Two Jesus Hoaxes? The View From Kentucky Wednesday, February 28, 2007
I'm waking up in Louisville this morning, only to find that the Jesus Hoax controversy has followed me here. A reader sent me a tip, linking me to a piece in the Lexington Herald about Ben Witherington. Witherington denounces the new docu-hoax as the silliness it is; the piece also has a great quote from an archaeologist at the Israel Museum who says: The chances that the film's contentions are true "are more than remote. They are closer to fantasy."
Money quote: Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at the evangelical theology school in Wilmore, said Cameron's contentions were false and amounted to a publicity stunt "full of holes, conjectures and problems."
But as the piece goes on to note, Witherington himself has his own problems with hoaxes. He co-authored with my friend and colleague Herschel Shanks a book about what they claimed was an ossuary of the brother of James. That turned out to be a forgery.
In 2003, Witherington and co-author Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, wrote in The Brother of Jesus that they believed an ossuary bearing the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," was authentic.
A few months after The Brother of Jesus was published, Israel's Antiquities Authority decided that the ossuary was a fake. It charged the ossuary's owner, Oded Golan, with fraud and illegally selling archaeological artifacts outside of Israel. His trial continues, 21/2 years after it began.
Witherington said that he and Shanks stand by their conclusion that the ossuary is authentic and are not likely to change their minds, regardless of the trial's outcome.
And the ultimate kicker: Witherington and Jacobovici used to work together! In fact, Jacobovici directed the film on the James ossuary. The tangled web gets even darker. Here's a section from Witherington's blog post about all this yesterday:
First of all,I have worked with Simcha.He is a practicing Jew, indeed he is an orthodox Jew so far as I can tell.He was the producer of the Discovery Channel special on the James ossuary which I was involved with.He is a good film maker, and he knows a good sensational story when he sees one. This is such a story.Unfortunately it is a story full of holes, conjectures, and problems.It will make good TV and involves a bad critical reading of history. Basically this is old news with a new interpretation. We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980.
For what it's worth, Jacobovici told me yesterday he was an Orthodox Jew. That was when he was barely speaking with me, before we were interviewed together on CBS. Afterwards he stormed out of the studio. To watch the interview, click here.
Here is the video of my appearance on the "CBS Early Show" with the director of the new Jesus documentary. For what it's worth: He stormed out of the studio without saying goodbye at the end. (Hat tip to my pal Whitney Tilson for uploading the video!)
A little update on what's happening around here. As many of you know, I've been inundated with media requests for comment about the new documentary purporting to have found the tomb of Jesus. To follow how the controversy unfolded on Feiler Faster click here, here, and here. I appeared on CNN last night, ABC's "Good Morning America" this morning, and, in what turned out to be a somewhat heated exchange, with the director himself, live, on the CBS "Early Show" this morning. Put it this way: At the end of our conversation, he stormed out of the studio without saying goodbye. Please check back a little later, when I hope to have a video of some of these appearances.
In the meantime, I have to leave for the airport for Louisville, where I'm giving a talk tonight, and to Dallas, where I'm giving a talk tomorrow. For details, click here. The paper in Louisville ran a wonderful piece this weekend.
Growing up in Chicago, my only exposure to farming was the Farm in the Zoo and for many years I thought that every farm in America had one cow that lived in the stall next to the one goat that lived in the stall next to the one pig, and so on. Similarly, my early years in Sunday school gave me the impression that Abraham lived next to Solomon who lived next to Esther who lived, if not next to King David, at least in the next village.
Bruce Feiler's books have, thankfully, driven out all remaining notions I may have had as a child that everything in the history of all religions happened in the same place at the same time by skillfully, artfully and frequently poignantly walking me through what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age -- the years between 800 and 200 B.C., when the relationship between God, faith and reason were born.
In his early writing career, Feiler took us into the worlds of circuses, scholars and singers before he began writing about the Bible and the Middle East. His first two books in this series, Walking the Bible and Abraham were written prior to 9/11. This sequel, however, is much more than an engrossing biblical travelogue. In Where God Was Born, Feiler carries us beyond history and into his personal spiritual exploration, confronting the same ambiguities about the role of religion in his life that many of us face today.
As we are drawn into his physical journey of discovery, the larger theme of the book becomes clear. His search for actual biblical locations with a map in one hand and a Bible in the other becomes a metaphor for the truth that the bloody mix of politics, violence and faith that form the core of these biblical stories create an uncanny prism through which we can see what is happening today.
As violence in the name of faith threatens to imperil our world, Where God Was Born is an enlightening way to explore the question of whether religion is just a source of war, or is it also a way to help bring about world peace.
— If "Jesus" and "Mariamene" weren't related matrilineally, why jump to the conclusion that they were husband and wife, rather than being related through their fathers?
— The first use of "Mariamene" for Magdalene dates to a scholar who was born in 185, suggesting that Magdalene wouldn't have been called that at her death.
— St. Andrews' Bauckham defends his probabilities, noting that Jacobovici was comparing his name-cluster to the rather small sampling of names known to have been found on bone boxes, while his own basis for comparison, which adds names from contemporary literature and other sources, makes the combo far less unusual.
— Asbury Theological Seminary professor Ben Witherington, a early Christianity expert who was deeply involved with the James Ossuary, says there are physical reasons to believe it couldn't have originated in the Talpiot plot.
Darrell Bock, a professor at the conservative Protestant Dallas Seminary, whom the Discovery Channel had vet the film two weeks ago, adds another objection: why would Jesus's family or followers bury his bones in a family plot and "then turn around and preach that he had been physically raised from the dead?" If that objection smacks secular readers as relying too heavily on scripture, then Bock's larger point is still trenchant: "I told them that there were too many assumptions being claimed as discoveries, and that they were trying to connect dots that didn't belong together."
From Laurie Goodstein in the NYT:
“This is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” said Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, in a telephone interview. “One of the problems is there are so many biblically illiterate people around the world that they don’t know what is real judicious assessment and what is what some of us in the field call ‘fantastic archaeology.’ ”
Professor Stager said he had not seen the film but was skeptical.
Mr. Cameron said he had been “trepidatious” about becoming involved in the project but got engaged out of “great passion for a good detective story,” not to offend and not to cash in.
“I think this is the biggest archaeological story of the century,” he said. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt. It’s part of a very well-considered plan to reveal this information to the world in a way that makes sense, with proper documentation.”
FEILER FASTER EXCLUSIVE: Report From Jerusalem on Jesus Hoax Monday, February 26, 2007
My phone has been ringing off the hook today with media calls about the James Cameron "Lost Tomb of Jesus" docu-hoax. As a service to readers of Feiler Faster, I telephoned my longtime archaeologist companion Avner Goren, who lives in the neighborhood in question, knows the archaeologist who first discovered the cave, and has been down this road before.
The headlines:
1. Caves like the ones where the ossuaries were discovered are commonplace in the area and were very familiar features of this neighborhood in the 1st century B.C.E. and 1st century C.E. Avner made the fascinating point that bodies used to be buried in groups but with the introduction of individualism from Greece, they started burying people in single boxes and labeling them. Basically, the way it would work is that the bodies would be buried for a year, the family would come back and collect the bones and put them in an ossuary (a stone box). Then they would take the box out once a year and have a memorial service, as Jews still do today with candle lighting.
2. A family from Nazareth would not be buried in Jerusalem. Jewish custom holds that a body should be buried within 24 hours. I recently heard of a family that hired a private plane to get a body from Cleveland to Jerusalem in time. It would have been impossible to get a body from Nazareth, in the Galilee to Jerusalem in this time period. Also, there's no way for a family to tend a grave this far away. So the idea of a multi-generational family tomb for Jesus in Jerusalem makes no sense. Even the archaeologist who discovered the tomb, Amos Kloner, has dismissed the show as "nonsense."
Kloner, who said he was interviewed for the new film but has not seen it, said the names found on the ossuaries were common, and the fact that such apparently resonant names had been found together was of no significance. He added that “Jesus son of Joseph” inscriptions had been found on several other ossuaries over the years. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb,” Kloner said. “They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”
3. The names on the ossuaries are very common. As Avner pointed out, 21 percent of names of women are Mary; Joseph and Jesus (Joshua) are among the top four male names. The presence of these names in a tomb would not have been rare. We have no evidence that this is a family tomb; it could have been a communal tomb, or an extended family tomb. The DNA evidence that Jesus was not connected to the Mary buried in the tomb does not prove anything, other than they are not related. There is no evidence the female body belonged to someone who was "married" to anyone else in the tomb. There is no evidence she was the the mother of anyone else in the tomb. And we can be sure they checked that! So the claim that Jesus fathered a son with the "Mary" in the tomb is bogus.
Avner is a contemporary of Amos Kloner and has known him for decades. "It takes courage to say that the names on these ossuaries were very common," Avner said. As for the filmmakers: "There is something cheap about playing on the emotions of people."
And therein is the truth of this tale: For two centuries now we have seen a tap dance between science and the Bible. Whatever the scientific breakthrough of the moment becomes the battlefield of the war -- archaeology, Darwin, physics, now DNA. What's said about this story to me is that there are many archaeologists out there who strive to find the truth. This exploitation of science is hardly new -- in fact a story like this pops up every few years or so -- but it's tawdry nonetheless.
The bottom line for me: There is more truth in Dan Brown's fiction than in James Cameron and SimchaJacobovichi's fact.
The Titanic Code: James Cameron Becomes Mel Gibson
My in-box filled this weekend with happy-talk about the new James Cameron announcement, expected on Monday, that's he's solved the mystery of Jesus. Before I pour cold water on it, let's review what he's expected to preview. As TIME puts it:
Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you 'The Titanic' is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he's sinking is Christianity.
In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, SimchaJacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.
No, it's not a re-make of "The DaVinci Codes'. It's supposed to be true.
The story starts in 1980 in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, with the discovery of a 2,000 year old cave containing ten coffins. Six of the ten coffins were carved with inscriptions reading the names: Jesua son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Matthew, Jofa (Joseph, identified as Jesus’ brother), Judah son of Jesua (Jesus’ son - the filmmakers claim).
The findings in the cave, including the decipherment of the inscriptions, were first revealed about ten years ago by internationally renowned Israeli archeologist Professor Amos Kloner.
Since their discovery, the caskets were kept in the Israeli Antiquities Authority archive in BeitShemesh, but now two have been sent to New York for their first public exhibition.
Although the cave was discovered nearly 30 years ago and the casket inscriptions decoded ten years ago, the filmmakers are the first to establish that the cave was in fact the burial site of Jesus and his family.
First, let's go back eight months ago to last summer when Cameron announced that he had "solved" the riddle of the Exodus, and proclaimed, in similar grand fashion, a television show that moved the traditional dating of the Exodus from around 1250 BCE to 1500 BCE based on an outmoded theory that a volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean had "caused" the Exodus. So to be clear: Then he was interested in proving the Exodus and now he's interested in disproving the Gospels. That's hard work for anyone in six months time!
Now he's picking up the similar underappreciated work of another archaeologist who has an entirely speculative theory about Jesus belonging to a dynasty far grander than the storyline in the text about his father being a carpenter. The raw facts of the story are problematic: These names were extremely common at the time, and finding them in a burial chamber is not emblematic of anything. And now comes DNA? I haven't seen the purported DNA evidence, but what's the original source? And finally, the heart of their claim is that the ossuary of Jesus was actually stolen, it's "The Lost Tomb," but as others have mentioned, it's listed as having "no inscription."
To say that this whole gesture is a money-making proposition is neither interesting nor surprising. What is surprising to me, at least, is that for most of the last century these types of grand announcements were quite common. There was a golden triangle among religious institutions, biblical scholars, and the press. The churches (and sometimes synagogues) would pay for the research; the scholars would make bold, unsupportable proclamations; and the press would report them credulously. The headline of this story to me is that the churches have been taken out of the equations and replaced with whom ... Hollywood! Mel Gibson may have met his wildest dreams: He's turned everyone in Hollywood into his or her own church.
Update: Their appearance on THE TODAY SHOW was completely unpersuasive. Not an archaeologist in site, just a journalist and a filmmaker, as they both admitted, "pimping the Bible," as one archaeologist commented. Their best case: "Nothing we discovered disproves the initial hypothesis." This is very shady and setting the bar very low: When making a claim like this, the goal is not, "We've found nothing to disprove our outrageous claim," but "We can prove it to a scientific level of certainty." At least Dan Brown had the nerve to call his story fiction.
Both of the names were my wife's idea. She first proposed Eden as a name for one of our girls just a few weeks after we learned we were having twins. I was in Turkey, actually, filming the Garden of Eden sequence in WALKING THE BIBLE on PBS, when she announced the idea. We both liked it instantly: it was biblical, it was a place, it was paradise, and it had an echo of my father's name, Ed. Matching Eden proved to be a problem; it overshadowed most of the possibilities we considered. Months went by and we had a short list but no finalist. Then one day my wife proposed Tybee. Tybee is a beach off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, where I spent summers with my family (back then we called it "seedy Savannah beach") and where we celebrated our wedding. I didn't like the idea at first: Tybee can be hard to pronounce (it rhymes with "why be?"), it's a Creek Indian word meaning "salt," which is problematic," and she would spend the rest of her life explaining what it means. And Feiler itself has some of these problems, as the president of the United States just proved.
But she insisted our daughters could pull off the names and it was done: Eden and Tybee, aka The Feilerettes.
So imagine our reaction this weekend when we learned that Marcia Cross, who plays the redhead Bree on "Desperate Housewives," gave birth last week to the twin girls that had kept her on bedrest for much of the last few months and her character in bed for the last few episodes. Their names: EDEN AND SAVANNAH.
What?! Eh? You've got to be kidding. How can this happen?!
Coincidence, copycats, or kindred spirits? None of us quite knows... But just for the record: one percent of humans are twins. Half of those are girls. That means one half percent of all humans are twin girls. What are the chances that two would have these two sets of names within 22 months?!
Final results are not in yet (my sister wasn't watching live...) but I seem to have come out on top, along with several others in our annual, high-stakes Oscar pool. We heavily weighted Best Picture, and you had to nail that to win.
With that in mind, I thought I would link to this story I saw a few weeks back that has special echo. Maybe it's because I've been spending a lot of time talking with folks in the entertainment business about turning some of my books into film or television projects, but this story struck me as hilarious. My first experience came in 1991, the month that LEARNING TO BOW was published, about the year I spent teaching English in Japan. Japan, you must recall, was hot at the time, as was DOOGIEHOWSER, M.D., and the person they wanted to play me was Neil Patrick Harris. Sixteen years later he's turned into quite the star, but at the time he seemed like half my age. As to what happened, this reporter's story rings very true:
I recall with embarrassment the first call of this sort I received, not long after that novel came out in '71. It came from a person who represented an outfit I'd never heard of, but he was in LosAngeles, or said he was, anyway, and that was mighty close to Hollywood, wasn't it? That fellow actually came to my house and drank my beer and talked two hours about our movie, and everything he said sounded delicious. He left saying that I would soon receive a firm offer from his group.
So I celebrated. I told the neighbors. I called friends. I wrote letters to the family. I told the mail carrier when he came by, and anybody else who'd listen, that my book would soon be a movie.
The fellow from LosAngeles? I never heard from him again.
Even that was not my worst mistake. My worst one was, one day when I was feeling especially needy I sold the film rights to that novel. I wouldn't mind telling you how much I got, but this story is already sad enough. Anybody with an ounce of business sense would have sold only an option, but selling the rights was a mistake I hadn't made yet, so I added it to my list.
Since then the rights to my story, over which I have no control, have been resold three or four times, and every new owner has had a script and made plans to start filming in the spring. If I ever hear that they really have started, I probably won't believe it.
My observation over 35 years is that the closer to the West Coast you get, the harder it is to hear the truth about turning books into films.
First Carter, now the U.N. A UN human rights envoy has compared Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories to elements of apartheid. The UN's Special Rapporteur, John Dugard, describes the regime as being designed to dominate and systematically oppress the occupied population. And to boot: He's South African!
In a new report, Mr Dugard says: "Israel's laws and practices certainly resemble aspects of apartheid".
He points to what he describes as "unashamed discrimination" against Palestinians in favour of Israeli settlers.
"It is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel's laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination," says the report.
So what's Carter's reaction now? He's tried to climb down from his remarks, saying he was just using the term to be provactive, and that Israel's system was not at all like South Africa's. Now the South Africans are chiming in saying he was right. Of course, the U.N. has never been a place to love Israel. They're more Arabist than Carter. The one-two punch of the term is not likely to elevate it to international standard, but it is likely to do more harm than good -- needlessly puffing up the Palestinians and needlessly distracting the Israelis who can rightly defend themselves from this overreaction.
Of course it's an old Oscar cliche that if you're not sure whom to predict in the live action short or documentary or any other minor category, look for any film that's about the Holocaust. It's sure to win. Mrs. Feiler Faster and I are watching the Oscars and the nominees for live action short passed by, including "West Bank." We didn't even know what it was about but both said, "It will win!" Naturally, it did, but then the filmmaker, Ari Sandel, gave a passionate, articulate speech about his film that showed why the Feiler Slower rule of Oscar speeches can make your career.
First, he described his film about two falafel makers in the West Bank who dream of peace. He gave what should become one of the more memorable lines of the night, "Hope is not hopeless." Then he defined and described why his genre is still important, as it gives little filmmakers and chance to get discovered. Then, and only then, he thanked his parents, tastefully, emotionally.
"And," Mrs. Feiler Faster announced, as if this were greater than the Oscar itself, "I think he's cute!"
No Thank You: An Oscar Proposal Friday, February 23, 2007
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the acceptance speeches should be the best part of the Academy Awards, the one time all evening when the show is spontaneous, raw, and, with luck, emotional. Yet acceptance speeches have become nearly universally maligned – for their repetition (the same winners keep thanking the same people in show after show), for their lack of originality (what do you mean you didn’t expect to win; there are only five choices), and, most of all, for their endless litany of industry thank yous (not just lovers and directors, but managers, lawyers, assistants, hairdressers, “everybody I ever met in my whole life,” and, de rigeur, God).
The web is full of long-winded proposals (like here and here) to shorten acceptance speeches this year. Well-meaning tips include “Drop the ums and ahs;” “Practice, practice, practice;” and, for actors, “Hire writers.”
But what these proposals lack is an awareness that Hollywood is a business. Any proposal must introduce an economic incentive. In fact, the proper inducement is not to implore winners to shorten their speeches, but to offer them a way to lengthen them. The Academy should introduce a rule: If you insist on giving a laundry list of thank yous, we’re going to cut you off after 30 seconds. But if you instead speak from the heart, tell a story, address your inspiration, or even – and how’s this for a sure-fire Hollywood hit – talk about yourself (!), we’ll let you go on for three minutes. Three minutes in front of a billion people to charm, to enamor, to sell, to“build your brand.”
That ought to be enough incentive to leave the thank you list in your cleavage – or better yet, on the web. Which leads us to the ultimate money-maker: The Academy could open a portion of its website for the winners to post their gratitudinalia in the morning, which would have the added benefit of making sure, say, Hillary Swank doesn’t leave off her (future) husband next time around. Think of all the hairdressers who would visit!
Note: I published this piece on Huffington Post yesterday. Click here to read the responses it generated, including word that the Academy already has such a website for thank yous and a hilarious proposal for what Helen Mirren should say when she wins for "The Queen."
A few years ago I was asked to give some advise to Bill Ury, the quixotic and visionary Harvard professor, who had an idea to open an Abraham Path across the Middle East, from Turkey to the Palestinian Territories. The idea was rudimentary then but has becoming more real through his dogged efforts. The Christian Science Monitor has a major, behind-the-scenes piece about their efforts:
The two researchers – one British, one Jordanian – are tracing the footsteps of the ancestral patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the hope that people today will rediscover the common roots of many generations past – and inspire coexistence and understanding in the present.
This is the making of the Abraham Path, a route that will start in Harran, Turkey – the place where many sources suggest Abraham heard "the call" from God – and will continue into Syria, down through Jordan, across the river into the West Bank, winding through both Israeli and Palestinian territory before ending in Hebron, or Al Khalil, described in the Book of Genesis as Abraham's burial place.
Eventually, the route would go to Egypt, where Abraham was also a sojourner. In the much longer term, the founders hope to have the path go into Iraq – Abraham's birthplace was Ur – and possibly to Mecca, the home of the kabbah, the holiest site in Islam, which Muslims believe Abraham helped to build.
To its initiators, the dream of building the path presents an endless array of possibilities: for religious pilgrimages, for developing the region's underrealized tourism potential, and, most important, for breaking down barriers of fear and misunderstanding between East and West. To skeptics, however, it sounds like an idealistic peace plan that doesn't easily fit into the landscape of a volatile Middle East, where even different sects find themselves embroiled in conflict.
But the project, conceptualized and studied for several years under the auspices of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, doesn't intend to ignore or overcome the political realities of the Middle East. Rather, it seeks to increase contact between average people, on a point of reference to which followers of all three major monotheistic religions can relate.
"We're not creating this path. This path already exits. In some ways, we're just dusting off the path so you can see the footsteps," says Harvard's William Ury, a world-renowned expert on conflict negotiation and a co-author of the bestseller, "Getting to Yes." The concept of the project dawned on Professor Ury after decades of working to bring warring sides together, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland.
A disheartening follow-up to our post of last week on Middle Eastern bloggers:
An Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak, and sentenced to four years in jail on Thursday, in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger.
Abdel Kareem Nabil, a 22-year-old former student at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, an Islamic institution, had pleaded innocent to all charges, and human rights groups had called for his release.
Nabil, who used the blogger name Kareem Amer, had sharply criticised Al-Azhar on his web log, calling it "the university of terrorism" and accusing it of suppressing free thought.
The university threw him out last year and pressed prosecutors to put him on trial. He also often criticised Mubarak's regime on the blog. The judge issued the verdict in a brief, five-minute session in a court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. He sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and another year for insulting Mubarak. Nabil had faced a possible maximum sentence of up to nine years in prison.
There Is No Clash of Civilizations Thursday, February 22, 2007
Here's some hopeful news on the clash of cultures between Islam and the West: Most people are smart enough to realize there is no clash of cultures. It's a political struggle using religion as a proxy.
A majority of people do not believe that Islam and the West are in a conflict of cultures and that the prevailing tensions are a result of conflict over political power rather than for causes relating to either culture or religion.
A survey by the BBC World Service covering 28,000 people in 27 countries also indicated that most of the people do not believe the conflict could lead to any clash of civilizations. On the contrary, majority of the people -- 56 per cent -- are positive about a common ground that can be found between the western culture and Islam, while only 28 per cent believe violence could ensue as a result of the conflicts.
When repeatedly asked about the causes of the current friction, 52 per cent said they believed these could be the result of political disputes, while 58 per cent said minority groups caused the tensions.
Doug Miller, president of polling company GlobeScan, which conducted the survey for BBC, said the results indicated that there are no prospects of an inevitable and wide-ranging "clash of civilizations." Most people feel the tensions and clashes are the result of political power and interests and not religion or culture, he said.
He also pointed out to the fact that most victims of Islamic intolerance and terrorism are Muslims themselves.
A friend sent me this photo of a demonstration in Estonia called "Means of Promotion." A blurb attached said:
This demonstration was part of our workshop “Means of Promotion” at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. The workshop examined different strategies for being a parasite on existing media. We organized an unregistered demonstration with empty banners by the Liberty Clock monument in Tallinn. Estonian law requires a demonstration to be registered by the authoroties. We did not ask for such permission, thereby posing the question to the system whether or not this was an illegal action. The event was covered by all major TV-stations and newspapers in Estonia.
Camels aren't just for lovers anymore. They're also for bookworms!
The provincial library system in Kenya uses a Camel Bookmobile and -- proof that anything can be subject of a novel -- someone has now written a novel about it. GalleyCat has the details, and the picture worth a month's worth of overdue book fines.
Masha Hamilton's forthcoming novel, The Camel Bookmobile, has its origins in a real book distribution network the author encountered in northeast Kenya, which delivers books in Swahili and English to villagers. The Garissa Provincial Library is always glad for new inventory, especially considering the beating their books take in transit, so Hamilton has helped set up a book donation drive with several dozen authors already contributing five books apiece to the program. You don't have to be an author to donate books—and a five-pound box of books to Kenya costs just $23.
When I first mentioned the camel library service a few years back, I had no idea how many people rely on it.
Since then, author Masha Hamilton has accompanied the camels on trips through Kenya’s isolated Northeastern Province, “near the unstable border with Somalia,” during a drought, and returned with photos and a video showing the crowds of people who gather every time the “bookmobile” visits.
“[T]he bush is hard on books,” she writes, “and the traveling library needs more.”
[L]ibrarians in the Northeast Province who travel with the camel bookmobile told me children’s storybooks are most popular, general fiction is also high on the list, and much interest is shown in nonfiction books covering topics ranging from astronomy to geography to history. The librarians also said patrons especially love it when a book is inscribed with a note from the sender. It helps them feel connected to places only barely imagined.
You know that box of old textbooks and novels you keep meaning to drop off at the Salvation Army? Well, donation instructions are here.
"I May Be the Only Person on the Face of the Earth Who Loves the Smell of Dung"
When I was in the circus, a priest came to the lot on the opening day in Deland, blessed the tent, and held a service for all the performers. Periodically during the year, a chaplain would pitch up on the lot and sort of hang around. Maybe there would be a service, nothing major. The far more noticeable religious activity was the competition among two different evangelical pentecostal Bible study groups to recruit different members. One was started by the family of wire walkers, the other by a branch of the trapeze artists. I attended one of these, complete with tongues, and the scene is described in UNDER THE BIG TOP.
I was thinking about this today when my brother sent me an article from that Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a circus chaplain. (The author, John Blake, wrote a wonderful piece about me a few years ago, calling me "a modern-day Indiana Jones.") Says retired priest Newell Graham, who has seen The Greatest Show on Earth 26 times, "I may be the only person on the face of this Earth that loves the smell of dung."
The current chaplain, the Rev. Jerry Hogan,travels at least 60,000 miles annually, performing baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals.
"You see people take their gifts to extraordinary levels," Hogan says, "and it reassures your faith, whatever that may be, that there is something more to life than what we readily experience."
Hogan is assisted by two Roman Catholic nuns who not only travel with the circus, but also help put the shows on. Sister Dorothy Fabritze criss-crosses the country with Ringling in a truck that hauls a chapel. She pulls the show's curtains, steering the entrance and exit of each act.
The constant travels remind her of biblical journeys: Abraham moving to a new land; Moses leading his people out of Egypt.
"They've taught me a lot about leaving from one place to another, letting go and trust," Fabritze says. "A trapeze artist has to have a lot of trust. The performers are trusting the crew to get things in the right place in the right time. So there's a lot of family values, a lot of trust in what we do and that's, of course, scriptural and spiritual."
Graham says he admires the efficiency of the circus so much that he's driven to towns just to watch the crew unpack railroad cars. It puts him off when people refer to a chaotic situation as a "circus."
"Trust me. There is absolutely nothing chaotic about the circus, in front of the footlights or behind the footlights," he says. "If many churches worked as smoothly as the circus, they would be spiritual powerhouses."
Any reporter who has been to Iraq feels an instant, kindred spirit with anyone else who has been there. This is especially true for anyone who was hurt or killed. I knew David Bloom briefly from several appearances I made with him on The Today Show over the years. I have never met Bob Woodruff, despite working closely with some folks at ABC over the years. Still, my wife and I took the news of his attack very personally, given that I had trod many of those roads a few years earlier.
The picture above is a scan of Bob Woodruff's skull created at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., on Jan. 31, 2006 -- just two days after Woodruff and his team were hit by an insurgents' bomb in Taji, Iraq. (The second picture is him two days after waking from a five-week coma.) The scan shows the rocks and debris that were lodged into Woodruff's face and neck, and the areas around his eyes. They were posted on the ABC News website to promote an upcoming report about his recovery (Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 10 pm). This news sends chills down my spine just thinking of what he went through. Hooray!
I'm a bit late in linking to this. But here is an excerpt of a piece that appeared in the Florida Sun-Sentinel about an appearance I made there recently. It begins: "Bruce Feiler treats the Bible like a moon rock -- a rare, touchable sample of another world. And one that can change your outlook. 'Almost everyone I know who has done been to the desert has felt a powerful connection between the land and the stories,' says the author of the best-seller Walking the Bible. 'Whether you've been to the Holy Land 25 times or never, and see a rock in the exhibit, you're there.'"
Feiler, 42, has apparently stumbled onto a red-hot demand by American readers: background on holy writ that doesn't push a theological agenda.
He first saw that need in 2001 with Walking the Bible, his account of his 10,000-mile trek to the sites of the big events of the Torah: Eden, Ararat, the Red Sea, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem -- "real stories in real places," as he told a Fox News interviewer.
Feiler followed up in 2002 with a book on Abraham, then in 2005 with Where God Was Born: A Journey by Land to the Roots of Religion, looking up locations for the likes of David and Joshua. He also hosted a PBS miniseries last year on Walking the Bible, a special now out on DVD.
But he thinks more than rock-solid certainty is at work in the popularity of his work. He says it's also the freedom to voice doubts about the literal truth of the Bible stories, even as he visited the sites -- like Kaumah, Iraq, the traditional site of Eden -- to check them out.
"Most people who speak about religion do so from a position of certitude; they either feel they have it, or that they should have it," says Feiler, who attends a synagogue in Brooklyn. "It was hard for me to write about my struggles. But people have given me the most e-mail on that -- thanking me for talking about doubt."
He doggedly believes that the battle is being won for interfaith understanding, whatever it may look like day to day. On the ground level, he notes a lot of anger over Islam, both by and at Muslims. But at "30,000 feet," progress is visible, he says.
One example: the criticism of Pope Benedict XVI for his verbal attacks on Islam. "Popes have attacked Islam for 500 years, but no one objected. That's what popes did. Now there's a blowback.
"A hundred years ago, America was called a Christian society. Fifty years ago, people started calling it a Judeo-Christian society. After 9-11, people realize we live in an Abrahamic society, that we have to bring Islam into the conversation.
"The day-to-day struggles are messy, but the long term struggle is being won."
Feiler Faster gives you tomorrow's news today -- in this case, news picked up from GalleyCat. The Cat in the Hat is turning 50. Long-winded writers (like me) out there take note: 236 words!
When Abebooks' Richard Davies sent word that the site's top-selling book of last week was Dr. Seuss's THE CAT IN THE HAT, a little investigating turned up the probable reason: the book will be 50 years old on March 2, and to mark the occasion, the National Education Association is conducting a 'National Read Aloud' of the book, known as Project 236 (in honor of the number of words used in the book) across schools, libraries, and book clubs. The event will take place on the 2nd at 2:36 PM Eastern Standard Time. Random House Children's has also set up a spiffy site to commemorate the book's birthday and for more information on the event (although there are only so many ways to hear "Happy Birthday" before it sticks in your brain for an indefinite period of time...)
For more information on how to get involved in a literacy campaign surrounding the book, click here.
I'm on my way to Savannah for the weekend. With that in mind, Arnie Belzer is an old friend and the rabbi of my hometown congregation, Mickve Israel, in Savannah, the third-oldest congregation in the country. He and I were exchanging emails this week and he sent me a link to a self-described "only Jewish blogger in Savannah," who had attended a Judaism 101 class that he taught recently. Twelve hours. Several hundred people. Very few Jews, it turns out.
"A few innacuracies," Arnie reported of this post by at yoyenta.com, "but mostly right on!"
My eyes did their usual wandering around the room with its classic nave structure and breathtaking stained glass with inscriptions from the 1800’s, but was distracted by the sound of pens scratching on paper. I saw that some people were listening very attentively and taking notes. I had my pen out, too, of course; I’m always scribbling stuff to collect for this blog, and perhaps one day, a book. Since when do Jews listen to the rabbi, let alone write it down? I thought. Could it be that I am not the only Jewish blogger in Savannah? Then it dawned on me: These people weren’t Jews.
It seems the rabbi’s Judaism 101 talk is immensely popular among Christians looking to find out more about our religion, for various reasons, some earnest, some scary. Not that there weren’t a good number of congregants there, too; I recognized several senior Yentas from my weekly lunch with my mother-in-law. The rabbi, who I’ve always liked a lot but many find to be a little showy for the third oldest congregation in the country, unapologetically framed religion in marketing terms, and admitted that Judaism has pretty lame PR: We don’t seek converts, we don’t believe in original sin and we don’t promise eternal salvation.
I started to get down with the basic explanations of Judaism, learning what I must’ve slept through in Hebrew school. Did you know that Reform Judaism was developed in the 19th-century South in keeping with the Protestant aesthetic so popular in America at the time? Or that the Southern Baptists fund Jews for Jesus? (Rabbi B. invoked meshuggeneh pundit Dennis Prager when one of the non-Jews asked why one couldn’t be a Jew for Jesus: “It’s like being a vegetarian for meat.”)
The piece includes at least one questionable joke by Rabbi Belzer that YoYenta finds funny. You be the judge: A Liberal Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew are discussing when life begins. The Liberal Protestant says: “At birth.” The Catholic disagrees: “At conception.” The Jew trumps them all: “When the kids leave for college and the dog dies.”
Shakespeare Meets Saddam Hussein Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Given the frequency with which Shakespeare is reinterpreted for contemporary times, perhaps the news that Richard III is being done in Stratford as an Arab dictator should come as no surprise. But it does! And how interesting. The NYT sums up the road from Shakespeare to Saddam and beyond:
As played by the Syrian actor Fayez Kazak, the title character in “Richard III: An Arab Tragedy” is a preening, plotting devil with the vulpine intelligence and maniacal charisma of the late Saddam Hussein. But he is not Mr. Hussein, even if the director and adapter of the play, Sulayman Al-Bassam, briefly conceived of him that way.
“It was clear that once I’d gone into the process of research into that historical parallel that it was a sort of a non sequitur,” Mr. Bassam said. And so, commissioned to bring an Arabic production of “Richard III” to Stratford as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s yearlong Complete Works Festival, Mr. Bassam set his play in an archetypal present. His unnamed oil-rich Arab state is easily understood in Shakespearean terms, every bit as steeped in blood, riven by tribalism and replete with corruption as the world of 15th-century England.
The form has freed him to consider contemporary Arab politics in a way that would have been all but impossible without the refracting mirror of Shakespeare, said Mr. Bassam, 34, who is half Kuwaiti and half British. “You could write such a play,” he said, musing on the notion of a present-day political work, “but you’d be best advised to set it in England in the 1400s. That would be a very good starting point for your contemporary play.”
I'm very flattered to find myself in print in your lastest Feiler Faster. I just want to say that I didn't react quite as strongly as you have described. But, for the sake of literary enhancement, I grant you full license to use your imagination. As I recall the incident, it was your future bride who phoned me. Not at all surprised that it was my daughter on the phone, I immediately shouted, "Why didn't he at least say he had someone special in his life!!!!!" But,I promise, in no way did I want you to disappear from our lives. We had come this close to "reeling you in" and I wasn't going to let my daughter give up the fight!!! Aren't you happy we all stayed the course?? We certainly are!
Hard to know what to make of this story, other than Muslims are fighting back in England. Instead of issuing boring white papers about the Muslim Contribution to the Betterment of English Society, they're taking a page from the cliched covers of every lifestyle magazine and the mindless countdown shows on TV. Here now, "Your Muslim Idol. Call now to vote for your favorite!" Not that far off, actually, it's the Muslim 100.
An ageing pop star, a rear admiral in the Royal Navy and the head of Amnesty International have been included on a list of most influential Muslims.
The Power 100 website compiled the top 100 list to show how Muslims have contributed positively to the UK.
Singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, was included alongside Irene Khan, of Amnesty and Rear Admiral Amjad Hussain.
Actors, journalists and police officers also made it to the top 100.
The Power 100 website received 5,200 nominations, which were whittled down by a panel of judges to the most influential 100.
The website said it was "applauding the vital achievement and contribution being made by the British Muslim community to the social, cultural and economic well-being of Britain".
By the way, the piece includes the photo above of the former Cat Stevens. Wow. I hadn't seen him in a while. It's a shame "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is off the air.
What was the problem of the U.S. Army in Iraq? Not enough camels, apparently. Now comes word they are determined to prevent this from happening again.
Once, the U.S. Army depended on animals to wage war. With the advent of technology, the military began to rely more and more on machines to transport soldiers and goods.
But as the country's war against terrorism takes the battles to the mountains, the deserts and the jungles, the Army is instructing its elite Special Forces soldiers on the use of pack animals, according to an Army field manual recently posted on the Internet.
The manual says its purpose is to teach Special Forces soldiers "some of the expertise and techniques that have been lost in the United States (U.S.) Army over the last 50 years" - in other words, since the military retired its pack animal transportation units.
The section on camels contains this quote: "Camels are clumsy-looking, rather ugly animals, and have a lousy reputation because they are believed to spit and kick at people," the manual says. "This perception is not accurate because well-handled camels are safe to with and be around." The manual says soldiers should rely on native handlers as their first option for controlling camels.
An update on the riots at the Temple Mount we've been discussing here on Feiler Faster. As you know, riots broke out ten days ago after excavation work on the ramp to the Muslim portion of the Temple Mount -- the plaza on top -- created some problems. The knee-jerk reaction among the commenters on this site, and in the Israeli press, is that the Muslim authority has overreacted. Wouldn't be the first time this happened. The Palestinians are fond of using sideshows like this as a way to score points against the Israelis. That's why I called this an Archaeology Proxy War.
But now it turns out that the Israeli government may have found a Muslim prayer room in the excavation and kept it secret from the Palestinians for three years. Now I hardly think finding a Muslim prayer room near a site that was controlled by Muslims for more than twelve centuries is surprising. But how stupid of the Israeli government to keep this secret for three years. Imagine how this plays on Al Jazeera. I often hear Jews complain that the Arabs have better PR machinery. They turn out to have some collaborators in the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
An Israeli archaeologist said the site of an archaeological dig outside a disputed holy compound in Jerusalem might contain a Muslim prayer room, and the work drew renewed condemnation Sunday.
Muslim leaders and critics of the dig said the announcement of the find, three years after it was discovered, confirmed their fears that Israel is intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site. Israeli officials denied that.
Two weeks ago, Israeli archaeologists began a salvage dig ahead of the construction of a new pedestrian walkway up to the disputed hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The site is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The dig, outside the compound's Mughrabi Gate, is meant to ensure that no valuable archaeological finds are damaged by the construction. But it has ignited a long-standing feud over who controls the site, and drawn Muslim charges that Israel is planning to damage Islam's holy places. The new report of the find provided more fuel for those allegations.
The Israel Antiquities Authority, which is running the dig, said Sunday that the room might not be a prayer room at all, and that archaeologists would know only after research was complete. If it was found to be a prayer room, a spokeswoman said, it would be carefully documented and left in place.
“If it's found to be important, it will be preserved and will remain as part of the archaeological park” outside the holy compound, the spokeswoman, Osnat Goaz, said.
My father has been friends for many years with the son of Abraham Zapruder, who shot the famous film of the Kennedy assassination. (Wikipedia's entry includes a special note that some believe it's a fake!) I had lunch with the son some years ago in Washington and the family has no connection to the film anymore, but I've always felt a personal connection to the story.
Today comes word that a new film has emerged, one that shows the motorcade 90 seconds before the killing.
The silent, 8 mm color film is ''the clearest, best film of Jackie in the motorcade,'' said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, which focuses on Kennedy's life and assassination.
The film shows a brief but clear glimpse of President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, a few blocks from Dealey Plaza and roughly 90 seconds before the killing. Also visible is Secret Service agent Clint Hill riding on the back of the car. After the shots were fired, Hill jumped onto the car as it drove to the hospital.
The film ends with some footage the next day outside the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots.
''Because the speed of the motorcade was known to be between 12 and 15 miles per hour, I was able to figure out how far back in time it was from the assassination,'' Mack said.
To see the image of Jackie O, and watch the film, click here.
Note: I posted this piece about my recent experience as Blurbee In Chief on Huffington Post over the weekend. To read the many (quite hostile) responses, click here. C-SPAN ran the president's quote again yesterday as part of a package about me.
Ever since George Washington held up his first inauguration to summon a Bible from the nearby Masonic Lodge to be sworn in on, the question of what the president is reading has fascinated Americans. In recent years, we've seen swoons of interest whenever a president endorses a book -- from Ronald Reagan and Tom Clancy, to Bill Clinton and Walter Mosley, to George W. Bush and Bernard Goldberg. I received one of these out-of-the-blue bouquets from the White House.
Last week, at the end of a thirty-minute interview on C-SPAN, Steve Scully asked the president, "Finally, what books are you reading these days?" President Bush said the following:
Well, I just finished a book called "Abraham," by a guy named Feiler. And it's a really interesting book that studies the prophet Abraham from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective. And the lesson is, is that if you -- you can look at Abraham as a unifying factor. In other words, all three of our -- all three of those religions started from the same source, which means it's possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God. [To hear a clip of the quotes, click here.]
Even in this instant age (I write a blog called "Feiler Faster,” after all), the first I heard about this was the following afternoon, when my father left me a message, "Did you hear that the President of the United States mispronounced your name on C-SPAN last night?" Actually, No.
“But who cares?!” I thought. The leader of the free world had read my book, and, more to the point, had gotten it. I was impressed by how dead-on his summary was: Abraham is the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In scripture, his story is universal. Over time, each of the religions has tried to claim him for itself, but we can go back to the original source and find an Abraham who can be helpful for our time, helping promote reconciliation.
For a man who joked as recently as this month that he mangles the English language, Bush's description nailed the book. It was better than my flap copy.
Once the euphoria began to wear off, I began to feel something else. Everywhere these days people are talking about whether the West can coexist with Islam. Iraqi sectarian strife is at the top of every broadcast. Iran is on the cover of Newsweek and The Economist.
The president’s military actions in the Middle East will go a long way to defining his legacy on religious coexistence, but they are not the only way. After mis-stepping and calling our response to 9-11 a “crusade,” the president has emphasized that Islam is a religion of peace and that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. Both of these steps drew stern rebukes from his base in the evangelical community. As I stand here grateful for his blurb, I am hopeful he is considering even bolder gestures – a White House summit of interfaith leaders, a call to grassroots dialogue, a man-on-the-moon statement that will help ensure that the legacy of September 11 is not just conflict and mistrust but a summons to unity around the shared God of Abraham.
One of my favorite scenes in WHERE GOD WAS BORN came in a meeting in Iraq with a man who called himself The Last Rabbi of Baghdad. He was interesting, funny, and quite emotional -- plus he wanted me to introduce him to a Jewish woman in America. After 2600 years, the Jews had abandoned a place where Judaism, in many ways, was born.
I thought of that when a friend sent me this link to a story about the Last Jews of Cairo. The photos are amazing and the story is quite well-written. The pull-out quote reads: "On the eve of Ramadan, in the center of the Arab world, we found ourselves – two agnostic Jews with no interest in or ties to the Jewish community back home – [scrambling] to join in prayer and worship with the remaining Jews of Cairo."
"The Only Egyptian To Ever Hit Hollylwood Big Time" Convicted of Hitting in Hollywood
Egyptian-born Omar Sharif, of all people, has been in the news this week, after he was convicted of punching a valet parker in L.A. for not getting his car quick enough. On top of that, he called the attendant a "dirty Mexican."
The Independent offers this summary of his rise to fame: "Back in the 1960s, Sharif wowed Western audiences with his performances in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago and developed a reputation as an international playboy who could reliably play the foreigner - preferably swarthy and sexy, though not necessarily - in any given movie production. In his heyday, Sharif was something truly remarkable - perhaps the only Egyptian, if not the only Arab, ever to hit the Hollywood big time. The job offers flooded in, as did the marriage proposals, as many as 1,000 of them a week, according to legend."
Then in capitulates his sad demise:
Omar Sharif hasn't had a hit in years. Unless, of course, you count the time he headbutted a police officer in a casino in the Parisian suburbs in 2003, for which he received a £1,000 fine and a suspended sentence. "It made me the hero of the whole of France," he later said, less than apologetically. "To headbutt a cop is the dream of every Frenchman."
Or the time, a year later, he whacked his fellow actor John Noble with a lamp while on location in India for a barely noticed biblical movie called One Night with the King. ("We were drunk," Sharif later explained.)
Or, going back a bit further to 1985, the time he knocked Ian Dury out cold on the floor of Le Caprice in London. (Both men were still furious about the fight when, four years later, they wound up in the cast of the same film, an obscure Polish production called The Rainbow Thief.)
Most recently, the Omar Sharif hit most in the news has been a punch to the nose he allegedly delivered to a parking valet outside a Beverly Hills restaurant in 2005. According to the prosecution in this week's quick-fire trial, Sharif - accompanied by an unidentified female - was intoxicated and became enraged after the valet at Mastro's Steakhouse, one Juan Anderson, refused to accept a €20 note as payment for parking the actor's four-wheel-drive Porsche.
In retaliation, the prosecution alleged, Sharif called Anderson a "stupid Mexican" (he is in fact of Guatemalan descent) and broke his nose. Sharif chose not to fly to Los Angeles to defend himself - he has been in his native Egypt of late - preferring to plead no contest and accept a sentence of probation plus mandatory anger management therapy. He is also likely to have to pay restitution to the valet for the broken nose, something the judge will decide at a sentencing hearing scheduled for April.
Over the years, of all the remarks I've heard about how people discovered my work (The TODAY Show, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, TIME, the remainder bin at the bookstore), by far the most common has been, "I heard you on C-SPAN." BookTV is a Godsend for authors, and for readers. Everyone who watches it believes they are the only one. But they are many, and they are loyal, and I, for one, am extremely grateful. As I once remarked to one of the cameramen, who at this point has filmed me so often that he could give my speeches, every time I'm on C-SPAN one of my books goes into another printing.
Today, C-SPAN2 re-aired an interview I did with Brian Lamb about ABRAHAM back October 2002 (it aired in December of that year). It's somewhat legendary in my family because near the end Brian asked me if I was married. I answered, truthfully, "No." At the time, I had been dating the future Mrs. Feiler Faster for about a year. This was the second time we had dated for a year, the previous time ending in a break-up that had last a year itself. (I know that's hard to follow, but it's early Sunday morning with crying twins...) Anyway, Brian asked me the question, and C-SPAN didn't exactly seem like the time or place to rehash my dating history. But when my future mother-in-law watched the interview and saw the answer, she was on the phone with my future wife within seconds lambasting me, how I wasn't serious about her, how she never wanted to see me again, ad infinitum like one of those C-SPAN callers who gets cut off by the host.
What neither of them knew is that a few days after the show eventually aired, I had plans to whisk the future Mrs. Feiler Faster off on a plane to an undisclosed location to propose to her. The storm became so heated that, for a time, I considered calling Brian Lamb and asking him if he would record a short statement for my mother-in-law in his wonderful deadpan way. I still regret that I never did that, but the logistics would have been too complicated to pull off in a matter of days. And when I heard that they were going to re-air the show this week, after the president mentioned on C-SPAN this week that he had just read the book, I wanted to reach out to Brian again. I immediately teased my now mother-in-law about all of this --she's actually visiting this weekend -- and she actually didn't remember for a minute or two! I take that as a sign of progress.
Notes: To watch the program, click here. If you're new to the site, read the story of the origin of this blog here. To download the materials about hosting an interfaith "Abraham Salon" mentioned on the show, click here. To send me (or my mother-in-law) an email, click here.
UPDATE: Me on C-SPAN2 Sunday at 11 AM Saturday, February 17, 2007
C-SPAN2 is carrying live coverage of the Senate debate on the Iraq resolution (the Senate defeated a measure to vote on the matter, a victory for the GOP). As a result, the interview I did with Brian Lamb that was scheduled to air today was pre-empted and will now re-air, according to a scroll on the screen, at 11 AM on Sunday, February 18th. That's this weekend. For more information, click here.
Feiler Faster EXCLUSIVE: Inside Interfaith Peace Talks with Iran
I received the following email this week from John Chane, the Bishop of Washington, who gave me permission to post this news.
I recently returned from Tehran where I spent three days in inter-faith dialogue with former president Khatami and many high level religious leaders in that country. We will be meeting again in Switzerland this Spring to continue our discussions and to find ways in which we can lower the rhetoric between the US and Iran. Was in New York Monday for a social gathering at the UN with the Ambassador of Iran to the UN and many in leadership positions within that country.
I met with President Bush several weeks ago, not to reveal the confidential discussions had with Iranian leaders, including the head of their nuclear development program...but to let him know that we intended to keep the conversations going. He gave a thumbs up. It was he who signed the order to allow Khatami to visit Washington last September.
Our next round of discussions in Switzerland will address the anti-Israel, anti-semetic stance taken by the current Iranian president and to further discuss Sunni/Shiite violence. Have been meeting as well with all ambassadors from Middle Eastern countries now serving in Washington to remind them that although religion cannot be blamed for the current crisis in the Middle East, it is in fact the "fault line" and therefore it needs to have a place at the table for ongoing negotiations that seek peace.
For more on this story, click here. Meanwhile: TALK. TO. IRAN.
As readers of Feiler Faster know by now, President Bush was asked on Monday what books he had been reading lately. Here's what he said.
Well, I just finished a book called Abraham," by a guy named Feiler. And it's a really interesting book that studies the prophet Abraham from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective. And the lesson is, is that if you -- you can look at Abraham as a unifying factor. In other words, all three of our -- all three of those religions started from the same source, which means it's possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God.
He mispronounced my name (saying Feeler not Filer). Anyway, there has been lots of interesting fall-out from this, but one unexpected result is that C-SPAN will re-air an interview I did with Brian Lamb about ABRAHAM on Booknotes this Saturday at 2:30 pm on BookTV. Here's the description on the website.
On Saturday, February 17 at 2:30 pm
Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths
Bruce Feiler
Description: Bruce Feiler was a guest on Booknotes to talk about his newest book, "Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths." In writing the book, the author explored the modern Middle East in order to better understand the region that Abraham lived in, hundreds of years ago. Mr. Feiler argues that Abraham is the central religious figure in whom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam find their origins. The author also makes the claim that in order for those three religions to better understand each other's differing viewpoints, they need to better understand Abraham. In an interview conducted by C-SPAN on Monday, February 12th President Bush stated that he just finished reading the book.
How's this for a topic likely to get the blood boiling: Is the blood libel true? The AP:
An Italian-Israeli historian has angered fellow Jews by taking on a subject that has long haunted his people: alleged anti-Christian hatred he says fueled medieval accusations that Jews killed Christians in ritual murders.
Ariel Toaff's book, just released in Italy, shocked the country's small Jewish community — in part because he is the son of Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi who welcomed Pope John Paul II to Rome's synagogue two decades ago in a historic visit that helped ease Catholic-Jewish relations after centuries of tensions.
The author, who teaches medieval and Renaissance history at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, Israel, delves into the charge that Jews added the blood of Christian children to wine and unleavened bread for Passover — allegations that resulted in torture, show trials and executions, periodically devastating Europe's Jewish communities over the years.
Historians have long disputed the medieval allegations, dismissing them as racism. But "blood libel" stories remain popular in anti-Semitic literature today.
In his Pasque di Sangue— Bloody Passovers — Toaff cites confessions from Jews accused of ritual murder to expose what he claims was a body of anti-Christian literature, prayers and rites among the communities of central Europe.
Jewish and Catholic scholars have denounced Toaff's work, saying he simply reinterpreted known documents — and has given credence to confessions that were extracted under torture.
Interesting to note that at least one place this AP story ran is in Pakistan.
Today, Camel Cigarettes get a makeover. As the NYTreports, Camel cigarettes are undergoing a makeover to make them more appealing to women. The strategy: Make Camel cigarettes more like Chanel perfume!?
Reynolds, eager to increase the sales of its fast-growing Camel brand among women, is introducing a variety aimed at female smokers. The new variation, Camel No. 9, has a name that evokes women’s fragrances like Chanel No. 19, as well as a song about romance, “Love Potion No. 9.”
But don’t look for a Jo Camel to join Old Joe the dromedary on Camel packages, displays or posters. Rather, Camel No. 9 signals its intended buyers with subtler cues like its colors, a hot-pink fuchsia and a minty-green teal; its slogan, “Light and luscious”; and the flowers that surround the packs in magazine ads.
For decades, Camel has been a male-focused cigarette; only about 30 percent of Camel buyers are female. By comparison, for competitive brands like Marlboro and Newport, women comprise 40 percent to 50 percent of customers. Almost half of adult smokers are women, so that limited Camel’s potential.
That's what Virgil Goode said on the House floor would be printed on our money if Americans didn't support the president's policy in Iraq. As many have pointed out, Muslims don't worship Mohammad. They worship the same God as Jews and Christians.
My daughters turn 22 months today. They received an unexpected gift this morning from their grandfather, my Dad, who sent the following email to them and to their seven- and four-year old cousins.
------------ Dear Max, Hallie, Tybee and Eden --------- Your great-grandmother -- Aleen Helen Wolf (Feiler) was born exactly 100 years ago today on February 15, 1907 at 212 West Harris Street in Savannah, Georgia. You will never be able to meet her, but I believe you all reflect her heritage. You share her vitality in body, mind and spirit. Your obvious love of learning reflect her strong commitment to education thru study and teaching. I hope that you will also grow to appreciate some of her beliefs which she would have wanted you to value - such as: keep the family strong, always find a place for religion in your life and be prepared to sacrifice for the future. She would have counseled you to carefully evaluate risks, but never avoid the well-considered new venture. Many of the extraordinary strengths and significant lessons of her life have been passed to you through her children and grandchildren. You can honor her memory by the decisions you make in your lives. Love, Papa
Mrs. Feiler Faster is in a social/business group that had a members-plus-spouses dinner tonight at Per Se in New York. (By the way, Per Se may have been the least romantic place in New York tonight. It seemed like mostly business dinners, very few couples, unless you count Nicholas Cage clinging to a woman in a too-red dress.) Anyway, don't ask me how, but the guest of honor was Dr. Ruth. She pointed out proudly that she had been on CNN and Fox News earlier today and gave us all signed copies of Dr. Ruth's Sex for Dummies.
At one point, she came over to my table, I shook her hand, someone brought up WALKING THE BIBLE, and she announced, "I have that book." A few minutes later I called over to Mrs. Feiler Faster. "You're missing an interesting moment here," I said. "Dr. Ruth turns out to be a WALKING THE BIBLE fan."
"I didn't say I'm a WALKING THE BIBLE fan," she quickly corrected. "I said I owned WALKING THE BIBLE."
Praised by President Bush and dissed by Dr. Ruth in the same week.
I am writing because I found a very interesting TV program that you might try to catch sometime. It is called Day of Discovery and I found it on a cable channel. Most of its programs are shot in Israel and they consider both religious and political issues very warmly and fairly. The presenters are evangelical Christians and yet they treat their subjects very fairly. There is none of the fanaticism and hoopla that one finds on TBN, for instance. I think their website is www.rbc.org. When I checked it last, they had a listing of local cities. The program is lighthearted and yet handles heavy themes such as the Israeli/Arab conflict well and even handedly. The photography, too, is done very professionally.
It's Bob Dylan week here on Feiler Faster. First, Dylan's song about Abraham pitches up on an NPR show about my book. Then a friend sends along this email about Dylan's love that dare not speak its name: His love for Israel.
Back in 1983 Bob Dylan wrote "Neighborhood Bully" and sang it on an album entitled "Infidels". "Neighberhood Bully" is an amazing pro Israel song, a commentary on the Jewish people and its contribution to the world; on the eternity of the Jewish people; on the world's hypocrisy; as well as the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries.
Unfortunately very few people seemed to notice it at the time but its never been more appropriate than it is today. I recently shared it with a colleague (and dedicated Dylan fan!) who confessed that he had missed it as well. So for the edification of all of us who remain Dylan fans, for all of us who love Israel and hate the world's hypocrisy, I'm reprinting the lyrics below. Read it and share it with your kids ....download the song from itunes (it's actually a great song...well worth the $.99!)...
Here's a sample:
Neighborhood Bully by Bob Dylan
Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man, His enemies say he's on their land. They got him outnumbered about a million to one, He got no place to escape to, no place to run. He's the neighborhood bully.
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive, He's criticized and condemned for being alive. He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin, He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in. He's the neighborhood bully.
The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land, He's wandered the earth an exiled man. Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn, He's always on trial for just being born. He's the neighborhood bully.
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized, Old women condemned him, said he should apologize. Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad. The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad. He's the neighborhood bully.
An update on the Yale-bashing story from New Year's Eve in which members of a Yale singing group were beaten up on the streets of San Francisco, allegedly after gay slurs were thrown around. Now lawyers for the victims are saying that three U.S. Marines were involved in the attack.
As many as three U.S. Marines were involved in the alleged New Year's attack on the Baker's Dozen singing group, an attorney for two singers is claiming in a letter that asks for the head of the Marine Corps' help in the investigation.
The case -- which sparked outrage on both coasts -- began with a dispute at a Richmond District party and ended with members of the singing group telling police they were kicked and beaten. One singer, SharyarAziz, Jr., suffered a broken jaw and another, Evan Gogel, a concussion.
In a Feb. 9 letter to Lt. General Robert R. Blackman, Jr., the head of the corps, attorney James Hammer named only one of the Marines allegedly involved, saying that he "was one of the men at the center of the attacks and we believe (he) personally participated in the brutal attack on both students.''
I've been saying for some time now: This case has the potential to be much more serious that the Duke rape case, which is obviously disintegrating before our eyes.
When the President Blurbs Your Book ... Wednesday, February 14, 2007
I'm going to have a lot more to say about this later, but suffice it to say that we're all still abuzz around here about this unexpected bouquet I received from the White House yesterday.
February 12, 2007 INTERVIEW OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH BY STEVE SCULLY, C-SPAN
Q And, finally, what books are you reading these days?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I just finished a book called Abraham," by a guy named Feiler. And it's a really interesting book that studies the prophet Abraham from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective. And the lesson is, is that if you -- you can look at Abraham as a unifying factor. In other words, all three of our -- all three of those religions started from the same source, which means it's possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God.
Apparently he mispronounced my name, saying Feiler as "Feeler" not "Filer," but who cares?!
Update: And one consequence already. C-SPAN'sBookTV is going to reair a Booknotes interview I did with Brian Lamb a few years back about ABRAHAM this Saturday, February 17th, at 2:30 PM EST.
I was surprised the other day to see a book about Islam that I'd never heard of pop up in the Amazon Top 100. The book, Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is "the autobiography of the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women with Theo van Gogh, who was later assassinated." Then I stumbled into this AP article that reports that the Religious Right in this country has embraced her because she fans the flames of their anti-Muslim bias.
As a child, Ayaan Hirsi Ali fled violence in Somalia with her family. As an adult she fled Kenya to escape an arranged marriage. She left her adopted Holland after she was caught up in political turmoil and had her life threatened.
Now Hirsi Ali - a brave critic of Islam to her supporters, a bigot to her critics - has found refuge in the intellectual bastion of leading U.S. conservatives.
Hirsi Ali joined the American Enterprise Institute last September, after a sometimes stormy 14 years in the Netherlands, where she was a member of parliament and became a central figure in two events that jolted the nation.
First, after she wrote a script for a film that depicted naked women with Quranic verses scrawled on their bodies, a Dutch-born Muslim gunned down the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. A letter threatening Hirsi Ali was left on a knife plunged into van Gogh's chest.
Next, a fight within Hirsi Ali's political party over her Dutch citizenship brought down the government.
The reaction to the Speaking of Faith broadcast on Abraham has been enormous. Thanks for all your letters and emails. Here's a story on the web that really touched me, from a blogger who identifies himself as a "twenty-something Baptist minister":
I already knew that my feelings for home were that of a love/hate nature. I already knew that geographical place could hold great power in human ties and relationships, not to mention culture and religion. I also knew that the ties I have to the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia are strong ones. I hadn’t realized how strong they are, however, until this past Sunday evening, during my one-hour-twenty-minute drive home, listening to Bruce Feiler on the radio. I began crying while Feiler, author of, “Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths,” talked about the power of place. More specifically, he was talking about the power of place in the three great monotheistic religious traditions (i.e. the Middle East).
While listening to Feiler, I could not help but think about the ties between Appalachia and religion. The church in Appalachia is so intertwined with the land and culture that one can hardly separate the three. Indeed, it is difficult for the individual who has lived nowhere else to pull up her/his Appalachian roots without carrying at least some of the soil along.
I have been a part of the Appalachian land-religion-culture mix my entire life. The church of my childhood traces its roots to a West Virginia coal mining community. The faith of my childhood is that of Christian fundamentalism, but with a very Appalachian twist. That means that this faith runs deep and it cannot be easily separated from the culture, daily life, or the land.
The book of mine that most resonates with this theme is WALKING THE BIBLE, which is really about the relationship between the people, the land, and God. I've been struck over the years by how many people have said to me that the feelings I experienced in the Middle East were similar to ones they felt upon, say, going to their ancestral home in Italy or walking in a beloved landscape, like the southwest. Appalachia seems to fit that description perfectly.
PS: To listen to a netcast or podcast of the show, click here.
All over the news today: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped fund a new school in NYC dedicated to Arab language and culture. What a great idea. In the past we interred Americans associated with the culture of our adversaries and banned their languages. Now we study them -- both those that are against us, and the many more who are with us. More, more!
The New York City school system will open its first public school dedicated to teaching the Arabic language and culture in September, with half of its classes eventually taught in Arabic, officials said yesterday.
The school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, is one of 40 new schools that the Department of Education is opening for the 2007-8 school year. It will serve grades 6 to 12 and will be in Brooklyn, although a specific location has not been determined.
Debbie Almontaser, a 15-year veteran of the school system who is the driving force behind the school and will be its principal, said that ideally, the school would serve an equal mix of students with backgrounds in Arabic language and culture and those without such backgrounds.
“We are wholeheartedly looking to attract as many diverse students as possible, because we really want to give them the opportunity to expand their horizons and be global citizens,” said Ms. Almontaser, who emigrated from Yemen when she was 3 and is fluent in Arabic.
“I see students who are excited about engaging in international careers, international affairs, wanting to come to our school. And I also see Arab-American students who would want the opportunity to learn Arabic, to read it and write it and have a better understanding of where their ancestors have come from.”
BREAKING NEWS: When the President Blurbs Your Book Tuesday, February 13, 2007
This just in:
February 12, 2007 INTERVIEW OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH BY STEVE SCULLY, C-SPAN Library 11:41 A.M. EST
Q And, finally, what books are you reading these days?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I just finished a book called Abraham," by a guy named Feiler. And it's a really interesting book that studies the prophet Abraham from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective. And the lesson is, is that if you -- you can look at Abraham as a unifying factor. In other words, all three of our -- all three of those religions started from the same source, which means it's possible to reconcile differences. And I was impressed by his writing. I really enjoyed the amount of study he did on the subject. And I appreciated his lessons that sometimes as each religion appropriated Abraham to suit their own needs, but, ultimately, we could view Abraham as a way to find a common God.
On Monday, President Ahmadinejad told Diane Sawyer on ABC: "You are asking me tough questions. You should ask about love." He should tell that to officials in Malaysia! They've taken steps to squelch Valentine's Day, saying it conflicts with "Islamic principles."
Religious officials are urging couples in Muslim-majority Malaysia and Brunei to shun Valentine's Day, saying it conflicts with Islamic principles and could cause moral erosion.
The warning came as florists, hotels and restaurants ramped up promotions for the occasion, offering roses inscribed with sentimental proclamations, idyllic seaside escapes and candlelight dinners with popular singers serenading lovers.
There are no laws banning Wednesday's celebration in either country, which advocate moderate Muslim teachings, but some officials noted that Saint Valentine was a Christian and feared that romantic revelries might prompt impure behavior among young people.
"From the point of view of Islam, this is not an advisable practice," said Muhammad Ramli Nuh, a state lawmaker who belongs to the ruling United Malays National Organization. "Unmarried couples might come together and mingle with each other in unacceptable ways."
Oh, Please. Go take a cold shower in some rose water.
When I lived in Nashville in the mid-1990's, the dominant question about the future viability of country music was whether labels could find a way to introduce music to fans without going through country radio. As it happens, this same notion was precisely the reason Simon Fuller began "American Idol." Idol has had mixed results when it comes to selling music to pop fans -- for every success (Kelly Clarkson) there are fare more duds (Reuben, Fantasia, and now Clay).
As anyone who watches the show knows (and I admit I got drawn into it a few years ago as a way to spend time with Mrs. Feiler Faster, who was simply ditching me for half a week), Southerners have dominated, with the majority of the top finalists for the show's six-year run. It's not surprising, then, as the great Ken Tucker points out in Billboard, that Idol finalists have had more success in Nashville than anyplace else.
The story of country's most famous "Idol" alum, Carrie Underwood, has been well documented. The winner of season five, Underwood has made her mark with two No. 1 records (as well as a No. 2) and numerous industry awards. Her latest single, "Wasted" (Arista/Arista Nashville) is climbing Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, where it is No. 14 this week.
Kellie Pickler, now signed to Sony BMG'sBNA Records, finished sixth in season five. Her debut single, "Red High Heels," peaked at No. 15, and her 2006 album, "Small Town Girl," has sold extraordinarily well -- 400,000 units, according to SoundScan -- for a new artist with a top 15 hit.
Josh Gracin is the granddaddy of Nashville's "Idol" group, having finished fourth in season two. The former U.S. Marine's self-titled Lyric Street debut has sold 684,000 copies and spawned three top five singles, including the No. 1 "Nothin' to Lose." "I Keep Coming Back," the second single from his upcoming sophomore album, is No. 30 and climbing.
Like Pickler, Covington is a North Carolina native and, like Gracin, he's signed to Lyric Street. His debut single, "A Different World," is No. 41, and he's in the studio finishing his album, due April 17, with Sawyer Brown frontman Mark Miller producing.
Beyond the obvious affinities between country fans and TV viewing, the real reason Idols have been more successful in Nashville than in pop music is that Nashville still accepts artists interpreting songs that others have written, which is the only thing Idol finalists are required to do. Success in Nashville has always been based more on personality (and savvy) than musicianship, which makes the genre particular open to the American Idol popularity contest.
I wrote a few months ago about how great I think Michael Oren is, based on his previous book Six Days of War, about the Six Day War. I have just been sent a copy of his new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, about the U.S. in the Middle East. I haven't read it yet, but I intend to. Now I see, courtesy of the folks over a Jewlicious, that he gave this quote in an interview to the Forward:
“If it hadn’t been for George Bush between 2001 and 2005, I’m not sure the Jewish state would have survived,” Oren said. “Because when the bombs started going off at the end of the Clinton administration, Israel was not given much latitude to respond to Palestinian terror. A year into the Bush administration, after 9/11, Bush started giving an unqualified green light to the IDF to go in and smash terror. By doing that, they created a situation where the tourists came back, foreign investment came back. The fact that you could walk down the street as a tourist in Jerusalem today owes a lot to the Bush administration. But the Bush administration owes a lot, in turn, to evangelical backing. So how am I to gainsay that this particular community helped save the lives of my family?”
Wow. So he would take Bush and the war in Iraq as a better situation for Jews in Israel than the deal that Clinton was trying to push through and containment for Iraq. Hard to believe.
The NYT chimes in on my prediction. (If you're new to Feiler Faster, we're keeping track of my annual prediction game with my brother. So far, I've got a point for Nifong being out as Duke rape D.A., but my brother has two points for picking Indy win the Super Bowl.)
Who wants Harry Potter dead? No, not just his evil nemesis Voldemort. The latest death wish comes from none other than Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays the boy wizard on screen. Discussing J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the saga’s seventh and concluding volume, scheduled for publication on July 21, two days before Mr. Radcliffe turns 18 and has access to an estimated $35 million fortune, he told The Observer magazine in London what he thought would happen to the character he plays. Will he die? “I think I will,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I sort of hope I will, really. I think that’s really the only way Jo can end it,” he said, referring to Ms. Rowling, “if Harry and Voldemort . . . Maybe one can only die if the other one dies. I don’t know that for sure. But I’m quite looking forward to doing a death scene, if I get that opportunity.”
Showing Christ's Love to Muslim-Haters Monday, February 12, 2007
I got an email this week that reminded of something I've been thinking for some time but haven't written about publicly. Let's start with the email, in response to a notice from me about the paperback publication of WHERE GOD WAS BORN:
Great to hear from you. It's amazing how God's timing is so relevant. I have had discussions over the last few months with a fellow from our church regarding Islam, or for more clarity "Allah-the Moon God". He was upset with me when he found out I was delivering food hampers to a new immigrant community in our area comprised of 80-90% Muslim families. I gave him some research I had, to attempt to educate him that the moon god position is not true as stated. I was unable to locate your book "Abraham" that I had lent out after reading it, and emailing you previously.
Two days ago, a friend came by and returned the book, without me calling him (I couldn't remember who I lent it to). I will ask this fellow from church if he would like to read it when I see him at church on the weekend.
I am finding it more difficult to show Christ's love regarding faiths like Islam to fellow Christians then to followers of Islam. Somehow that seems backwards to me, considering how open the Muslim families are to talking with us over "groceries" about our faiths, and the similarities of them; i.e. "The God of Abraham". Baby steps, I know, but one has to learn to walk before they learn to run.
I have been traveling around the country talking about religion, politics, and geography for almost six years now. At the start, pre-9-11, when I had just published WALKING THE BIBLE, I would say the conversation was more personal for me, and for most people I met. What is the role of the Bible, and religion, in my life. After 9-11, of course, the topic became much more political. When I published ABRAHAM in the fall of 2002, and it appeared on the cover of TIME, I would say the country was still thirsty for interfaith relations.
That hunger, and that need, are certainly still out there. But I would say with the war in Iraq, and the (inflated) showdown now with Iran, that the attitude toward Islam in this country has worsened considerably in the last few years. Individuals like the writer above are pioneers, and I believe the vast majority of Americans would still like to make interfaith relations work in this country. But the pioneers are feeling the wind in their faces more these days, not at their backs.
One of my favorite memories from my trip to Iran a few years with my wife, which is described in WHERE GOD WAS BORN, was sitting in an Internet cafe watching a woman with fake fingernails emailing her lover, in English, across the country. (Yes, I admit, I read over her shoulder.) The Internet is, of course, highly regulated across the Arab world, but bloggers do have increasing power. The AP rounds up the situation:
Mideast governments for decades have dominated the media, trying to keep a monopoly on information and deter criticism of authorities. But bloggers are chipping away, writing about everything from human rights to the region's rulers to the most taboo topic - Islam.
Weblogs - or blogs for short - started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. There are now hundreds of Arabic- and Farsi-language blogs posted from the Middle East.
Many of the blogs are just personal musings. But many others strive to tackle political and social issues, and their authors are increasingly getting into trouble, with governments blocking their sites and throwing them in jail.
"I firmly believe that blogs now with normal people using them have become the fifth estate. They watch the watchers, especially in this area of the world, because there are no controls over them," said Mahmood al-Yousif, a Bahraini blogger.
Al-Yousif said his blog was blocked by authorities briefly last year after he published articles about an election-related scandal on the Persian Gulf island kingdom.
One interesting stat: Reporters Without Borders has five Mideast countries - Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria - on its list of the globe's 13 worst Internet freedom enemies that block Web sites and detain bloggers.
And another: Though the number of Internet users has grown nearly fivefold since 2000, only about 10 percent of the region's people have access to the Internet, according to the online Internet World Stats, which monitors Web usage around the world.
As part of its fascinating package on Blogs in Arabia, the AP includes a helpful set of links to blogs around the region.
EGYPT:
-- http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com Arabic-language blog by democracy activist Wael Abbas. Has been instrumental in bringing attention to police torture and sexual attacks on women, publishing videotaped accounts of both in recent months.
-- http://karam903.blogspot.com Arabic blog by Abdel Kareem Nabil, on trial for allegedly insulting Islam and causing sectarian strife with Internet writings critical of Islamic institutions in Egypt.
-- http://www.manalla.net Arabic and English political blog by husband and wife team, Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Manal Hassan. Abdel-Fattah held six weeks last year after being arrested during rally at Cairo court in support of other detained democracy activists.
SYRIA:
-- http://saroujah.blogspot.com English blog by Sasa Kajam. Called Syria News Wire, says it features ''independent news from the streets of Syria and Lebanon.''
SAUDI ARABIA:
-- http://saudijeans.blogspot.com English blog by Ahmed al-Omran, pharmacy student who writes about politics, social issues and trends.
IRAN:
-- http://hamedmottaghi.blogfa.com Farsi blog by Hamed Mottaghi, freelance journalist who lives in holy city of Qom and writes about human rights, culture and other social issues.
-- http://www.kosoof.com Farsi photo blog that publishes pictures of Iranian dissidents with their families after release from prison.
(Both Iranian blogs were awarded Reporters Without Borders prize during 2006 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards for taking strong stands on freedom of information.)
BAHRAIN:
-- http://mahmood.tv English blog by Mahmood al-Yousif, Bahraini businessman who writes about politics, human rights and daily life on Persian Gulf island kingdom.
Breaking News: Obama knows his middle name may freak out many Americans. The AP:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Sunday he does not think voters have a litmus test on religion, whether evangelical Christianity or his childhood years in a largely Muslim country.
"If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you can expect it, some of that. I think the majority of voters know that I'm a member of the United Church of Christ, and that I take my faith seriously," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"Ultimately what I think voters will be looking for is not so much a litmus test on faith as an assurance that a candidate has a value system and that is appreciative of the role that religious faith can play in helping shape people's lives," he said.
For more the background of Obama's name at Feiler Faster, click any of the links below:
Bob Dylan on the Bible Saturday, February 10, 2007
The NPR program "Speaking of Faith" has been broadcasting a special show they did on ABRAHAM, featuring a long interview with me and others involved in interfaith activity. You can check out the broadcast here, or download the podcast, here. It's extremely well produced. One of the things they did is track down the Bob Dylan song, "Highway 61 Revisited," which I discuss in my book, and which is his riff on the Abraham story. You can listen to the song here. The song opens:
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on" God say, "No." Abe say, "What?" God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin' you better run" Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?" God says, "Out on Highway 61."
If you heard the show, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought. If you're looking for the interfaith discussion guides mentioned on the show, they can be found here. More than 5,000 people have downloaded this packet and begun their own Abraham Salon. Hooray!
PS: Now that I've started a blog, if you are part of a discussion group that reads any of my books, please send a report -- with both positive and negative comments -- and I'll post it for others to read.
Elie Wiesel Dragged from Elevator by Holocaust Denier Friday, February 9, 2007
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust conscience, was dragged from an elevator and accosted in San Francisco this week by a Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks. Wiesel, author of 40 books, including the Oprah-blessed "Night," was later escorted to the airport by police.
Reports the S.F. Examiner: The suspect accosted Wiesel in the hotel elevator at around 6:30 p.m., saying he wanted to interview him. Wiesel said he would do the interview in the lobby. That’s when the attacker pulled him out of the elevator, police reported. The attack is just coming to the surface now.
In a posting Tuesday on the anti-Zionist Web site ZioPedia, a writer using the name Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack: “After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor. I pulled Wiesel out of the elevator. I said I wanted to interview him.”
Wiesel grabbed at his chest and yelled for help, according to the posting. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you want people to know the truth?’ His expression changed, and he began screaming again. …” the posting reads. Police reported that the suspect tried to force Wiesel into one of the rooms, but ran away when Wiesel started yelling.
The online posting states that the writer intended to “bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious.” Later in the posting, the Holocaust is portrayed as a “myth.”
Here we go: News of the archaeology proxy war between Israelis and Palestinians intensified today, and my email box is proof. A reader writes to link this story:
An Israeli archeologist said Wednesday that he has pinpointed the exact location of the Second Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount.
The site identified by Hebrew University archeologist Prof. Joseph Patrich, based on the study of a large underground cistern on the Temple Mount and passages from the Mishna, places the Temple and its corresponding courtyards, chambers and gates in a more southeasterly and diagonal frame of reference compared to previous studies.
Patrich based his research, which is about to be published, on a study of a large underground cistern on the Temple Mount that was mapped by British engineer Sir Charles Wilson in 1866 on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, along with passages from the Mishna.
The giant cistern, 4.5 meters wide and 54 meters long, lay near the southeastern corner of the upper platform of the Temple Mount. Examining the location and configuration of the cistern together with descriptions of the daily rite in the Temple and its surroundings found in the Mishna, Patrich said that this cistern is the only one found on the Temple Mount that can tie in with the ancient rabbinic text describing elements involved in the daily purification and sacrificial duties carried out by the priests on the altar in the Temple courtyard.
On this basis, he says, one can reconstruct the placement of a large basin that was used by the priests for their ritual washing, with the water being drawn by a waterwheel mechanism from the cistern.
The reader adds: If further studies prove it to be true, I doubt either side would be willing to share the site. I think it would be just another example of the 'all or none' philosophy that seems to control religious thought today.
As a writer, every now and then something you write comes alive, writ large in the news. This happened Friday in Jerusalem, when a riot nearly broke out on the Temple Mount during Friday prayers. As Haaretz reported: "Israeli-Arab protesters on Friday agreed to leave Temple Mount peacefully after clashing with police to protest Israeli renovation work near the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. About 200 police officers entered the area around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurled stun grenades to disperse Muslim protesters there midday Friday, as hundreds of demonstrators threw stones at security forces."
The backstory is that Israel is doing some renovations on the ramp that leads up to the Mount, the one that goes alongside the Western Wall. Haaretz:
Excavations near the Temple Mount's Mugrabi Gate were approved two weeks ago as a necessary precursor to replacing a ramp that provides access to the gate. The ramp collapsed three years ago, and was replaced by a temporary wooden structure. Plans have since been approved for a permanent replacement, and by law, any construction work in the Old City must be preceded by a salvage dig.
The dig is taking place in the Jewish Quarter, outside the Temple Mount, but the Islamic Movement in Israel has accused it of being meant to undermine the Temple Mount. Meanwhile, Arab ambassadors to the United Nations asked the UN Security Council on Thursday to "to take immediate and urgent measures" to stop the excavation. They said in a statement that they "denounced the Israeli occupation authority's escalation of its aggression on Islamic endowments in occupied East Jerusalem by starting to destroy a historic route."
This exact scenario is outlined in chapter 4 of WHERE GOD WAS BORN, in which I interview dueling Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists about the battle over the Temple Mount. In effect, each side uses archaeology as a proxy war to wage their geopolitical struggle over the city. Archaeology, with its mix of science and emotion, appears to be a perfect weapon in this struggle, because it appears to offer what each side would like to be the ultimate answer: Proof that their claim to the land is more legitimate. But archaeology can offer no such assurances. In fact, the sooner we disentangle scripture, faith, and science from what is, at heart, a political struggle, the sooner we are likely to find a solution. Neither the Bible nor the Koran offer a solution to the Middle East crisis.
Two literary feuds in one week! I think of the National Book Circle Critics Award as being one of the more respected, but sleepier of the literary awards. Suddenly this week it finds itself in the center of the religious wars. GalleyCat first got wind of the dustup. Now the NYT has picked it up.
Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”
The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”
The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims — books including “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips, “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion” by Robert Spencer, and “America Alone” by Mark Steyn.
Most have been written by conservative authors and published by conservative presses, but not all: the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died last year, so angered Muslims with her strident books, like “The Force of Reason,” that she was sued for defaming Islam. The publication of such books coincides with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and reports of violent attacks and plots by radical Muslims in Europe. Bombings in London and Madrid, heated disputes over bans on women wearing the veil, gang attacks on young Muslims, rioting in Paris and violence in Berlin by disaffected Arab immigrants have brought to the surface anxieties over the growing number of Muslims in Europe. In December the European Union reported that Muslims faced deep-seated discrimination in education, housing and jobs, but that they should also do more to integrate into society. In this environment, it is no surprise that the books have elicited a mixture of praise and contempt, raising the question of where the line is between legitimate criticism and bigotry.
For Mr. Bawer, the condemnations are more evidence of liberals’ one-sided blindness. “One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor, etc., etc.,” he wrote on his own blog, www.brucebawer.com/blog.htm.
My flight from LAX to Seattle left without me on Wednesday night, even though I was waiting in the gate area, just feet from the door. The P.A. system didn't work and the plane left ten minutes early, unannounced. Basically it was virtually empty and they wanted to shove off. I got bumped to the next flight and lost a precious hour of sleep on the other end.
Then my sister sends along this email.
If your flight is cancelled, you can invoke Rule 240 (an old rule still on file at the U.S. Department of Transportation), which says the following: In the event of any irregularity of any kind whatsoever (other than that caused by weather), the airline must immediately rebook you on the NEXT available flight (not THEIR next available flight). In other words, the next available flight on any legacy carrier - American, United, Delta, U.S. Air, Continental, Northwest, etc. Airlines like JetBlue or Southwest, which do not have interline agreements with the legacy carriers, are exempted.
If you are already at the gate - or worse yet, on the plane - when you learn that your flight is delayed or cancelled, do NOT stand in line. Instead, use your cell phone or a pay phone to call the airline's 800 number, and ask them to invoke Rule 240 for you. They'll know what that means, and off you'll go, hopefully to your destination.
This morning I was listening to an interview with Bruce Feiler on my local NPR station. Bruce Feiler (don't worry, I had no clue who he was before this morning, either) is the host of the PBS series "Walking the Bible" and has written books chronicling his travels through the Middle East while attempting to locate many of the critical places written about in the bible. While I don't consider myself a "believer" of the Christian God (or any other single entity, for that matter), I found the dialogue captivating. At one point, Mr. Feiler was describing the role of military chaplains as masters of interfaith dialogue. He brought up the point that, despite the aggressive, conservative stereotype of the American armed forces, in some social sense, they have been pioneers. The military was integrated racially long before the rest of American society was out of necessity, and they are also necessarily respectful of varying religions, perhaps more so than our culture at large.
I found it fascinating that when we must, for practical purposes, work together and find ways to live in harmony with opposing viewpoints, we tend to do so much more readily. Perhaps it is easier to put aside our differences when our overarching goals are the same. Maybe it is that we are all respectful of the same authority and are unwilling to question it when we are commanded to collaborate. I know that when I do not, as a parent, make my rules crystal clear, my children feel more compelled to challenge them and use every inch of wiggle room they've been allowed. When I lay down the law in no uncertain terms, they may struggle initially, but then they relax and move forward within their narrower boundaries.
I am in Seattle on my book tour talking about the paperback release of WHERE GOD WAS BORN. On Thursday I spent a delightful hour with Steve Scher on KUOW, the public radio station in town. The highlights: The burning bush, chaplains in Iraq, Esperanto, and what the Ninevehites really thought of Jonah. To hear the interview, click here. It's also available on podcast.
Here was his intro: When it comes to the Middle East, there are two histories we frequently hear about in the United States. First is modern history in the making. Each day the news gives play by plays of our current conflicts there; the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, constant tensions between Israel and Lebanon. Secondly, we hear or read about the Middle East depicted in the Bible. How can we reconcile the two images? How does Middle Eastern history contribute to religion in West? Can exploring the Middle East in its current form help us understand the past?
I received a fascinating email this week from the Maryland state rep, Sandy Rosenberg, who represents the district in Baltimore where my mother grew up, and where my cousins still live. At issue: What to do when Maryland state law made Muslim-style burial illegal. His story of a Jew helping Muslims in his district bury their loved-ones legally is inspired, if only because it's the type of story we never hear in the media. This is America's true gift to the world, using a political legacy of pluralism to promote freedom of religion -- all religions:
At a candidates' night this past summer, a constituent asked us our position on a bill providing for burials consistent with Islamic belief. None of us was aware of the legislation. (I later learned that it had died in a Senate committee and thus never came before the House of Delegates.)
I met with Abdul-Hamiyd Muhammad afterwards and promised to work with him after the election. We were then joined by Saqib Ali, a newly elected delegate and the first member of the Muslim faith to serve in the General Assembly.
The crux of the issue: Muslims wash the body in a certain manner and may not embalm. State law requires that an apprentice assist in the embalming of at least 20 dead human bodies before obtaining a mortician's license. The challenge of solving a problem like this and forging a unique coalition to do so especially motivates me.
This afternoon we were joined by several other Muslims and reached agreement on the changes we needed to make to the bill draft. Over the years, I've worked on several bills to protect the exercise of religious belief.
This time, however, the sponsor line will read: Rosenberg and Ali.
94% discuss religion. And 71% attend religious services. Or so says a new report from Harvard, released as an attempt to quiet the furor over the fact that the school dropped the religion requirement that had been proposed last year.
Harvard University announced Wednesday its biggest curriculum overhaul in three decades, putting new emphasis on sensitive religious and cultural issues, the sciences and overcoming U.S. "parochialism."
The curriculum at the oldest U.S. university has been criticized as focusing too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, or for being antagonistic to organized religion. Revisions have been in the works for three years.
One of the eight new required subject areas -- "societies of the world" -- aims to help students overcome U.S. "parochialism" by "acquainting them with the values, customs and institutions that differ from their own," said a 34-page Harvard report on the changes.
An earlier proposal would have made Harvard unique among its elite Ivy League peers by requiring undergraduates to study religion as a distinct subject, but that was dropped in December.
The changes to the general-education requirements, imposed on students outside their major, still address religious beliefs and practices. Study of those issues, however, would be folded into a broader subject of "culture and belief." ...
Founded to train Puritan ministers 371 years ago, Harvard has been criticized by some conservatives in recent decades as a liberal bastion unfriendly toward religion.
A task force of six professors and two students which drafted the new curriculum said religion should be addressed, but only as one of several cultural influences.
"Harvard is a secular institution but religion is an important part of our students' lives," it said. It noted that 94 percent of Harvard's incoming students report that they discuss religion "frequently" or "occasionally," and 71 percent say that they attend religious services.
The report doesn't actually record the percentage that discuss sex, but can it possibly be more than 94%? Isn't anybody shy there?! I predict that more Harvard students discuss religion than sex, and I predict that this is a topic of some amusement in New Haven...
Ever since I became the father of twins, I've been creeped out by the expressions "separated at birth" or "switched at birth." I no longer fine the game "separated at birth?" all the amusing, and "switched at birth" hits a bit too close to home, especially since we followed the recommendations of some parents of twins and brought nail polish to paint out girls toes so we would remember which was which (turns out this wasn't necessary...).
Anyway, this story somehow casts new light on the situation, when switched at birth is real, and has consequence on a child's faith.
A Malaysian Muslim man switched at birth in a hospital mix-up wants to change his name after being reunited with his ethnic-Chinese biological family and become a Buddhist.
In multiracial Malaysia, ethnic Malays, who are mostly Muslim, form a majority of the population of roughly 26 million, while ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians account for about 25 percent and 8 percent respectively.
Sales executive Zulhaidi Omar, 29, was raised in an ethnic Malay family, and discovered his true origins only after a Chinese woman at a supermarket where he worked noticed his features were similar to those of her father, newspapers said.
"The girl who was always looking at me was actually my elder sister who suspected that I was her brother because of my striking resemblance to our father," the Star newspaper quoted Zulhaidi as telling reporters.
Three visits by the girl and her parents convinced him to take a DNA test that confirmed the ties, he added.
Zulhaidi, who unwittingly spent 20 years just a few miles from his real family, now lives with them in Batu Pahat in southern Johor state. But it took him six months before he began to call his parents "Mum" and "Dad."
His natural father, Teo Ma Leong, 66, said he had always suspected the fifth of his six children was switched at birth, because the boy had a dark complexion, the Star said.
Nothing gets the blood boiling more than a good, old-fashioned literary feud ... if you're in Britain that is. America seems mostly devoid of them. In this country, they seem mostly aimed at chipping away at the pedestal of some anointed one. James Wolcott, he of Vanity Fair, uses The New Republic to execute a take-down of Adam Gopnik, he of The New Yorker and the bestselling FROM PARIS TO THE MOON.
The great Amazon book blog (new but consistently fun), offers this review:
No semi-confessed murderers today, just the kind we're more used to in these parts: the literary evisceration. Today's victim: New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, at the bloody hands of James Wolcott in a New Republic review of Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York (I think you need to register--though not subscribe--to see the review). He starts with indiscriminate fire:
I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished. Mind you, he finds himself in fine company in my illustrious literary perp walk. Francine Prose, with her pinched perceptions and humorless hauteur--every time she brings out a new book (she is depressingly diligent), I find myself grumbling, "Her again?" I've never gotten the point of Paul Auster and his swami mystique and probably never shall, unless I move to Brooklyn and achieve phosphorescence. Walter Kirn, what a hustler. But no tactician of letters has shown a greater knack for worming his way into our hearts whether we want him there or not than Adam Gopnik.
But he soon bores in on Mr. Gopnik alone, and it's a memorable performance. I was once a Gopnik fan (and sometimes still am) but at some point the tide turned for me. Part of it was when he started writing about his kids so much, but partly I'm ashamed to say I must have been infected by Renata Adler's bitter New Yorker memoir, Gone, which subjects him to one of the cruelest literary portraits I've ever read. Wolcott seems under her sway too, as he quotes her twice, including this finely chiseled dagger:
I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.
Mrs. Feiler Faster is a big fan of Gopnik (though she recently saw him on TV and was a bit taken aback). I wonder what she'll think of this. For my part, I haven't read the book, but I think his essay on Kirk Varnedoe of the Museum of Modern Art, which is reprinted in the above eviscerated book, is the finest piece of magazine journalism I've read in the last decade.
With the paperback publication of WHERE GOD WAS BORN this week we've had a wonderful surge in traffic here at Feiler Faster. And what post has gotten the most comment: The Next Aphrodisiac, about the U.N.'s new push to promote camel's milk.
From Kenya, an old friend from Savannah writes: "Hello from Kenya where we can get Camel milk in our supermarket. I haven't been brave enough to try it. I just might have to give it a go and report back!" Please do! (By the way, to read about the mission my friend and her family have joined, visit www.plantingfaith.com.)
And from Israel, this link to another piece, this weekend, about Israel selling camel-milking equipment to the Arabs:
A camel-milking system largely manufactured by Israel's S.A.E. Afikim that can simultaneously milk 48 camels, was sold by Afikim's British distributor, to a buyer in Dubai, the Jordan Valley-based company said Sunday. The statement didn't identify the buyer.
Israel and Dubai don't have diplomatic relations.
Cooperation between Israeli companies and the nation's foreign ministry "is the best way to enter new markets in which only intervention on the level of governments can open doors for Israeli manufacturers," Afikim Chief Executive Officer YossiShemer said in the statement.
The sale of camel milk could become a $10 billion industry, providing food to people in desert areas and income for nomadic herders, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. Camel milk is three times richer in vitamin C than milk from cows and contains vitamin B, iron and unsaturated fatty acids. Camels produce as much as 20 liters of milk a day, compared with as much as 36 liters a day for cows.
Camel Milk: The mother milk of interfaith relations.
A reader writes that her son's two tours of duty in Iraq has challenged her to learn more about the Bible.
I want you to know that I really enjoyed your book "Where God was Born" I enjoyed the way you put the Bible and history of the Mid East together. When I was a little girl I wanted to be an archaeologist but marriage and 4 boys came and digging in the backyard was the only archeology I was able to do. I have done a lot of reading on the Mid East recently as my son has done 2 tours of duty in Iraq and I find it fascinating and mysterious. I can only wish that you could have included photos of the places like the staircase and the mosques that you visited. You gave me the opportunity to travel with you on a trip that I know that I will never be able to make and I loved every minute of it. Thank you so much and God bless you
P.S. I found that when my son returned from Iraq the second time he told me that Mohammed was born first before Christ and that Muslims wrote the Bible and that everyone else stole it. So I started studying and reading educating myself because I know that I better get my facts straight before we discuss this. I started with Karen Armstrong and several other books and now you, but you were the only one who put the history and with now and the Bible. Thanks again.
First of all, some good news: The paperback of WHERE GOD WAS BORN has photos of my travels in Israel, Iraq, and Iran, including the staircase in Persepolis she mentioned. Second, Mohammad was born 600 years after the birth of Christ, so you're on safe ground there. But I do agree that Iraq, known by its ancient name Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers) does hold interesting clues about the shared ancestry of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
For me, one of the highlights of my decade of traveling was the time I spent visiting biblical sites in Iraq. Three years ago this week I traveled to Iraq, and during my time in the country I went to the Garden of Eden, Ur -- the birthplace of Abraham, Babylon, and Nineveh, where Jonah goes after being swallowed by the whale. The Tower of Babel was built here, too, and I think that story holds a wonderful message for our time. After the people build the tower, God smashes it and disperses them around the world, forcing humans to speak different languages. God wants us to be different. God wants us to speak different languages. He rejects fundamentalism, the idea that we all speak the same language. God wants us to be diversified.
This is the legacy of Iraq. And it's too often lost today.
Note: To post a comment about WHERE GOD WAS BORN or my other books, visit our new discussion boards here. To write me an e-mail, click here.
One of the stressful things about living in New York and being a contributing editor at GOURMET is that I get asked several times a week to recommend places for visitors to eat. One of the realities of being someone who travels a lot, has a wife who travels a lot, and is the parent of 21-month-old twins, is that I rarely eat out in New York these days. I never know what to say.
Bloggers to the rescue! The NYT profiles the hyper-competitive, hyper-gossipy New York food bloggie scene. Some highlights:
THERE are almost as many new ways to read about the restaurant world as there are blogs. Grub Street (nymag.com/daily/food), New York magazine’s food blog started in August last year and written mostly by Josh Ozersky, 39, and Daniel Maurer, 28, has a regular “Restroom Report.”
Zach Brooks, author of Midtown Lunch, chronicles the comings and goings of sidewalk carts and restaurant traffic between 32nd Street and Central Park the same way paparazzi follow every step of Angelina Jolie.
Eater has a recurring feature called “Brunibetting” that sets odds on how many stars Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic of The New York Times (who has his own Times-sanctioned blog, Diner’s Journal will bestow in his reviews. Last Tuesday, the odds were set on Gordon Ramsay at the London: Zero Stars: 9 to 1; One Star: 5 to 1; Two Stars, 3 to 1; Three Stars: 6 to 1; and Four Stars: 1,100 to 1. On Wednesday, Mr. Bruni’s review appeared, awarding the restaurant two stars.
Clever features are nice. But being first with news about openings and instant judgments about dinner is more important.
“I’m just a dude with a ridiculously opinionated stance on all things food,” said a 36-year-old blogger who calls himself Augie. He has a day job at a Wall Street firm that, he said, might not appreciate the time he devotes to his blog, so he requested anonymity. His site, Augielandaugieland.blogs.com), made a splash after he ate at the Japanese restaurant Morimoto in Chelsea on 10 consecutive nights and filed a detailed review.
Elsewhere, the piece talks about:
Restaurant Girl is the pseudonym of Danyelle Freeman, 32, a former actress who has been breaking restaurant news and filing reviews on her blog, www.restaurantgirl.com, since March 2006. By last Sunday, three days after her meal, an 829-word review noting that “the saga of E. U. continues” and including snapshots of the food and a criticism that the quail was so undercooked “it practically walked over to the table on its own,” was posted on the Web site.
Ms. Freeman had beaten to publication a rival blog, Eater, whose scribes had also been at the restaurant that night, and which on Monday reported itself satisfied with Mr. Nawab’s hamburger, noting that if E. U. survives, it will be “an underdog story for the ages.”
I, of course, don't have time to read them. But if you pick up any good tips, or if you discover a new place in town I can recommend to friends who ask me, pass them along! It's nice to live vicariously.
Rickie Lee Jones, the New Cat Stevens Tuesday, February 6, 2007
What's with rock stars and conversions? First Garth Brooks, then Bono. Now Rickie Lee Jones. The NYT reports on the new album by Rickie Lee Jones, "The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard," which is based in part around the words of Jesus.
“Whatever it is Christ said doesn’t get a fair shake,” Rickie Lee Jones said. On a rainy December day, she was sniffling and coughing, fighting a bad cold and losing. “There’s not much written, it was done 150 years later, and it was used to create an empire. So can we get rid of all that and just see what the guy said?”
Ms. Jones was explaining the premise behind her new album, “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” out today on New West Records. The project is an attempt to explore the words and ideas of Jesus in a contemporary context, backed by the most rocked-up music of her almost-30-year career.
In a taping at Sirius Satellite Radio immediately before Ms. Jones’s interview, the intensity of her relationship to this material was evident. With eyes closed, shoes off and raggedy socks rolled down to her ankles, Ms. Jones sang, gesticulated, directed and cajoled her four-piece band. She started the session crouched in a three-point stance — one fist on the floor, the other clutching a microphone — and proceeded to pace and stalk around the tiny studio, fully possessed by the music.
“Sermon” began in 2005 when Robert Lee Cantelon, a close friend of Ms. Jones’s, organized a recording of various people reading from his book “The Words,” a new translation of everything actually attributed to Jesus in the Bible, published in 1991. When it came time for her to read, she began to sing instead, improvising a complete song; that first, spontaneous take is “Nobody Knows My Name,” the album’s opening track.
The cutting out of Jesus' words sounds a lot like Jefferson's Bible.
First came word a few weeks ago that Isaiah Washington, one of the stars of "Grey's Anatomy" who was caught using a slur against a gay cast mate, went into rehab for his offense. Now comes word that Gavin Newsom, the mayor of S.F. (who impressed Mrs. Feiler Faster at Davos the last few years), has also entered rehab. His problem: He was caught having an affair with his closest aide's wife, who happens to have alcohol and drug problems herself.
Since when is rehab the new standard of apology? Or is it, as I suspect, just a chance to duck the papparazzi. On second thought, maybe this is the answer to many of our societal problems: If everyone who uses an insulting phrase goes into rehab imagine how much less crowded the world would be. And if, on top of that, everyone who has an affair goes into rehab with them, even better! Our teacher-pupil ration will soar (think of all the kids who toss around insults), everyone can get a seat on the subway (or at Babbo), and global warming will disappear because the number of cars on the road will plummet. Rehabtopia!
Today is publication day for the paperback of my latest book, WHERE GOD WAS BORN: A Daring Adventure Through the Bible's Greatest Stories. A 10,000-mile adventure through the heart of the Middle East -- from the Garden of Eden to the rivers of Babylon -- WHERE GOD WAS BORN visits biblical sites unseen by Westerners in decades and explores the little-known origins of Judaism, Chrsitianity, and Islam.
In honor of the publication and the launch of this blog, I've received special permission to post a few excerpts in the coming weeks. Today, a slightly abbreviated version of the opening pages. Enjoy.
---------- I feel the tension before I know its source. My legs begin to quiver, then shake. Soon my whole body is quaking with vibration, or is it fear? Up above, the whir begins to build into a thudding bass beat. Cold air blows through the cracks and up my spine. I’m shivering. My feet are trembling. “Are you ready?” The sound in my ears is crackling, and a bit wicked. I nod. Within seconds, the shaking becomes overwhelming, the thumping dense, and the pull so strong it seems ready to suck my head off. I feel as if I’m in a full-body migraine. And then, just as suddenly, quiet. The sound dissolves, my body relaxes. I’m in the air, in a war. I’m at peace.
The helicopter pauses for a second, then accelerates into a gentle glide. Down below, the landing pad disappears, and rows of orange and avocado trees poke up toward the sky. I see the hairs on a donkey’s ears. Our nose is tipped, we’re flying, yet we’re not moving very quickly. Lifting off in a helicopter is like drifting off to sleep: You leave one realm and shift into another; the features seem dreamily unfamiliar; you want to touch what you see, but you can’t.
We bank toward the Mediterranean. Voices in my headphones interrupt. “This is the Air Force. Identify yourself! Do you have permission to be here?” Boaz, the pilot, smiles. We did have permission, garnered over the preceding six months, from three government agencies, but the flight was still risky. War was raging – between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq, between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism. Ripples were reverberating around the globe. The Cradle of Civilization – the tiny, fertile crescent of land that stretched from Mesopotamia to North Africa – had once more seized control of the world’s destiny and the future of civilization seemed to be at stake.
The bloody clash of faith and politics that filled front pages at the beginning of the new millennium seemed surprising, coming at the end of a century that seem to mark the end of God as a force in world affairs. Hadn’t Nietzsche declared at the end of the previous century (1882) that God was dead? Hadn’t science, capitalism, and the World Wide Web rendered faith a quaint hangover from the past?
History wasn’t ending, of course; it was finally coming home. The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing. It also dominates the greatest story every told. Jews and Christians who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent religion are willfully ignoring their past. Nowhere is the struggle between faith and violence described more vividly, and with more stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.
Yet nowhere is this conflict conveyed with more humanity and hope.
And so, I thought, what better way to confront my doubts about religion and consider the future of faith than to travel to the land where God was born? And what better guide to read along the way than the text that defines identity for half the world’s believers?
I would journey to the flashpoints in the new world war over God – Israel, Iraq, and Iran – and bring along my Bible. And I would begin my quest with the second half of the Hebrew Bible, at the moment when the children of Israel, sprung from Adam and Eve, descended from Abraham, and freed by Moses, face their harshest challenge. “Conquer the Promised Land,” God says to Joshua, Moses’s successor, at the start of the books of the Prophets. “Destroy the pagans who live on the land,” God commands. “Seize the future for yourselves – and for me.”
------------ "Breathtaking ... Goes from cover to cover, from one eye-opening story to the next, without a letup." Boston Globe
"Feiler is a real-life Indiana Jones." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In an attempt to funnel new income to nomadic herders in the Middle East, the United Nations is trying to create demand for camel's milk on the global market. The organization hopes consumers will seek it out for nutritional reasons -- it's rich in iron and vitamins B and C, with antibodies said to help fight disease. How does it taste? Says a report in this month's GOURMET: It's sweeter than cow's milk, and rather salty. Here's the U.N.'s take:
In Tunisia, people will travel hundreds of kilometres to get hold of some. Herdswomen from Ethiopia and Somalia think nothing of riding a train for 12 hours to sell it in Djibouti, where prices are high. In N’Djamena, Chad, milk bars are mushrooming all over town.
Half way round the globe people consider it a powerful tonic against many diseases. The Gulf Arabs believe it is an aphrodisiac.
From the Western Sahara to Mongolia demand is booming for camel milk. But there just isn’t enough to go round. State-of-the art camel rearing is rudimentary, and much of the 5.4 million tonnes of milk produced every year by the world population of some 20 million camels is guzzled by young camels themselves.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) thus sees bright prospects for camel dairy products, which could not only provide more food to people in arid and semi-arid areas, but also give nomadic herders a rich source of income.
FAO is hoping financing will come forward from donors and investors to develop the sector not only at local level but help camel milk move into lucrative markets in the Middle East and the West.
“The potential is massive,” says FAO’s Dairy and Meat expert Anthony Bennett. “Milk is money”.
As our traffic surges, thoughts on my redesigned site, first published on November 29, 2006.
In March 2001, on the eve of the publication of Walking the Bible, I started a website. I did it on a whim. "Authors should have websites," I thought. It changed my life. Not just my professional life. My life life. The experience of having people write me, in the middle of the night, two days after finishing a book, on the eve of a discussion in their book group,thirty-five years after teaching me in kindergarten; from Japan, Kuwait, the Philippines; in Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi; in appreciation, in tears, in rage; while watching me on PBS, while listening to me on NPR; while sitting with their dying spouse, while serving in Iraq, just after sending their grandchild to Israel, just after nodding off on the side of Route 1 in California while listening to me on an audiobook; has been the unexpected gift of nearly two decades of being a professional writer. Publishing books, appearing on television, giving a speech, succumbing to the occasional temptation of being the glib, knowing witmaster pundit (likeon Stephen Colbert) are mostly one-way forms of interaction. This site has enabled me to communicate, in the best, two-way sense of that word.
So now, more communication. This is the third major design of this site, and the first in several years. Many of the features visitors have come to expect remain, including descriptions, an excerpt, reviews, and links to purchase each of my nine books. For my last three books - Walking the Bible, Abraham, and Where God Was Born - we have very popular interfaith discussion guides and other materials for readings groups or classes. You can read a full bio and signup to receive a newsletter of upcoming appearances. Also, on the events page,I keep a perpetually updated list of where I'll be speaking and a have a link to the wonderful folks at Royce Carlton who help arrange my schedule. And, of course, I have a way to send me an e-mail. In over five years, I've answered every single one.
But in coming weeks we're going to be adding a new slate of features, including forums to discuss Walking the Bible, Abraham, and Where God Was Born on the site (update: now available here), video links to some of my appearances, and, as you can tell, a blog. Soon, I plan to begin posting comments, reports from my travels, photographs, the occasional video diary, the occasional rant, questions from my research that you might be able to help answer, requests for a restaurant recommendation or an interview tip, a tidbit that comes across my desk that you might be interested in, a tale or two of twins. I'll also explain the story behind the name of this blog.
Please know that we're hard at work on our end. Please stop back by soon. And please turn off that audiobook if my voice is putting you to sleep.
A Moderate Muslim Mayor in Macon Monday, February 5, 2007
Alliteration comes to Georgia! The White House may not be ready for a Muslim mayor, but Macon, GA, better be. Here's the unlikeliest story of the week, from my old backyard:
Mayor Jack Ellis has converted to Islam and is working to change his legal name to Hakim Mansour Ellis.
Ellis, 61, a Macon native who was raised Christian, said he became a Sunni Muslim during a December ceremony in the west African nation of Senegal.
Ellis said he has studied the Quran for years and that his new religion was practiced by his ancestors before they were brought to North America as slaves.
``Why does one become a Christian?'' Ellis said Thursday. ``You do it because it feels right. ... To me it's no big deal. But people like to know what you believe in.''
With the publication on Tuesday of WHERE GOD WAS BORN, we've been experiencing a surge in traffic here at Feiler Faster. Here are some of the stories we've been following recently.
I've just received word that the public radio program "Speaking of Faith" will air a special show "Children of Abraham," based on my book Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths, beginning this Thursday, February 8th. As the producer wrote me: "The program will air on public radio stations nationwide from Thursday, February 8 - Wednesday, February 14, and it will be featured on our Web site, www.speakingoffaith.org, during the same time. Speaking of Faith is now carried on 188 public radio stations nationwide, and we also have a growing audience through podcasting."
Here's a description from the show's website:
The sacred story of Abraham traverses the geography of the most bitter political conflict in the modern world—beginning in what is now southern Iraq and ending in the West Bank city of Hebron. Yet Abraham is the common patriarch of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. We explore the story of Abraham in several traditions and why he might be important for people in our time. The hour also includes readings from the Bible and the Qur'an as well as music from the likes of Bob Dylan and Benjamin Britten on the figure of Abraham.
If the critics of the "Jesus Loves Osama" signs actually did concede that this is probably true according to Christian beliefs, that's the clincher. End of argument, right? Or, don't Christian beliefs really matter to Christians? Well, some of us have been noticing that for some centuries, what was central for Jesus has been marginalized at best and anathematized at worst by Christendom--I speak of his teaching, "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you." It really is time for Christians to embrace what Jesus embraced, or quite dragging his name around in their violence and hate compromised wake. When Jesus said he came not to bring peace but a sword, he meant that his teachings were going to present truths which pierce the soul and divide those who accept his truths from those who do not. That's a division which can always be crossed in either direction, but it is a very meaningful division.
The viral phenomenon comes to Feiler Faster. First, its lyrics were printed in the NYT (minus the screed about the Supreme Court), this week Randy Newman is profiled in Newsweek (headline: the writer of "Short People" is 6 foot 3). Now see for yourself, and try to imagine when the last time we heard a hit song that referenced King Leopold?!
Slate answers the question, If you have a 55-inch television is your party illegal, like this church?
No. The 55-inch limit cited by the NFL applies only to public showings of the Super Bowl, not private gatherings. According to U.S. copyright law, Josh is in the clear so long as he doesn't take his gigantic TV to a public place, or invite "a substantial number of persons" to his house—more than a normal circle of family and social acquaintances. If he sticks to those rules, his Super Bowl party will be a private display and won't infringe on the rights of the NFL, no matter how big his television. (Since he's hosting a private event, he could even get away with charging his guests admission.)
Public displays are more tightly controlled; as a general rule, they require the consent of the league. But there is an exception, from section 110 of the copyright law: You can show the game to a big crowd, provided you're not charging people to watch it and that when you tune in, you're only using "a single receiving apparatus of a kind commonly used in private homes." (This is called the "homestyle" exemption.)
The National Prayer Breakfast was this week in Washington and the guest speaker was Francis Collins, former head of the genome project and recent born-again Christian. His entire talk is posted here. An excerpt:
As I explored the evidence more deeply, all around me I began to see signposts to something outside of nature that could only be called God. I realized that the scientific method can really only answer questions about HOW things work. It can’t answer questions about WHY – and those are in fact the most important ones. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why does mathematics work so beautifully to describe nature? Why is the universe so precisely tuned to make life possible? Why do we humans have a universal sense of right and wrong, and an urge to do right – even though we disagree on how to interpret that calling?
Confronted with these revelations, I realized that my own assumption -- that faith was the opposite of reason -- was incorrect. I should have known better: Scripture defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Evidence! Simultaneously, I realized that atheism was in fact the least rational of all choices. As Chesterton wrote, “Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas … for it is the assertion of a universal negative.” How could I have had the arrogance to make such an assertion?
So I had to accept the plausibility of a powerful force, a creative Mind, that existed outside of Nature. But was God only to be found in the abstract, or did he also care about me? I felt an increasing hunger to answer that question.
After searching for two years more, I ultimately found my own answer -- in the loving person of Jesus Christ. Here was a man unlike any other. He was humble and kindhearted. He reached out to those considered lowest in society. He made astounding statements about loving your enemies. And he promised something that no ordinary man should be able to promise – to forgive sins. On top of all that, having assumed all my life that Jesus was just a myth, I was astounded to learn that the evidence for his historical existence was actually overwhelming.
Update. A reader writes: "Perhaps you could also link this article to the February 2007 National Geographic. Collins is interviewed by John Horgan in this issue." A good idea: Done.
Feiler Faster reported this week from where football fans (and prostitutes, apparently) were not allowed to go: Inside the Colts hotel in South Florida. As the big game approaches, a roundup of our reports and some juicy tidbits to drop into your salsa at your Super Bowl party.
Does the NFL Own the "Hail Mary," Too? Friday, February 2, 2007
The NFL has clearly benefited from all the coverage about the faith of Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith. But now it's taken its control of the Super Bowl brand to absurd lengths. The league has sent a cease and desist letter to a church in Indianapolis saying it can't host a Super Bowl party at the church on Sunday night. Come on! Their argument: The church is profiting from the game and exceeding the size screen that anyone can project the game on: 55 inches.
Upon hearing the news, Bill Shoulta, pastor of Melbourne Heights Baptist Church in Louisville, had no initial plans to stop a planned Super Bowl program at his church, which is to include a talk by University of Louisville backup quarterback Hunter Cantwell but not an actual showing of the game itself.
In fact, he looked at the situation humorously.
"How absurd!" he said of the NFL's stance. "... Maybe churches should get a copyright on the NFL's use of such terms as 'Sunday,' 'Saints' and 'Hail Mary Pass.' Every time a player points heavenward, goes down on one knee, or shows the sign of the cross after a touchdown, maybe the cheerleaders should pass the offering plate.
"Let's charge the NFL for hyping the personal faith of the respective head coaches for the Bears and Colts. Perhaps we should be reimbursed for the loss of income that churches sustain from members who attend Super Bowl activities."
Wait. So it's okay for Sports Bars to promote Super Bowl parties but not churches? Who's a little full of themselves now.
Can a Muslim-Atheist-Christian Be Elected President?
My friend Martin Varsavsky, a brilliant entrepreneur, world traveler, new father, and blogger (in English and Spanish), responds to my post about Obama's religious background.
Being an agnostic Jew myself (would not call myself an atheist Jew cause atheist has that militant anti god component that I don´t endorse) and knowing how strongly most Americans feel about religion I cannot think of a least popular combination for a Presidential candidate than having a Muslim/Atheist background. I think this issue is likely to be raised again and again in the election, especially by whoever his Republican opponent is should Obama make it to the Presidential race. Unfortunately most American´s are quite xenophobic, if Kerry got hit for liking the French, what will happen to Obama Hussein Barack? Frankly I think this is sad because I think that Obama´s unique cultural heritage will make him more sensitive to racial and human relations.
The possibilities are endless now. Which is worse for most voters: a black, a woman, a Muslim-Atheist-Christian, a Mormon, a multiple divorcee, a nanogenarian?
The AP: A sign saying "Jesus Loves Osama" outside some churches in Australia drew criticism from the prime minister and religious leaders on Thursday, though they conceded it was probably true according to Christian beliefs.
One sign outside the Central Baptist Church in downtown Sydney also had a smaller footnote saying "Jesus said: `Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."' Several other churches in the city had similar signs urging prayers for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, according to local media.
A photograph of the sign was published in The Daily Telegraph newspaper on Thursday, prompting debate about whether it was a suitable message.
Prime Minister John Howard said something else would have been better.
I got an email this week in which a family member referred to an ideas as Mattis’. The sight of the name Mattis with that apostrophe dangling at the end jolted me, and reminded me that I never really learned the rule on what to do with an apostrophe s if the name ends with s. Boy did I get an eyeful when I started looking around – and a surprising connection with the Bible.
Here’s Wikipedia’s roundup: If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounced with an added s sound, do not add an extra s. Permitted expressions are Socrates’ suggestion; James’s house; or James’ house. In other words: either is permitted, but be consistent.
But. There are two well-known exceptions: Moses and Jesus, which do not add the extra s. Wikipedia: Classical, biblical, and similar names ending in an s sound, especially if they are polysyllabic, do not take an added s in the possessive, such as Moses and Jesus. As a particular case, Jesus’ is very commonly written instead of Jesus’s, even by people who would otherwise add ’s in, for example, James’s or Chris’s; Jesus’ is referred to as “an accepted liturgical archaism” in Hart’s Rules.
Encountered today, "The Death of Moses," by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Not one who wanted glory and only fallen angels; took weapons, deadly approached the commanded man. But already He clanked back again, upward, roared out into the heavens: I cannot!
For calmly through his thickety eyebrows Moses had seen Him and written on: words of blessing and the infinite name. And his eye was pure down to the bedrock of powers.
So the Lord, half the heavens swept up in the motion, plunged and Himself made a couch of the mountain; laid the old man down. From the house set in order He called the soul; it was up and telling many a tale of things shared, of measureless friendship.
But at last it had had enough. That it was enough the made-perfect admitted. Then the ancient God to the ancient man slowly inclined His ancient face. In a kiss took him into His age, the older. And with hands of creation He closed the mountain. So that only the one, one recreated, should lie under terrestrial mountains, unknowable to mankind.
A few years ago I traveled to the Sinai a few days after the bombing at the Hilton in Taba. I had passed that hotel many times -- it's right past the border crossing at Eilat -- and to see the gaping hole in the side of the building and the air of ruin around a usually bustling place was eerie, even post-Apocalyptic. Unlike 9-11, where New York quickly returned to a moving city, that part of the Sinai was simply dead.
That bombing was one of a series in the Sinai that left the normally mystical and eternal place jerked into contemporary politics. For such a serene location, the stench of terror seemed deeply out of place. The chapters on Sinai in WALKING THE BIBLE are my favorites, and the images that the cinematographer captured for the third hour of the show on PBS are what help give that show an elevated feeling.
A new report, highlighted on TIME.com, shows that lumping these attacks under the umbrella term Al Qaeda is unhelpful. The first attack was motivated by the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and the subsequent on the reaction of the Egyptian government to the first one. And the big shocker: It recommends scuttling the "war on terror" and replacing with economic development. Sounds like the Baker-Hamilton report...
Press speculation supported by official spin suggested that the attacks were part of Al Qaeda's global terror campaign. The IGC report, Egypt's Sinai Question, starts off by correctly noting that facts about the perpetrators and the attacks are scarce. Based on the known identities some of the attackers and a review of political factors, however, the IGC sketches the possibility of a complex picture. The terrorists were Sinai bedouin in a group led by a local dentist and an Egyptian of Palestinian origin who was a law school graduate. The Palestinian had worshipped in a Sinai mosque that preached jihad sermons. The bedouin came out of a Sinai community that has roots in the tribes of Arabia and experienced systematic discrimination from the Cairo government. The group's members were apparently aroused by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence in the nearby Gaza Strip abutting the Sinai. The initial bombing of the Taba hotel frequented by Israelis may have been motivated by the Palestinan cause. On the other hand, the subsequent attacks in Sharm el Sheikh and Dahab may have been carried out as a grudge against the Egyptian government--including anger over mass arrests following the Taba attack.
Bedouin discontent, Palestinian connections, radical Islam--it's pretty hard to solely blame Al Qaeda, much less the other side of Bush's extremist coin, Iran. The IGC's main recommendation is not more war against terrorism but a comprehensive social and development plan to "transform attitudes" and address what it says is "the Sinai question."
So much for security. But who needs it anyway? On my last day in Florida, I snuck into the Colts press conference. I guess I have the face of a sports reporter. (And they hardly missed another cold croissant.) I watched Tony Dungy answer questions. What struck me was his sense of perspective. As everyone knows by now, he is a man of faith, his 18-year-old son committed suicide last year, he is aware of his stature, with his friend Lovie Smith, of being the first black coaches in the Super Bowl. But the feeling he gave off in the room -- and what he actually said -- was the winning wasn't the only thing. In a sport dominated by the ghost of Vince Lombardi ("Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."), the message was startling.
And great.
Here's a quote I ran into: "Really, in a lot of ways, this team is a throwback to another time," Indianapolis Star sports columnist Bob Kravitz said. "There are a lot of likable guys - Tony, Peyton, Marvin - and they seem to do things the right way and say all the right things. Those are qualities America's heartland can relate to, so this team is a perfect fit in Indiana. ..."
And what better example, as I was going back to my room for the last time, two of the Colt players got into the elevator with me. "What did you do yesterday during your day off?" one asked the other. "I went to the outlet mall." "Really?" "There were like a gazillion stores. I was there three hours." "Wow. I wish I went with you."
The Outlet Mall! Who needs curfews? When the going gets tough, the Colts go ... shopping.
This may explain the most surprising thing of all about seeing the team close-up for 24 hours. There were no girls in the hotel. I expected the place to be swarming with, well, cleavage and the drool of hangers-on. Not one. This won't make them America's team, but it may make them Super Bowl champs.
Surely the last article I expected to see in USA Today on the way home last night was an homage to the beloved and, at times, abstruse Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. (Shown at right with MLK; Heschel is the one on the right with the Mosaic beard.) I quote from his book, The Prophets, quite a bit in WHERE GOD WAS BORN but probably the idea of his I must appreciate is the notion that God is looking for man as much as we are looking for him (see God in Search of Man).
"Heschel's central idea … was a God of pathos, a God of emotions, a God who cares about human history and what human beings do, even individuals," says biographer Edward Kaplan of Brandeis. "It's a kind of astounding doctrine."
Beyond academia, Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the Berkeley-based Network of Spiritual Progressives and author of 2006 best seller The Left Hand of God, calls himself a Heschel "disciple."
"We are following in his footsteps," Lerner says. "We're manifestations of his legacy."
Richard John Neuhaus joined with Heschel and peace activist Daniel Berrigan in 1965 to establish the influential anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. But today Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and editor of the religion journal First Things, says Heschel's influence on him and society is most clearly felt in Jewish-Christian relations, which Heschel shaped through his role as Judaic consultant to Vatican II at a time when Heschel's Hasidic community forbade theological dialogue with Christians.
Here's a classic Heschel quote: "When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people."
Borrowing from the traditional photo of both opposing coaches posing with the Super Bowl trophy, Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts and Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears are giving it a new twist for their shared faith in Jesus Christ.
Dungy and Smith, both good friends and fellow Christians, will appear in a full-page ad saying that while they may attain the height of their profession with a Super Bowl victory, their faith in Jesus Christ is still more important.
The advertisement was the idea of Campus Crusade for Christ, which is paying for the ad to run in USA Today and a variety of national newspapers, according to ministry officials.
Before Tuesday’s Media Day in Miami, both men posed for the ad, which will include a phone number and an Internet address associated with Campus Crusade aimed toward leading people to faith in Christ.
“It’s a great thrill to be here with my friend Lovie Smith because we have so much in common on the field and off,” Dungy said.
