Vote For My Post

It's that time again. Last year, one of my posts was nominated for the Politics Quark (Judged by Tariq Ali) at the estimable 3QuarksDaily. From a large field, my post was among the five finalists. There's a banner over on the right that will take you to that post entitled "Blunderbuss", as will this link.

Loyal reader, author Frances Madeson, has nominated another of my posts for this years Politics Quark (Judged by Lewis Lapham). The post is titled "Politics", and it deals with the outcome of the recent mid-term elections. Here is the link to the list of nominated posts over at 3QuarksDaily. There's some good stuff. Read through them, and, if so inclined, vote for mine here. They're in alphabetical order; mine is close to the bottom. Thanks.

UPDATE: Voting closes Monday, December 13, 2010, at 11:59 pm NYC time

We Interrupt...

...your regularly scheduled serial blog post (about J.M. Coetzee's latest work) to bring you this important announcement:

Once again, WoW has been nominated for a prize at 3QuarksDaily. This time it's for Literary Post of the Year.

As you can see from the sidebar, one of my posts was a finalist for the 3QuarksDaily Political Post of the Year.

I urge you ALL to go to 3QuarksDaily, read the nominated posts, and, if you are so inclined, vote for mine: "Wisdom of the West: Realisms." It is the next to last choice at the bottom of the page.

Semifinalists will be chosen by popular vote. Finalists will be selected by the 3QD editors. And Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, will choose the winners.

Even if you don't like my post, there are a number of terrific literary bloggers nominated. You will expand your world by reading them.

Here is the link to the list of nominees.

Here is the link to my nominated post: Realisms.

And here, if you're interested, is the political post that made it to the final round: "Blunderbuss".

Thanks!
Jim H.

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled reading.

Welcome to WoW

I would like to welcome everyone visiting here from 3QuarksDaily where one of my posts has been selected as a Finalist for the Politics Quark prize. I am honored. Wisdom of the West is not strictly a political blog, but it makes no bones about its views. Please browse around. There are personal essays, literary essays, critical pieces, philosophical musing, aggregations, responses to other blogs, etc. on here as well—as stated in the header. There are also a number of theme posts, such as my fifteen part personal essay "Thyraphobia" about skydiving or the ongoing "Ur-story" series which has close readings and critical essays on interesting and what I take to be important works of fiction. The "Labels" list on the right side should give you a sense of the breadth of discussion topics you can find here.

Comments are welcome, even if just to alert me to the existence of your own blog—so long as it has interests reasonably related to those herein. (For example, I will delete Spam and trolling-for-porn comments. I've been getting quite a few of those lately and hope not to have to resort to those annoying passwords and comment-blocking mechanisms and such.) I try to respond to each and every comment, as reasoned discourse is something I prize.

You will note that my blogroll comprises mostly institutional blogs, including 3QuarksDaily, and hasn't changed much in the two years I've been operating WoW. My two-year anniversary is later this month, and one of the changes I've been contemplating is to add a blogroll of other blogs I read regularly. Look for it.

Again, thanks for reading.

Best,
Jim H.

Auto-da-Fe

With a tip of the hat to 3QuarksDaily for pointing us to it, I encourage you to read the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lecture on Civil and Religious Law in England.

It brings up an important theme we raised in a previous entry. Revealed law depends for its application on the interpreters of the text/code/law. That is to say, certain people (priests, rabbis, imams... whoever) claim to speak for God. They set themselves up as mediators between the lay folk and the deity. There can be no disagreement, no appeal of their dictates. This is the danger of allowing religionists to wield secular power.

In fundamentalist Christianity, for example, preachers claim to speak for God. Their authority, they claim, comes from God. They claim the Bible is the inerrant revealed Word of God, whole and complete and without any admixture of error. This, on any rational view, is a naked power grab. For when you look at what they are claiming, you see the delusions and deceptions at play.

First of all, they claim the original text itself was actually dictated by God himself through His Holy Spirit and that the writers merely took some sort of inspired divine dictation without adding a single comma, jot, or tittle of their own. [Old Joke: Where do you find the Bible in a fundamentalist library (assuming they have one) catalog? It will be filed under 'S', for 'Spirit, Holy']. The Bible is the sole authority—not the tradition, not the commentary, not the priesthood. Sola scriptorum. Second, they assume the translations they use are accurate and claim it is only the translation of the original words they choose that counts—some translations are holier than others. Third, they pick and choose which passages of the Bible count and which don't. Thus, war-mongering preachers tend to ignore Jesus's injunction to turn the other cheek and love your enemy. They choose to apply selected Old Testament laws when they suit their purpose (homosexual behavior is an 'abomination') and ignore them when they don't (don't eat shrimp or pork, also 'abominations') because Jesus's coming superseded the code of the Torah. Fourth, they claim their interpretations of the text are solely legitimate. And fifth, they claim their applications of their interpretations to contemporary situations are authoritative. The only thing they lack is the power, in our secular society, to enforce their claims.

This, in short, is the universal problem.