Christopher Hitchens at RWU

This evening, Christopher Hitchens, one of "The Four Horsemen", will be giving a lecture here on campus. The lecture is free and open to the public as part of our "Civil Discourse" series and as the opening to the 2009 Roger Williams University Conference on Religion and the State. The theme of this year's conference is "Islam and the West". I'm not sure how much of the conference I will attend to, but I'm headed to the Hitchens talk in an hour or so. I'm willing to bet it will be good, likely to be controversial, and probably anything but "civil". Should be fun. :)

Ravenous curiosity

As usual, Dale over at The Meming of Life hits the nail on the head in his recent post, this time on the parenting philosophy of promoting "ravenous curiosity". His post comes as the perfect follow-up to my kids' "frozen ocean" experiment. I have to admit too that I really enjoyed this bit of snarkiness:

It’s not that religion is inherently incurious. Religion and science are both planted in the cortical freakishness that demands answers. It’s just that religion wants the answers it wants, while science wants the answers that are in the answer key. Also known as “the actual answers."

Who buys this stuff?

Some things are just too humorous not to share.

Hulkamania?

So, I'm eating breakfast at the hotel in D.C. last week and I see on CNN (or MSNBC or Fox or *insert cable news channel*) that there was going to be an "evangelical rally" on the Mall that day. Turns out The Call was in town. Great.

So, the kids and I take the metro down to the Mall and sure enough we're bombarded by pamphleteers as we leave the metro stop. I managed to fend off the hoard without taking a single "You're going to burn in hell" flyer/newspaper/brochure. As we move away from the crowd I see a monstrosity of a stage set up by the Capitol - it looked like a Def Leppard concert (no offense to Def Leppard) - and we hear someone on stage yelling and carrying on about something. Honestly, I have no idea what the guy was saying, but the tone and rhythm sent chills down my spine - it's hard to explain, but it was some combination of anger, insanity, and overacting (I hate to suggest this, but check out the video on the right side of the Call's website I linked to above to hear what I mean). I suppose, unsurprisingly, evangelical is the best word to describe it. The guy could have been reading directly from Isaac Newton's Principia and it would have sounded just as scary-insane.

Actually, now that I think about it, the whole thing reminded me of something like this

So, what did the kids and I do? Walked straight across the Mall to the Museum of Natural History, of course, and took part in, among many other things, the Mammal Family Reunion.

The Musical Illusionist

On a whim, I picked up The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales by Alex Rose while in a local public library the other day. I had never heard of it or Alex Rose, but the title and the slim volume grabbed my attention as I perused the New Fiction section.

I just started it and am only a handful of pages in. Already it is clear that the various short tales are a mish-mash of fiction and non-fiction - or perhaps, a better description would be that they are fiction wrapped up to look like non-fiction. The first part of the book is about time and quantification. I don't know where it is going, but I already like what it is saying. Here's an excerpt from the small piece on cause-and-effect:

Even now, many of us are content to relinquish our curiosity by invoking a primordial agent, the particular breed of which is arbitrarily determined by our religious heritage. But unlike the ancient teachings, these traditions are rooted in sacred scripture rather than observation, undeterred by modern methods and reasoning. In yet another strange loop, history would seem to have folded in one itself, cycling back to an era of willful ignorance.

Well, back to the book.