Layers of listening

You never listen!
I did not feel heard.

Why do we say things like this? What do we really mean?

I have been reading through the book of Deuteronomy and noticing how the Israelites were rebuked by the LORD because they did not listen.

It is interesting how there are layers of listening
-hearing the sounds
-hearing the words
-understanding what information the words carry
-understanding the feeling behind them
-taking to heart the message and acting on it

Others: a hot new magazine

I would not want to be one to start rumours... but I think I heard that the publishers of the women's magazine Self are going to break into new markets with a men's magazine entitled Others. I anticipate articles about:

Careers and work: how to make sure your colleagues get the credit they deserve
Marriage: how to manipulate your heart so your spouse gets what they want
Money:  ten new ways to give away more money
Sex: how to exercise greater self-control and live with less
Movies: the five best agape thrillers
Self image: more contentment, patience, joy, ...
Public transport: faster than ever before ...

I did a web search but could not find any details. Let me know if you find them or hear more. But, maybe I was dreaming last night ... or I am struggling with my mental health and distinguishing reality from fantasy...

Football is art

We are big football fans in our house. Last night we were ecstatic that Brisbane Roar played some beautiful football and outclassed their nearest competitors Adelaide to cement their place at the top of the A-League. But enough ....

This post is actually about recommending a fantastic video The Art of Football from A to Z featuring John Cleese. He goes through the alphabet (A is for attack, B is for ball, ... G is for Goal, ... M is for money, ... Q is for Quantum Physics!!) and interviews various famous soccer players (Pele, Henry, Beckenbauer, ...) and managers (Wenger) as well as artists, musicians, and politicians (Desmond Tutu, Henry Kissinger, Dennis Hopper, ...
 The  DVD has a brilliant interspersion of humour, brilliant football, philosophy, ...
It makes a convincing case that football is art.

A significant change of preference?

[Aside: I first posted this on my work research blog, condensed concepts, but thought I would put it here as well since it may be of interest to some readers here too].

I am puzzled by something. Suppose I ask five people if they prefer tea or coffee? Three say coffee, two say tea. Four years later I ask them again. One of the five people has changed their mind, now two prefer coffee and three tea. Suppose the sample size is much larger, but still only one in five people change their preference. I would not say there was a "massive swing" in preference or that drinks "preference did an almost complete turnabout".

Furthermore, suppose also that those five people had all previously said they did not wish to register as having a definite opinion on their preference. Then it should hardly be surprising if one in five changed their opinion.

Hence, I am puzzled by an article in the Wall Street Journal by Gerald F. Seib, Unaligned votes tilt rightward en masse. It states:

A massive swing by independent voters propelled the Republican Party to a series of key victories.... 

In House races nationally, Republicans won the votes of independents—voters who said they aren't affiliated with any party—by a 55% to 40% margin, a compilation of exit polls from across the country showed.

In other words, independents' preference did an almost complete turnabout over the last four years: They favored Democrats by 18 points then, Republicans by 15 points Tuesday.

Barth as a cultural intellectual

In the article I mentioned in my previous post Rudy Koshar states:

Barth’s cultural provenance also reflects his status as a European intellectual conversant with the important thinkers of the time. The luminaries of high bourgeois culture appear scattered across Barth’s writings, especially in the Church Dogmatics, where perhaps many readers expect not to find them because of this publication’s “churchly” character. Such eclecticism is fitting for one whose work “orders all the paths of human wisdom, philosophical and religious, around the central core of a purely theological point of view.” In the Church Dogmatics we find commentaries of varied length on Mozart (Barth’s favorite composer), Shakespeare, Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Darwin, Richard Wagner, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jung, Jaspers, and many others interwoven with often labyrinthine theological and biblical references and historical analysis of Church doctrine. Barth’s stance of engagement within distance remains evident throughout this massive referential system, which (seeing that Barth often listened to Mozart as he worked) had the character of a symphonic score rather than a theological treatise.

The towering intellect of Barth

Last night I read a fascinating paper, Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?, by Rudy Koshar [a Professor of History at the University of Wsconsin-Madison], and published in the journal Modern Intellectual History. There is no doubt Barth is the towering figure of 20th century theology. Indeed, Koshar notes the secondary literature about Barth amounts to around fourteen thousand titles [I presume this is books, journal articles, and book chapters] in twenty-five different languages!
Koshar makes a compelling case that although Barth's influence in European history, beyond the confines of theology, and into history, politics, and culture has been mistakenly overlooked.
Kosher suggests that in academic history this oversight results from a "secular confessionalism" which refuses to acknowledge its own basis in faith but dismisses all religious claims as irrational.

Kosher sings the praises of the Church Dogmatics for Barth's intellectual engagement with history, philosophy, music, and literature. This is driven by theology, but even secularists must respond to this analysis. It is noted that scholars have "celebrated Walter Benjamin's characterisation of civilization as "a document of barbarism"" but are unaware that Barth propounded such a view much earlier.

The German Academy for Language and Literature awards it annual Sigmund Freud prize for academic prose. Barth received the prize in 1968. [Werner Heisenberg received it two years later!].

To me, Barth represents a great model of real scholarship. The Church Dogmatics display a scope, balance, creativity, depth, originality, and thoroughness that is enviable and challenging.

I think Barth also has much to offer the philosophy of science, issues of which are touched on in my paper on emergence in science and theology.

But why was Barth so profound and influential? There is no doubt that he was a unique and very gifted individual. But, is it not more that he was obsessed with such a great subject: The Creator of the Universe who revealed himself through Jesus Christ. Indeed, I give Barth the last word:

"The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume and each is thicker than the previous one. As they laugh, they say to one another, `Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!' And they laugh about the men who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh."

The alpha and the omega of confusion in the face of certainty

This sundays sermon at church was on Revelation 20, a passage which contains reference to the Millennium, a thousand year reign of Christ. Different interpretations of this passage has led to countless controversies, arguments, and church divisions. Variant intepretations and whole theologies are based on this passage: pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, amillennialism,...
I probably hold to a highly nuanced form of amillennialism known as pan-millennialism: "All I know is thait will all pan out in the end!".
Jokes aside, unfortnately, often what is clear in the passage gets overwhelmed by what is not clear.
It is interesting to me that peoples views the interpretation of passages about passages of time in Genesis and Revelation often correlate. They seem to be strongly influenced by hermeneutical approaches, assumptions, and pre-commitments [how people read and interpret texts].
I thought our minister, Roy Davidson, did a great job of giving an overview of different views but emphasizing what is really clear: judgement will come, evil will be punished, God's people will be delived from this suffering unjust world, to one where Christ will reign and be worshiped as the Lamb of God. This message and the associated imagery used to reinforce it must have been incredible comfort to the first readers of the Revelation of John as they faced persecutin and death at the hands of a brutal Roman empire.