Monthly Archives: March 2010

It’s that time of the decade: I’m reinstalling Debian

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My main home workstation (previously named katherina, after a distant ancestor) was originally bought a few years ago — probably 2002 or 2003. Since then, it’s had its motherboard upgraded twice, new hard disks, and then even was moved to a completely new machine back in January. Throughout all of that, it’s still running the original sid that I put on it when it was new, dist-upgraded since then, copied to new disks via tar and netcat, but never reinstalled. So it’s probably been less than my average of 10 years on a given Debian install.

But it’s time. For one thing, despite the fact that I was one of the people that helped start Debian’s amd64 port (then known as the pure64 effort), I’ve been running i386 on my 64-bit workstation. For another, I want to switch from XFS to ext4. And finally, it has not escaped my notice that my laptop running Gnome with xmonad feels a lot faster than the far more powerful desktop running KDE4 with xmonad, plus Gnome integrates better with xmonad. And there are some nice gnome bits installed by default that my KDE system doesn’t have, and 400 packages installed on my system that are no longer in any archive. I could, of course, clean that stuff up — but all this adds up to enough of an excuse to start from scratch.

I continue to be very impressed with the quality of squeeze. This will be a very nice release when it comes out.

Review: Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves

Reviews, Society, Travel

Rick Steves is known for writing books, and producing public TV shows, about travel to Europe. He encourages people to get out of their comfort zone, advocates staying in homes instead of hotels, and giving yourself permission to struggle to communicate in a land of unfamiliar language. That way, you get to experience not just the landmarks, but the culture and history. That was the approach we favored in our recent trip to Europe, and after being there (and seeing tour groups), I think Rick Steves is right on.

On the plane to Europe, I read his Travel as a Political Act. This is not a guidebook, but more a book about the philosophy of travel. As usual with my book reviews, unless indicated otherwise, all quotes here come from the book. He starts out with this statement:

I’ve taught people how to travel. I focus mostly on the logistics: finding the right hotel, avoiding long lines… But that’s not why we travel. We travel to have enlightening experiences, to meet inspirational people, to be stimulated, to learn, and to grow. Travel has taught me the fun in having my cultural furniture rearranged and my ethnocentric self-assuredness walloped.

I read this book mostly on the plane to Hamburg, or the week prior to leaving. I can credit Rick Steves directly for encouraging me to strike up a conversation with a random German on the bus from Hamburg to Lübeck, which I’ll discuss here in a couple of days. Probably the biggest lament from Rick Steves is that the people that really ought to travel — the ones that are so sure that their ways are correct and best — are least likely to do so.

Make a decision that on any trip you take, you’ll make a point to be open to new experiences, seek options that get you out of your comfort zone, and be a cultural chameleon–trying on new ways of looking at things and striving to become a “temporary local.” … My best vacations have been both fun and intensely educational … Travel challenges truths that we were raised thinking were self-evident and God-given. Leaving home, we learn that other people find different truths to be self-evident. We realize that it just makes sense to give everyone a little wiggle room.

The book is set with an introductory encouragement to travel, followed by seven vignettes of different countries he’s visited, and descriptions of how it’s impacted him. He gave a lesson of the opening of the German Reichstag (parliament building), which he was present for in 1999. He was surrounded by teary-eyed Germans — and a few tourists “so preoccupied with trivialities — forgotten camera batteries, needing a Coke, the lack of air-conditioning — that they were missing out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate a great moment with the German people.”

He comments that we can learn from other countries — that no one country has a monopoly on good ideas, and it is plenty patriotic to insist what we adopt good ideas (such as drug policy) from other countries and adopt them for our own.

Particularly touching to me was the description and photo of a memorial in El Salvador, very much looking like the American Vietnam memorial — except that one remembering loved ones lost fighting the United States. How many Americans even know that we were involved in a damaging war in El Salvador?

A large part of his book was, for me, “preaching to the choir,” as this comment illustrated:

In the European view, America is trapped in an inescapable cycle to feed its military-industrial complex: As we bulk up our military, we look for opportunities to make use of it. (When your only tool is a hammer, you treat every problem like a nail.) And then, when we employ our military unwisely, we create more enemies…which makes us feel the need to grow our military even more. If an American diplomat complained to his European counterpart, “America is doing all the heavly lifting when it comes to military,” the European might respond, “Well, you seem to be enjoying it. We’re building roads and bridges instead.”

That’s a sentiment I’ve agreed with for quite some time already, and as such, some parts of the book moved slowly for me — though I imagine his target audience included people that had never seriously considered these arguments before. Then there were surprising facts:

by the end of World War I, an estimated half of all the men in France between the ages of 15 and 30 were casualties. When some Americans, frustrated at France’s reluctance to follow us into a war, call the French “surrender monkeys,” I believe it shows their ignorance of history.

And again, I’d agree with him on that point.

The vignette on Iran was particularly interesting, as he described his experiences in person, they sounded far different than the picture we often get in the media.

I have realized, incidentally, that I am terrible at writing book reviews. So rather than inflict more paragraphs upon you with this one, I’ll summarize by saying that this is a touching, informative, and motivational book, which I highly recommend. I’ll leave you with this quote:

Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” These wise words can be a reallying cry for all travelers once comfortably back home. When courageous leaders in our community combat small-mindedness and ignorance… travelers can stand with them in solidarity.

I didn’t travel to make some sort of statement or as a “political act.” But I was enriched in many ways by travel — of course the obvious ones of contemplating the history of a 900-year-old beautiful church, but also in seeing the different character of different cities, being with two families for a couple of days, and seeing different approaches to common problems. I am very glad I wasn’t shut off from this behind a tinted window in a tour bus.

Trip part 1: Kansas to Indiana

Travel

Note: This post was written March 12, and posting was delayed until our return home.

This is the first part of our trip: driving from Kansas to Indiana with Jacob and Oliver. From Indiana, we’ll be flying to Germany while the boys stay with their grandparents.

We normally don’t like long road trips. Our preferred way to travel is by train. By air is second, and car is last. But this time, driving was all that made sense. We planned to make the 11-hour drive in two days to give the boys more of a chance to get out of the car and run around.

It’s always a bit demoralizing heading east from our place. You drive at highway speeds for an hour and are barely one county over.

We left at about noon and made it as far as Kansas City before our first stop — much to our surprise. We ate at a Cracker Barrel there. Afterwords, Jacob loved running in front of the restaurant.

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Meanwhile, Oliver chilled on a wooden bench.

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Jacob was excited to find this chair. He said “Here is a chair just the size of me!”

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We spent the night in a hotel on the eastern edge of the metro area. Then Thursday hit the road again. We stopped for a mid-morning snack, then ate lunch at Pizza Hut. Jacob ran around in the grass outside again.

Jacob invented a new game with me. He’d ask, “How will we get there?” I was supposed to guess. “With a pickup?” “No…” “With a boat?” “No…” Eventually he’d come up with a silly answer: “We’ll ride a pile of bricks there!” or “We’ll ride on top of a stop sign!” Then he’d sit there laughing for a little bit. Pretty soon: “Hey dad. How will we get there?”

We had a few toy-throwing episodes, but overall Jacob did very well. Oliver did even better. He slept a good part of the way, and happily watched Jacob for most of the rest. The car trip went well.

This morning, it’s time to get ready to head to the airport, and to break the news to Jacob that we’ll be gone for a few days. We’ve learned that he worries a lot about change if he knows about it too much in advance, finding it hard to process and understand, so we’ll tell him after he wakes up this morning. Then off to the airport for our flight to Newark. Then we get to sit around in New Jersey for a few hours before our 7.5-hour flight to Hamburg.

Review: The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox

Reviews,

I know I’ve been on something of a religion streak on the blog of late, and this will be the last such post for awhile.

I first hear of Harvey Cox’s book The Future of Faith during an excellent hour-long interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm. It was intriguing enough that I bought the Kindle edition of the book and read it.

The title of the book is both very accurate and rather misleading. A lot of the book — and, to me, the most fascinating parts of it — focus on the history of faith. Cox’s repeated point is that we are only now regaining a notion of faith that the earliest Christians had, and it is a notion that happens to be compatible with modern science and incompatible with fundamentalism and intolerance in all its stripes.

Throughout this post, it should be understood that quotes or passages are from the book. Cox is so quotable that a good chunk of this review will be showing you some of his quotes, with a bit of discussion around them. I very much enjoyed this book, and highly recommend it.

Faith vs. Belief

It is true that for many people “faith” and “belief” are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same … and it is important to clarify the difference. Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure… a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term to express a degree of uncertainty … We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live.

This is an important distinction, and if you stop and think about it, Cox is arguing with a common notion about faith almost from page 1. Faith isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It’s about what we hold dear, what we think works for us in life.

Creeds

Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs. It is also the history of equally faithful people who questioned, altered, and discarded those same creeds … But both the doctrinal canons and the architectural constructions are means to an end. Making either the defining element warps the underlying reality of faith.

Cox here reinforces the point that Christianity isn’t about believing certain statements, and it isn’t even about a literal (or not) reading of the Bible. It’s what C. S. Lewis talked about as the inward transformation in onesself. Creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, are rather irrelevant to him.

Cox separates the history of Christianity into three periods: the age of faith, stretching from the time of Jesus only a few centuries until Constantine; the age of belief, stretching from Constantine until the 20th century; and the age of the spirit, now dawning. During the age of faith, “their sharing in the living Spirit of Christ united Christians with each other, and ‘faith’ meant hope and assurance in the dawning of a new era of freedom, healing, and compassion that Jesus had demonstrated.” Cox makes the point that doctrinal questions just weren’t all that important back then, and though differences existed, they weren’t considered to be fundamental to the religion. “Confidence in Christ was their primary orientation, and hope for his [earthly] Kingdom their motivating drive.” Further, he argues that the age of the spirit is a return to this earlier age, albeit with modern twists.

Christianity is growing faster than it ever has before, but mainly outside the West and in movements that accent spiritual experience, discipleship, and hope; pay scant attention to creeds; and flourish without hierarchies. We are now witnessing the beginning of a ‘post-Constantinian era.'”

Cox describes a person that described himself as “a practicing Christian, not always a believing one.” He suggests that the belief/non-believer statement is a disservice to Christianity and to other religions. He then quoted a Catholic bishop as saying: “The line between belief and unbelief runs through the middle of each one of us, including myself, a bishop of the church.” In other words, “The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it.”

Faith and Belief in Bible reading

Creation myths such as … the first chapters of Genesis were not primarily composed to answer the “how” or “when” questions. They are not scientific accounts, even though their poetical language, when read literally (which is always a mistake), may sound that way. Rather, they grapple … with the linked mysteries of both why there is a universe and what our place in it is … They are more like lyrical cantatas, symphonies of symbols through which humans have tried to make sense of their place in the world…

This is where the distinction between faith and belief is vital. These stories are — literally — “not to be believed.” They are, rather, artifacts human beings have crafted to try to wring some meaning from the mystery. They are not themselves the mystery.

I liken this to Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park. If you were to read it 1000 years in the future, it might not have been conveniently shelved above the word “fiction.” Would a reader in the future know that it was not meant to be a literal description of facts? I think sometimes we make this mistake when we read the Bible. Note, though, that although we all understand that Jurassic Park wasn’t meant to be a literal description of facts, it seems to have been valued by quite a large part of society. And it didn’t even address big mysteries.

Cox argues against ridding ourselves of the creation myths, suggesting that they are an important reminder that we are similar to humans who grappled with the same big questions centuries ago as we do today.

The ill-advised transmuting of symbols into a curious kind of “facts” has created an immense obstacle to faith for many thoughtful people. Instead of helping them confront the great mystery, it has effectively prevented them from doing so … the objective knowledge science rightly insists on is not the only kind of knowledge human beings need … Faith, although it is evoked by the mystery that surrounds us, is not the mystery itself.

Constantine and the Age of Belief

One of the most devastating blunders made by the church, especially as the Age of Belief began, was to insist that the Spirit is present only in believers.

Cox spends a lot of time covering the very interesting topic of how and why the church moved to the Age of Belief. His central thesis is that money, power, and prestige were primarily responsible, and that an unrighteous collusion between bishops and Constantine, each using Christianity for their own purposes, finally made it happen. This is very interesting stuff, but this post is too long already, so I will not spend a lot of time on it. I found the Council of Nicea to be particularly interesting, considering that the Nicean Creed came about partially by exile or execution of those Christians that disagreed with it. Cox also points out that “there never was a single ‘early Christianity’; there were many, and the idea of ‘heresy’ was unknown.”

The time is ripe to retrieve the term “Way” for Christianity and “followers of the Way” for Christians. It is at once more accurate, more original, and more contemporary than “believers.”

To the future

Cox describes attending a meeting of the church in Hong Kong in 2003, and uses it as a metaphor for the future of faith:

Their idea of interfaith dialogue was to work with their fellow Asians of whatever religion to advance the Kingdom that Jesus had inspired them, as Christians, to strive for, regardless of what the others called it. They were neither “fundamentalist” nor “modernist.” They seemed more attuned to the element of mystery at the core of Christianity and to its vision of justice. They were also clearly impatient with many of the disputes that preoccupy the different wings of the American churches.”

Conclusion

I found this book to be both enlightening and informative. I highly recommend it, even if you disagree with some of Cox’s conclusions. It is a fascinating view into how the world’s largest religion evolved over the years, and a candid look at the mistakes it has made in that time.