Clipmarks | enbar's clips

Commonweal on Mark Taylor's "After God"

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:06:00 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Villanova's Bernard Prusak reviews Mark Taylor's latest book. He is critical, but thoughtful. The review is a very good read.

Clip Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

April 11, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 7

The Lord & Taylor

After God

Mark C. Taylor

University of Chicago Press, $35, 416 pp.

When I was a student at Williams College in the 1990s, Professor Mark C. Taylor was the big man on campus, the intellectual figure to reckon with. If a book had been written with the title God and Man at Williams, the man would have been Taylor, according to whom God was dead. Taylor loomed especially large for students like me who came to Williams with faith in God as well as aspirations, or pretensions, to be intellectually sophisticated. For faith in God, at least according to Taylor and his protégées, was intellectually disreputable. Haven’t you read Nietzsche, and Freud, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and above all the French “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida?

Tags: roman_catholicism, religion, christianity, books, secularism, review, pluralism

Suicide may kill more U.S. soldiers than combat

Tue, 06 May 2008 13:07:59 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Not sure what to make of this news, or how reliable these numbers really are, but it's fairly shocking. It also says that one in ten U.S. veterans will suffer from untreated PTSD.

Clip Source: www.bloomberg.com

Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, U.S. Says (Update1)

May 5 (Bloomberg) -- The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said.

Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven't provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington.

Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment.

Tags: war, violence, psychology, u.s.-news, iraq, gwot, military

Maurice Bloch: religion is a consequence of imagination

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:28:00 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Maurice Bloch produces what sounds on first glance like a neo-Durkheimian theory of religion with a foundation in cognitive psychology. I need to look more closely at this.

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Religion a figment of human imagination

00:01 28 April 2008

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

Tags: religion, social_science, anthropology, research, theory, !toread, post:facebook(clip)