Content & Context

THE APOSTLE PAUL

Kilari Anand Paul may be the world’s most influential spiritual leader. But he suffers from anonymity in the United States. And apparently, “suffer” is the right word; he longs for more exposure for his Global Peace Initiative and, reportedly, for himself. A recent cover story in The New Republic, intended to introduce Paul to an American audience, portrayed him as a relentless self-promoter whose heart nonetheless seems to be in the right place, ministering to the people who most need a minister. An Indian-born Christian, Paul has counseled warlords and leaders throughout war-torn regions of the world, from Ivory Coast and Pakistan to Haiti—where he laid hands on and prayed with rebel leader Guy Philippe, convincing him to pursue peace—and Liberia, where he helped urge president Charles Taylor to step down and go into exile. He’s met with Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. To Paul, “sermonizing to armed goons has become almost commonplace,” the New Republic‘s Michelle Cottle writes. So has preaching to crowds—he draws tens of thousands to rallies in Africa and India, including a 2001 rally in Lagos, Nigeria, which GPI claims drew three million people.

But even though he and his family now live in Houston, Paul is a nobody among American evangelicals, Cottle says. To try to change that, Paul has hooked up with Manhattan p.r. firm Rubenstein Associates and former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, and has twisted his share of arms in Washington. But so far, his name awareness hasn’t budged. As Cottle tells it, American evangelicals would rather listen to a white televangelist rant about abortion than an Indian man preach about global poverty. Cottle, as with most of the news media, seems too eager to put a risible face on American evangelicalism and greatly exaggerates the popularity of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But she does acknowledge that part of the problem is the reportedly confrontational and ego-swollen Paul himself. His “reflexive self-promotion borders on parody,” she writes, adding that “he can come across as either a liar or a crank.” Still, it’s hard to argue with the importance of his mission, which Cottle calls a “peculiar specialty as spiritual adviser to the scum of the earth.”

PLACES & CULTURE

From Reuters:

YORK – Researchers have sent up a mini-airship inside one of Britain’s most ancient cathedrals to inspect stained-glass windows and inaccessible stonework. The metre-long radio-controlled craft carried digital cameras to allow staff to monitor the condition of the cathedral’s 14th-century windows, all of which survived a 1984 fire that gutted the south transept. “Compared to the cost of erecting scaffolding it is very cheap,” said York Minster Collections Manager Louise Hampson on Tuesday. “It’s remarkably unobtrusive,” she added. “Because it’s almost silent, it’s been possible to have services in the side chapel while it has been flying around.” Small electric motors control the fine movement of the craft, while wires from the ground dictate its height.

From the BBC:

The largest particle detector in Mexico is being built inside a pyramid in the ancient settlement of Teotihuacan. The equipment will detect muons, tiny particles that are created when cosmic rays bombard the Earth’s atmosphere. Dr Arturo Menchaca and colleagues from Mexico’s National Autonomous University hope that by tracking the muons through the pyramid, they can find cavities. This could indicate whether the kings of the ancient people who built the site are also entombed within it. “Down we go—and mind your head,” Dr Menchaca says, as he adjusts his yellow hard-hat, and lowers himself down the rusting iron steps in to a dark 2,000-year-old tunnel running beneath the Pyramid of the Sun. It is a 100m walk along the cramped tunnel to the team’s new laboratory, a plastic shed set up in a cavern in the bowels of the structure.

WEEKLY DIGEST

“Disgust is both powerful and pervasive in our lives, yet of all the emotions that make us human, it is surely the most neglected, and the least understood,” wrote B&C editor John Wilson earlier this month in the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section. Recently, though, scholars’ contributions have advanced a philosophy of disgust, or “disgustology,” even if their questions are more useful than their answers. Bioethicist Leon Kass contends that “repugnance is the emotional expression of a deep wisdom”—a moral sensor alerting us to violations of order and goodness. Another study suggests disgust is “an evolutionary response to the threat of disease.” Philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees disgust as an awareness of our animal nature, which we seek to deny by distancing ourselves from others, and from which we seek relief in (she says) fantastic notions of an all-powerful deity. As John points out, one concept she neglects is self-disgust, which, despite the self-esteem cheerleading of pop psychology, he says can be “congruent with reality” and “an indispensable engine of reform.” Story
Asia has always prized boy babies, as Chinese poetry from the first millennium B.C. shows, says the Chronicle of Higher Education. Now that sex-selective abortion or abandonment of female babies is aided by prenatal technology, the imbalance between the sexes of has grown more pronounced. But is this a threat to world peace? Two new books argue that “surplus males,” minus mates, not only cause crime and social disorder, but also encourage excess militarism among governments (which figure they have plenty of male soldiers to spare). Critics say this thesis relies on masculine stereotypes and exaggerates the threat to international security. Story
Who will win this year’s presidential election? That’s easy: the sunnier optimist. Candidates consider optimism to be “a political strategy” and even “a matter of patriotism,” says Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic Monthly, and so they “strive to out-Pollyanna one another, laboring to maintain their smiles, never allowing a sobering thought to cloud their gaze.” Story If Chait weren’t a political columnist, he probably would have spent less time analyzing the political upside of optimism and devoted more space to the interesting question he poses at the end: why do we assume “that there’s something inherently virtuous about optimism,” especially since optimism has often been the political capital of tyrants? And given the woes in the world right now, to what extent is blithe optimism dishonest?
Whether or not they’re optimistic, church leaders often falter because they fail to conceive of their church as an organization, writes David Batstone in the weekly e-mail newsletter of Sojourners. If they did, perhaps “internal conflict and dysfunction” would give way to “intentional thought and strategy” for “maintaining the organizational integrity of the operation.” Batstone says he has been surprised to hear from churches who are using his book Saving The Corporate Soul—which he wrote with for-profit corporations in mind—to help them evaluate their own methods of leadership. He identifies some of the basic leadership principles churches often fail to appreciate (including the problems with top-heavy leadership and lack of “organizational transparency”). Link While some churches may find this list helpful, it lacks the important disclaimer that a church is not just like any other corporation, and may in fact need to steer clear of some of the business terminology Batstone uses if it is going to avoid what he condemns: confusing “goals” and “values.”

Related:
Federal intelligence: the ‘ideal’ corporation, from the New Yorker
The Economist on Wal-Mart
Elsewhere:
Four ways worship relates to culture, from blogging theologian Gideon Strauss
Report from last month’s Anabaptist Colloquium, from Martin Marty’s “Sightings”

Miscellaneous:Hitler’s dream: New York-bound suicide bombers, from the Atlantic – U.S. dominance in science slides, from the New York Times – Rose-smelling low among busy college students, from the Times – Jane Jacobs returns to New York City, from the New Yorker – Shadowmancer billed as anti-sorcery alternative to Harry Potter, from the Baltimore Sun – Celery’s negative calories, from the Chicago Reader
Resonance: Todd Hertz’s “What Would Buffy Do?” from the current issue of B&C was posted last week. Here‘s an ode to Buffy in the Salt Lake Tribune; David Buckna’s “Pop Gospel” quizzes on Buffy from the Calgary Herald are here and here. See also “Slayer Slang” by Michael Adams in Verbatim, edited by Erin McKean. … Jeffrey Overstreet wrote in B&C last year about anger in recent movies. The Melbourne Age recently ran a feature on a new book about anger and men.