place for the squeamish or self-righteous.”

Church community:
“I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin. I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in, when the going gets tough. And I suspect that instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride.”

Sexual sin:
“Sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won’t be ‘healed’ by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. . . . Christians act as though marriage redeems sin. Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that.”

Adoption:
“Because we are Christ’s, we know that children are not grafted into a family to resolve our fertility problems or to boost our egos or to complete our family pictures or because we match color or race or nation-status. We know, because we are Christ’s, that adoption is a miracle. In a spiritual sense, it is the miracle at the center of the Christian life. We who are adopted by God are those given a new heart, a ‘rebirth.'”

I have been thinking a lot lately about the recent controversy over “missionary adoption” and the idea that adoptive parents must have the “right motives” before they adopt. While I understand the cautions and caveats that Ms. Headmistress of the Common Room and Ms. Butterfield both repeat and the issues involved with foreign adoptions in particular, I hate to see us as a culture discouraging adoption and the ministry of orphan care.

I believe Ms. Butterfield and the Headmistress when they say that adults who adopt out of selfishness tend to reap trouble and disappointment, just as those who have selfish motives when they give birth to children tend to have parenting and family issues. However, our motives in anything we do are difficult to discern and usually mixed at best. Why did I give birth to eight children? Because I enjoy having children and parenting them and homeschooling them (most of the time). Because I believe children are a gift from the Lord. Because it makes me happy to see my children serving the Lord and glorifying Him. Are these selfish motives or unselfish? Am I less likely to deal well with the disappointments of having some children who are not serving the Lord right now because I expected them to all follow Him? Do I love them less (or should I not have had them in the first place, God forbid) when they are not making me happy? These are all good questions to ask yourself in regard to your children, whether they’re adopted or not. The answers can give Christian parents insight into the growth that the Holy Spirit wants to bring about in their lives so that they can better serve Him as parents.

Being a parent is complicated, whether you birth the children or adopt them. Adoption has its own joys and pitfalls. Yes, I am going off on a tangent here. Rosaria Butterfield has written a great story with insight about homosexuality, Christian conversion, the gospel, and adoption. I recommend the book—and I recommend having children, too, however you go about it.

The Convert by G.K. Chesterton

Apr22

It’s National Poetry Month, and I haven’t done much poetry. It’s been one of those months so far, fast and furious and full of sounds, signifying I’m-not-sure-what-yet.

At any rate, here’s a poem by one of my favorite people, G.K. Chesterton. Does anybody know of a good, well written, popular biography of Chesterton? I’ve read his autobiographical Orthodoxy and others of his writings, but a really cracking good bio would be of interest.

The Convert
by G. K. Chesterton

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

Mar30

“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” Mark 15:37-39.

“Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.

Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer was born April 21, 1897 to a farming family in Pennsylvania. As a teenager, “while on his way home from work at a tire company, he overheard a street preacher say: ‘If you don’t know how to be saved… just call on God.’ Upon returning home, he climbed into the attic and heeded the preacherâ€™s advice.”

He later became a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and teacher and still later in his life he edited the denomination’s magazine, Alliance Life. He had seven children, never owned a car, and signed away most of the royalties from his books to charity.

Prince of Peace

Mar29

I thought Iâ€™d post a few times today and tomorrow about the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and what it means to me and to some of the authors and fictional and actual characters that I have on my bookshelves. Iâ€™m going to take turns blogging and house-cleaning and see how that goes.

Don Richardson and his wife Carol were missionaries to the Sawi people of Irian Jaya. In 1962 they went to live among the Sawi, a cannabalistic and pagan people, and to translate the Bible into the Sawi language.

However, there was a big problem. The Sawi idealized violence so much that when they heard the story of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas and subsequent death, they admired Judas as the hero of the story, the man who was so clever that he could befriend Jesus and gain his trust and then betray him to his death.

Mr. Richardson was at a loss as to how to communicate to the Sawi people their need for a Savior and reshaping of their violent culture. Then, as Don and Carol were about to leave the Sawi in despair over their inability to communicate the truth of Christ’s sacrifice,something happened. The Sawi decided to make peace:

“Among the Sawi,every demonstration of friendship was suspect except one. If a man would actually give his own son to his enemies, that man could be trusted! That, and that alone, was a proof of goodwill no shadow of cynicism could discredit!

And everyone who laid his hand on the given son was bound not to work violence against those who gave him, nor to employ the waness bind for their destruction.”

After witnessing for himself the peace child ceremony in which the Sawi gave their own sons to each other as a peace bond, Mr. Richardson was able to give the Sawi good news:

“Because Myao Kodon (God) wants men to find peace with Him and with each other, He decided to choose a once-for-all tarop child good enough, and strong enough to establish peace, not just for a while, but forever! The problem was, whom should he choose? For among all human children, there was no son good enough or strong enough to be an eternal tarop.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16

God made peace, eternal peace, between us and Him, between human beings, between the Sawi and the other tribes that they viewed as strangers and prey. And in our so sophisticated culture in which we view each other as rivals and strangers and either victors or victims, we need the peace of Jesus Christ just as much as the Sawi need it.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. Ephesians 2:13-14

Peace Child: An Unforgettable Story of Primitive Jungle Treachery in the 20th Century by Don Richardson is a wonderful demonstration of the efficacy of the gospel of Jesus Christ in all cultures and for all people.

A Light Shining by Glynn Young

Feb2

I thoroughly enjoyed Dancing Priest, Mr. Young’s first book about Michael Kent, Olympic cyclist, Edinburgh student, Anglican priest, and orphan with a mysterious past. Of course, it’s also the story of Sarah Hughes, American artist and also a student in Edinburgh, whose lack of faith throws a kink in the developing romance between her and Michael.

In this sequel, I was pleased to read more about Sarah and Michael and their growing families, both nuclear and church families. Michael’s and Sarah’s Christian testimony through lives lived openly and vulnerably is fresh and un-jaded. I loved the way that in their youthful enthusiasm they just did the next thing that God called them to, with prayer and thoughtfulness, yes, but without that too long attention to possible problems and hesitation that many of us (I) are prone to allow to derail our best intentions.

Mr. Young’s writing is simple and unadorned, easy to read and follow. The e-book edition of the book that I read sometimes needed some more spacing indicators to show when the point of view was changing from one character to another. There’s a shadowy terrorist villain in this second book, and I sometime couldn’t tell when I was leaving the mind and viewpoint of Michael Kent and entering the mind and world of the villain. I find this problem frequently in my Kindle reads, and it’s a little bit annoying, but not overwhelmingly so.

I would recommend these companion novels to anyone with an interest in well-written Christian-themed fiction, Anglican church fiction, adoption and street children, Olympic cycling, or the politics surrounding the British royal family. Read them in order, first Dancing Priest and then A Light Shining. No spoilers her, but all of these subjects are elements in the these two books about a vibrant young couple coming to terms with their faith in Christ and their journey to follow Him through difficult circumstances.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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