Archive for the 'Reflections' Category

Observations of the Customs of a Certain Temple on a Certain Feast Day

Published on April 8, 2012 in Reflections and Theology. 4 Comments

I rise. It is a feast day, a holy day. I blink sleep away and begin to prepare a special savory treat to commemorate the end of the traditional annual fast. Outside the window I see a man walk by, his body making jerky lunges in random directions, seemingly at war with specters. His mind is shackled by some demon or other, and awareness of his prison lessens the savoriness of my treat slightly.

My wife and I have been invited to a temple where this holy day is celebrated, the day which proclaims that death is only a hiccup of our existence. We walk to the temple amidst a sleeping city which has not altered its pattern for the sake of today’s holiness. Closer to the temple, we observe disciples in expensive clothing (a tradition I do not understand) making their way to the entrance, where we are all greeted by smiling acolytes who hand us papers on which are inscribed the details of today’s ceremony. Inside is a joyous throng of worshippers, eating more savory treats, drinking a bitter, black tea, and greeting their friends. The fine clothing is impressive, but more so the beautiful faces and radiant smiles of the crowd. In stark contrast with the streets outside the temple, there are no demons to be seen here, just the medley of colorful garments and the exuberance of the end of the fast.

The ceremony begins and we hurry to find our place in the giant indoor amphitheater. Hundreds, if not thousands, have come to celebrate this holy day, and all faces are now focused on one priest on a central stage (he is dressed like a successful merchant). He lifts his hands and calls upon the divine presence, then cedes the stage to a differently-accoutred priest holding an instrument like a lute. This second priest leads various musicians as well as the gathered audience in songs written for this annual feast. But for the words which are sung and the clothing of the audience, I would struggle to know whether I am in a temple or a house of music where the traveling bards play less holy music upon a similar stage.

Soon, a third priest (the high priest of this temple, also dressed like a merchant) takes the stage in order to deliver a speech, after the fashion of this temple and others like it. The speech reminds me of the debates of the University, if they (in foolishness) had only one participant, and if others present were mute. The audience listens in silence, and thus it is difficult for me to discern whether the priest’s speech is being met with agreement or not (as this seems to be the point of it). I see that his heart is pure in his belief, but true to his choice of clothing he wields logic like a merchant. In his effort to convince those of the throng who do not yet belong to the temple to adopt its hopes, he makes several points, and I wonder if anyone has chosen to change his mind as a result.

My own mind wanders to the story which this day celebrates, about the man who died and then was raised by divine power back to life. The high priest in his speech reminded us that the news of that man’s new life was couriered by women (in a society where they were considered insignificant). I ponder the honor given to these women in the story as my wife shares in whisper an irony: the cadre of priests at this temple consists entirely of men! So much for women bearing good news.

I am brought back to the ceremony as the cadence of the high priest’s lecture signifies that he is about to finish. The next ritual is one with which I am familiar, though at this temple it is also rife with irony. Led by yet one more priest, it re-enacts another part of the story of the resurrected man, where, at dinner with his friends, he uses bread and wine to prophesy his death. Owing to the size of the crowd, the re-enactment looks more like a display of martial discipline than a meal. Small wafers and tiny cups of sweet wine are delivered with impressive efficiency, and the worshippers swallow the bland morsels as the musicians play music designed to inspire contemplation. Truly, the music is more reminiscent of the intimacy of that first meal than the small food bits which are intended to symbolize it.

For my reflection, I contemplate death. I contemplate my fear of it and search for that seed within my belly that says death will not be the end of me. I contemplate the story of the man who was raised from the dead, and wonder at its place in history and what it means if it really happened. I contemplate the beauty of the gathered worshippers contrasted with the ugliness of the streets outside. I contemplate a world that doesn’t know what to do with death (physical or psychological), and so inflicts it on others, runs from it, or denies its reality altogether through a steadfast focus on present pleasure. This contemplation submerges me into the deep pool of longing which has always existed in the center of my being, and I am moved in wordless ways.

The amphitheater emerges back into view as the high priest returns to the stage to intone a farewell benediction, accompanied by more music. He then directs those in the audience who are parents to collect their children from a holding area. I realize for the first time that, despite the varied ages of the disciples, no children were present during the ceremony. I can only imagine that they were sequestered so as not to be bothersome, or perhaps because children are thought not to be able to understand the high priest’s lecture.

After the ceremony, we make our way to the temple doors, passing clumps of worshippers (organized by some social principle or other) discussing various topics unrelated to the rituals of the temple. Back on the streets of the city, the people we pass seem to be going about their business in ignorance of the day’s holiness, particularly those who, being deformed and unable to work, beg for money. Without further event (save for seeing several citizens wearing masks with the ears of a hare, presumably about to act in a comedy) we arrived home and began to prepare the traditional feast: a combination of morning and mid-day foods.

Reflection: Why “It’s Complicated” With Facebook

Published on February 3, 2011 in Culture, Reflections and Technology. 9 Comments Tags: , , .

When my wife and I got married at the beginning of last August, we decided not to use Facebook or do (practically) any e-mail during our month-long honeymoon, since we wanted our vacation to be free from social distraction. Afterwards, once we got set up in our apartment in Oxford, I gave myself a little challenge, on a whim: not to open up Facebook until I had a need or strong desire to. While the need was realized once or twice (I maintain a Facebook application called BookTracker, and had to update and test some code, which required going to the canvas page for the application), the strong desire wasn’t. Thus it happens that, 5 months after my Facebook hiatus officially ended, I still haven’t updated my status (although updates are made automatically when I publish a blog) or seen anything in my news feed. Somewhat humorously, Jessica and I haven’t even bothered to update our relationship status from ‘Engaged’ to ‘Married’! What follows are a few reflections I now feel prepared to make about Facebook (and a fortiori much of social media in general), given that I’ve had a decent amount of time to differentiate from it:

  • Facebook is distracting. Even though I had heavily curated my news feed, ruthlessly eliminating ‘friends’ to keep them from crufting it up with FarmVille updates, I now recognize that Facebook was a habitual distraction. Whenever I paused in work or lost a train of thought, I’d mindlessly navigate to Facebook and get even further away from what I really needed to spend time doing. I still have other such distractions, e-mail being the most major. But in resisting the urge to click my Facebook bookmark, I really do save time and brain cycles. I think the mode of distraction goes deeper than individual distraction experiences, however; more on this in further reflections!


  • Facebook discourages extended or systematic discourse. I’m the kind of person who likes to share thoughts and ideas, and sometimes I even think others appreciate them. What Facebook (and moreso Twitter) encouraged me to do was to compress these thoughts into something that could fit into a status update. I realized that this bite-size style of communication had two effects:
    • My desires to share thoughts/ideas were satisfied by publishing these snippets, and I therefore had less inclination to try and say something that took time to post on my blog. Why would I try to make a complex and nuanced contribution to a conversation when I would get ‘liked’ just as much for saying something short and snarky, or simply passing on a link?
    • The things I said were less useful or interesting to others. While there is indeed value in saying something concisely, there are a lot of valuable things that can’t be so stated (hopefully this post is among them, for example). Some arguments that merit attention are extended!

    A systemic corollary of this, I think, is the general reduction of people’s willingness to engage with complicated ideas that take time to explicate and understand. I think it’s obvious why this is a problem—one has only to look at any hot political issue to see what happens when debate devolves into slogan-shouting (i.e., status-update-slinging)!


  • Facebook is shallow. I mean this in a number of ways. The previous point elaborated on the shallowness inherent in the sharing mechanism, but I believe it extends to the quality of relationships maintained on Facebook, and in general the content which is produced (‘social’ apps tend to exacerbate this problem, as they try to spam the news feed with meaningless achievements or updates). I think this point is a strict consequence of other things I’ve been saying, but I wanted to sum it up under one adjective.


  • Facebook technologizes relationships. I hope that this entry will be the first of many to come relating to the philosophy of technology, and so I don’t want to go into a lot of detail here. Basically, Facebook is an instance of the technological paradigm in that it commoditizes the goods it claims to procure for us. Ostensibly, Facebook’s goal is merely to provide something like ‘frictionless online connection’ for pre-existing friendships. However, let’s face it, what people use Facebook for is ‘connection’ simpliciter, and often not even in the context of a pre-existing relationship. The ‘connection’ that Facebook procures for us in this regard is the mere composite of the sharing and consuming of personal information, rather than the appropriate synchronization of sharing/consuming which engenders true connection. These two behaviors (sharing and consuming) are disconnected in such a way that everyone is talking, and everyone is listening, but nobody is having a conversation. And yet, in the way that high-fructose corn syrup fools our bodies into thinking they have ingested something natural (sugar), I notice that, for the most part, Facebook users believe this flood of voices projected into the void constitutes legitimate connection.


  • Facebook facilitates strange interpersonal behavior. Has anyone ever had a Facebook friend post something to their wall which should have more appropriately been sent as a private message? I have, and much more often than experiencing the equivalent real-life behavior (i.e., communicating personal information within earshot of others) or even the equivalent e-mail behavior (i.e., cc’ing people who really don’t have anything to do with the private contents of the message). Has anyone else noticed a growing tendency in users to share fairly personal and/or awkward updates to their entire friend list? Facebook provides tools to moderate who sees what, but few if any people make use of these tools, with the result that most users’ friend lists are undifferentiated masses of relationships, probably not all of whom should be informed at the same time about, say, a miscarriage! Are these things Facebook’s fault? Not directly, perhaps, but the ecosystem has somehow bred this kind of culture, perhaps because the disembodied nature of Facebook relationships makes it easier to forget who exactly you’re speaking to.

    One more personal example: mere hours after our wedding, my wife and I were tagged in Facebook photos of the event (nevermind the fact that our invitation explicitly asked guests not to do this!), which of course are visible to God-knows-who. We were faced with the decision of waiting to relive our special day through our wedding photographer’s photos (which would take a few months to arrive), or seeing people’s crappy cameraphone pics immediately, in all their poorly-lit glory. We chose to ignore the Facebook photos, and in fact I still haven’t been on to see any of them. My point is: when did it become socially acceptable to publicize photos of a bride and groom to the wider network before said bride and groom can even realistically be expected to be able to see them?


  • Facebook is the best tool on the internet for making stuff ‘social’. Let’s face it, we all use the internet, and we’re not going to stop anytime soon. A lot of what we do online is socially oriented, like sharing photos of weddings and parties and vacations with friends. If we ignore the strange social behavior I claim is encouraged by Facebook culture, there’s nothing wrong at all with sharing photos with friends. This is one of the few things I’ve missed about using Facebook, though I guess I could post everything to Flickr and link it up here on my blog, hoping people would find their way to the photos. Likewise, Facebook is the best avenue I know for reliably blasting information to the widest audience I have; that is why I decided to let my blog posts automatically generate updates on Twitter and Facebook. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to suggest that these channels are in principle good things.

I think it’s clear that, overall, I’m pretty happy with my time away from Facebook. It’s enabled me to recognize some of the weird things that happen in its ecosystem, whether or not they are explicitly encouraged by Facebook itself. I also have substantial worries about what social media in general is doing to the concept of real friendship and embodied relationship. I think these are broader worries about the pattern of technology which hopefully I’ll be able to explicate in future posts (my ultimate goal will be to blog through a book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Society, by Albert Borgmann, which has radically reshaped my thinking about the nature of technology). I also hope I don’t need to make an exhaustive list of qualifications, e.g., people are weird without Facebook too, and so on—I simply think there is a definitive pattern of engagement we can discern through observation of social networks, and it’s worth taking a critical perspective on that pattern, in order to inform our decisions about how we want to relate with networks like Facebook.

PS: Justin has reminded me that our friend Jesse Rice has a book about how to engage with social media in a spiritually healthy way: The Church of Facebook. I haven’t read it, but it looks interesting! Comments from anyone who’s read it?

Reflection: Food Ethics and Genetically Modified Corn

Published on January 24, 2011 in Food and Reflections. 4 Comments

When I was young, my family had little money, and eating out at all was a luxury. When we did eat out, we tended to frequent such fine establishments as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, or (for special occasions) Golden Corral (not sure if they ever made it out of Texas). The evidence of this can be seen in my memories of my 12th birthday dinner (on our birthday dinners we got to pick the meal): I chose a 20-piece box of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Yum! What a tasty treat!

Thankfully, most of the time I ate my mom’s cooking, which, while not engineered specifically to crank my food pleasure sensors into panicked overdrive, was at least healthy. Living life on my own in college and afterward, I actually cooked for myself, and by ‘cooked’ I mean ‘prepared a box of Tuna Helper’. When I moved back to Palo Alto, I discovered the endless joys and conveniences of Trader Joe’s, and the boxes I purchased went from advertising such bland American fare as “Creamy Tuna” to exotic culinary experiences like “Pad Thai”. At no point did I ever think about (a) any kind of ‘health’ properties of the food, e.g. number of calories (I was active and naturally burnt calories through constant nervous beard-twisting), or (b) any (what you might call) ‘food ethics’, e.g. the provenance of the food, whether it was ‘fair trade’, ‘organic’, etc… I cared about two things: price and flavor!

California has this way of sort of oozing ‘organic’ ideology into your body if you’re not careful, though, and soon enough I was vaguely aware that I was supposed to feel that what I was eating was bad, tasteless (in both senses), and just wrong! I have to say, I didn’t care that much. Then I went to live in Kenya for a while. While there, I (and my housemates) decided to be vegetarians, in a sort of solidarity with the orphans we were living with (they were too poor to eat meat except on Christmas). For 2 months, I ate exclusively locally-grown vegetarian food, because that is what was available. Also, we were training for a marathon, so I was eating lots of it. Anyway, at some point I had a brief trip back to the States, and stopped at a McDonald’s during a road trip. I didn’t want to give up on the vegetarian solidarity, so I had them make an Egg McMuffin with no meat. I started to eat it and immediately stopped. It was nauseating. All I could taste was fat and flavor—and the thing that they said was an egg was certainly not an egg. For the rest of the trip I became sort of a snobby vegetarian person of the kind I would have mocked a few years earlier, all because real food had spoiled me. It just wasn’t fun to eat crap anymore, I guess!

A few months later, after returning to the States for good, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It’s a really good book, and you should read it. It’s all about food, and how it’s produced and manufactured according to several different ‘food frameworks’ (industrial, organic, industrial-organic, hunter-gathering, etc…). It blew the door to questions of ‘food ethics’ wide open in my mind, and, for better or worse, I can’t go back. On top of that, I’ve married my wife Jessica, the Queen of All Things Organic Even If There’s No Hard Evidence To Suggest They’re Any Better. Between her and Michael Pollan (or maybe because of Michael Pollan and despite her efforts to convince my recalcitrant self otherwise), I now exhibit the following characteristics:

  • I look at all ingredients in food products before I buy them, and reject any food which contains non-natural ingredients.
  • I’ll spend more money to buy organic food if it is available.
  • I’ll spend more money to buy local food if it is available.
  • It feels like a serious moral dilemma (because I actually believe it is) when different bits of the ethical food pyramid collide: what’s more important? Fair wages for producers or food production which doesn’t harm the environment?
  • Slow food is where it’s at. The process of producing, gathering, cooking, and eating the food is a sacred one that shouldn’t be rushed.
  • …and so on.

Essentially, I’ve become just the sort of California wacko I never understood before, and find myself on the other side of the same arguments I used to have with Jessica! Strangely, it feels like what I have is a great and integrated way to relate my body to both the world and other people. One other benefit of this approach is avoiding a lot of the crazy things that can happen in the world of highly-processed food, like what I learned with great sadness is how they make my precious McDonald’s chicken nuggets. A bit of news that inspired me to write this entry: apparently a recent study claimed to find significant links between genetically-modified corn (the kind of corn which has been genetically engineered in order to withstand the pesticides which are most effective) and several serious disorders in rats. Not surprisingly, trace amounts of the pesticides were found in the rats’ bodies after ingesting the corn. I guess it makes sense: if you make corn immune to Roundup (a particular popular pesticide herbicide), you will probably use Roundup on it. But Roundup is not good to eat. But, hey…the corn survived and looks good, so let’s eat it! Mmmm, Roundup! … I don’t know, but to me the whole idea seems a bit stupid.

Another point that Michael Pollan made in his book is that we might want to be a bit careful of genetically engineered food for reasons other than possibly ingesting pesticide residue. We’re discovering that our bodies have evolved in a complex symbiosis with our natural foods, and that, while we can perform chemical magic and make our bodies think they’re eating well, after a long time it can lead to degeneration. I’m neither doctor nor chemist, so I don’t want to overreach my authority, but it does seem like a decent point to consider: at what point does fiddling with the genetic makeup of our food pose a threat to us as eaters? How many generations do we need to test the food on in order to discover whether it’s safe? A few, at least, I would think. And all the data I’ve seen about people who eat “that kind” of food suggest that obesity, diabetes, and cancer are what may indeed result.

Anyway, all this is to say that food is worth thinking about deeply. Not only is it important for the very obvious reason that we need it to live, but it is connected on the level of essence to what makes us human in so many strata other than the biological: it motivates work, drives and sustains social experiences, procures meaningful, enjoyable, and lasting experiences, echoes deep theological principles, and teaches us about our limits and our needs. I hope to write more about this stuff as Jessica and I continue to explore how we engage with food, in a world no longer set up to make the answers to some of our questions obvious. I guess, from the point of view of reflection, that’s a good thing!