The Pope's line in the sand

As the flap over the Pope's address at the University of Regensburg spread, it seemed time to take a good look at what he actually said (transcript in German here, English version here). From initial reportage, it seemed as if this might be somewhat akin to the Lawrence Summers affair, where certain opinions had been deemed so unacceptable that even mention of their existence was grounds for execration. Yet upon closer examination, there's much more going on here.

For Benedict's address does fault Islam quite forthrightly -- but chiefly and centrally regarding a point apparently overlooked by all the most vocal protesters, and most journalists. The point is however noted here:

Benedict . . . [discusses] the Greek roots of reason in Christianity, which he contrasts with Islam's view that God is "absolutely transcendent," including above reason . . .

Near the end of the address, Benedict said that only by recognizing the "rationality of faith" do people "become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today."

The central theme of the Pope's message at Regensburg is a defense of human reason. In a long and carefully constructed essay, the Pope condemns conversion by violence, celebrates the rapprochement of faith and reason ("Biblical faith and Greek inquiry"), defines that rapprochement as "the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe", and faults both reason without faith and faith without reason -- making Islam, for the latter, example number one.

In terms of theological disputation, this is a sharp thrust. Unfortunately, if there has been a reasoned response, it has been lost amid what Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, termed "crying foul" as opposed to engaging in real dialogue. Nor does it seem likely that this Pope will pay much heed to those cries: although a number of apologists have objected that Benedict's quotation of Manuel II Palaeologos does not indicate endorsement of the Emperor's views, that simply doesn't fly. For Benedict places the quote front and center, using it as the launch pad for a broader condemnation of the furthering of religion by violence in which the Emperor's words segue cleanly into his own. Noting the "startling brusqueness" of Manuel's words is not so much a repudiation as Benedict's bow to the proprieties of academic detachment -- a rather disingenuous bow, given the approving analysis of the reasoning underpinning those words that follows.

The language of Benedict's address is academic, and may not be easily comprehended by impatient or unskilled readers. For those who can comprehend it, his message could not be clearer. Look at the rest of the passage excerpted above, which is nothing less than a reductio ad absurdam against Muslim irrationality:

The decisive statement in this argument . . . is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

Benedict then continues by reasserting the necessity of that reason he has just found lacking in Muslim teaching:

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

Nearly all of what follows -- the bulk of the address -- is devoted to consideration of the changing roles of faith and reason in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, from the Hellenistic era up to the present. Is this a divagation? Or were his introductory reflections on Islam, forced conversion, and Manuel II Palaeologos a poorly chosen lead-in? I think not: the address as a whole is a discourse on identity, on who we are, and who we aren't -- "we", here, of course, being Benedict's unapologetic "we".

This blunt willingness to draw lines between "us" and "them" is radical, at least in this day and age. But where Benedict chose to draw his line may yet transform the terms of discussion. At last report, many leaders of Europe have come to the Pope's defense, and though the Vatican has issued a conciliatory message (full brief text here), it is far from an apology, let alone a retraction -- and it seems doubtful that any substantive retreat is in the offing. As the Times of London noted today:

In May, the Pope told a Vatican conference on immigration that although he favoured “dialogue” with Islam it could only be conducted on the basis of “reciprocity”. Christians should “open their arms and hearts” to Muslim immigrants, but Muslims in turn had to overcome “the prejudices of a closed mentality”. As L’Espresso magazine observed yesterday: “This is not exactly a diplomatic pope” . . .

Vito Mancuse, lecturer in theology at the San Raffaele University of Milan, said: “The message of Regensburg is that logos — reason — is at the heart of Christianity, whereas the God of Islam is more arbitrary, and in the absence of reason lie the seeds of war. For Christians, God is love. Muslims don’t know what God is, only that he exists and dominates the world.”

To be continued . . . .

Oriana Fallaci obit

From the NY Times:

Oriana Fallaci, a dissecting interviewer of the powerful and an iconoclastic journalist turned icon herself, who in recent years wrote angrily about the threat of Islam, died today in her home city of Florence, the hospital reported. She was 77. . .

She became famous in the 1960’s and ’70’s for her war reporting and long, aggressive and revealing interviews with prominent people. Ms. Fallaci was once labeled “the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no.” Among others, she interviewed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Nguyen Van Thieu and Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, called the experience “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.”

Lillian Schapiro obit

Dr. Lillian Milgram Schapiro, a pediatrician and widow of the renowned art historian, Professor Meyer Schapiro, died Aug. 6 at the age of 104 at her home in the Village where she had lived since 1931. . .

Born to Benjamin and Doreé Milgram in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on Aug. 20, 1902, she went to P.S. 22 and Girls High School. In 1918 she met her husband, whose family lived in the neighborhood and who was a friend of her older brother, with whom he shared a passion for photography.

Read the rest in the Villager.

Olmec inscriptions: oldest writing in Americas

A stone block unearthed in Mexico and covered in carved patterns is thought to be the oldest example of writing found in the Americas.

Archaeologists believe the writing on the 26lb (12kg) block could date back to the first millennium BC. Road builders digging in a gravel quarry found the 14x8in (35x20cm) block at Cascajal, Veracruz. It is thought to be the work of the Olmec civilisation, which may have laid the foundations for the future Mayan and Aztec empires.

Full article here.

Looted Iraqi artifacts returned from London

COMMANDER Sue Wilkinson of Scotland Yard returned two stolen artefacts yesterday to Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, and Salah al-Shaikhly, the Iraqi Ambassador to Britain.

The items were part of a haul of looted antiquities that were smuggled out of the country and put up for sale on the international art market. . .

Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, who heads the Arts and Antiques Unit at Scotland Yard, said that the items were handed in by an auction house and an art dealer in London.

The items were an incantation bowl and an 11th-century medical manuscript. From the Times of London.

Chipping away at cross theft in Cornwall

Since the 10th century, travellers to Cornwall have been helped by hundreds of distinctive Celtic crosses, carved from rough-hewn granite, which mark their route. But a recent wave of thefts, fuelled by Cornish nationalism, has prompted officials to adopt a 21st-century solution to help to protect the ancient signposts.

Cornwall County Council has become so alarmed at the loss of the relics that, in an effort to deter thieves, it is fitting them with microchips.

For the present, the tagging will only allow crosses to be identified, but adding the ability to track them is also under consideration. Full article here.

Re-examining the Battle of Towton

SKELETONS bearing marks of horrendous sword injuries have been unearthed beneath a North Yorkshire hall.

The victims of a medieval battle were discovered beneath the floor of the dining room of Towton Hall, between Tadcaster and Sherburn-in- Elmet, dating from the Battle of Towton in 1461.

The discovery was made as part of a ten-year investigation into the archaeological evidence of the longest and bloodiest battle ever fought in England.

Full article here. These, and other nearby mass graves recently found, should give the forensic crews plenty to work on. In addition to what we may learn about medieval warfare in general, we stand to find out much more about this battle in particular:

Archaeological evidence to be presented at a conference in York in October 2006 could alter our accepted historical view of one of Britain’s bloodiest battles. . .

Contemporary written sources about the battle are however few and far between and even the location of a Chapel built some years later by Richard III has been at the centre of many debates that persist about the battle.

Now according to archaeologist Tim Sutherland and his team from The Towton Battlefield Archaeological Survey, findings to be unveiled at the Towton Conference at Yorkshire Museum on October 4 2006 will finally clear up these and other mysteries and even turn the accepted history of the battle on its head. . .

According to many accounts written since the battle, ten hours of vicious hand-to-hand combat resulted in a final bloody death toll of over 28,000, whilst mass graves marked on maps (and acknowledged locally) were said to contain the bodies of the slain. Place names such as Bloody Meadow and Chapel Hill were commonly accepted as evidence of the battle’s course.

But according to Tim, the archaeology doesn’t tie in with the history.“We’ve knocked many sites on the head that were, or are still, associated with the battle and even much of the local history surrounding the battle seems wrong.”

Hunley update

Scientists have removed the rear hatch on the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, although the work won't immediately remove the questions surrounding the sinking of the sub in 1864. . .

The Hunley [had] two towers with hatches but the rear hatch apparently was locked. After it was removed from the sub, which is in a conservation tank at a lab in North Charleston, the hatch was taken to the lab for X-rays.

The way the sub was configured, most of the crew would have had to have opened that hatch and escaped through the back tower.

The fact it was locked indicates the crew didn't sense an emergency in the last minutes of the sub, said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston and chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.

From Discovery News.

Neanderthals' last stand?

Our evolutionary cousin the Neanderthal may have survived in Europe much longer than previously thought.

A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham's Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago.

The Neanderthal people were believed to have died out about 35,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans were advancing across the continent.

The new evidence suggests they held on in Europe's deep south long after the arrival of Homo sapiens.

The research team believes the Gibraltar Neanderthals may even have been the very last of their kind.

"It shows conclusively that Gorham's Cave today was the last place on the planet where we know Neanderthals lived," said lead author Professor Clive Finlayson, director of heritage at the Gibraltar Museum.

From the BBC.

Voicemail machete 2

Here's another solution, in beta, to cutting through corporate voicemail: www.nophonetrees.com (a fine supplement to the gethuman database).

New Zealand meteor

Sound like quite a spectacular daytime fireball; a chunk of it may have been found, too.

I rather like The Register's (slight) embellishment:

The meteor broke the sound barrier during its rapid descent, leaving a "long white trail" as it disintegrated in "purple and red flames", as one eyewitness recalled. . .

That the object was probably a meteor was confirmed by the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, which said "none of its instruments had registered any shocks". The NZ Air Force rather sadly added that "none of its planes was fast enough to break the sound barrier".

Funeral strippers crackdown

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say.

The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.

But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.

From the BBC.

From EU to Forum Communis

A tidbit from the Not Bloody Likely Department:

The Vatican's daily newspaper has called for Latin to be made the official working language of the European Union, after attempts by the new Finnish presidency to promote its use in EU departments.

"While Latin has been given up as a compulsory subject in schools over recent years, interest in the language is growing in Europe and other parts of the world," the semi-official L’Osservatore Romano said in a commentary.

"In these circumstances, it would constitute a suitable instrument for international communication."

The paper said a Latin-language news programme, Nuntii Latini, had been broadcast weekly for the past decade by YLE, Finland’s equivalent to the BBC, making the ancient Roman language "potentially contemporary."

Via Mirabilis.

Happy birthday, Roald Dahl

Fans of all ages are staging parties to celebrate what would have been the 90th birthday of writer Roald Dahl.

Exhibitions and children's reading campaigns are being held to commemorate the life of Dahl, who died in 1990 and has sold more than 100 million books.

Read about some of the commemorative activities here, at the BBC.

Breathe . . . or go blind

Brazilian researchers found lifting heavy weights was linked to a temporary increase in pressure within the eye - especially when holding the breath.

They say that this could increase the risk of glaucoma, as the condition is more common in people subjected to frequent changes in eye pressure.

From the BBC. Note, however, that eye-popping pressure can also be generated by hard blowing into wind instruments, or pretty much any other strain-generating activity.

No fly flu zones

The freeze on air traffic after the September 11 attacks delayed the 2001-2002 flu season, and researchers were able to confirm what many had long suspected -- air travel could help spread a bird flu pandemic very efficiently.

While there is no way to stop a pandemic completely, the researchers at Children's Hospital Boston said restricting air travel could delay the spread of a deadly virus and buy some time to prepare vaccines, drugs and take other measures.

"For the first time we've been able to show, using real data, that air travel spreads the flu, suggesting that reducing the number of air passengers might ameliorate a flu pandemic". . .

Full article here. Note that while the Reuters headline reads, "September 11 study shows flu spread by airplane", it does not read (nor does the study appear to address), "spread in airplanes". Putting filter masks on passengers in case of an epidemic would help cut transmission during flight, but how useful that would be in comparison to stopping movement by air entirely is quite another (and quite an interesting) question.

Iraqi archeology: foxes taking over the henhouse

Followup on the flight of Donny George and the events that precipitated it:

There is mounting concern among scholars that the appointment of religiously conservative Shiite Muslims throughout Iraq's traditionally secular archaeological institutions could threaten the preservation of the country's pre-Islamic history. . .

Liwa Sumaysim, the new minister of tourism and antiquities, is a dentist whose wife, a member of Parliament, is related to Sadr. The new ministry has already replaced employees of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage at both the national and local level.

Burhan Shakur, an archaeologist who was director of excavations at the Iraqi Museum, was fired in the spring, then given the option to retire; he has left for Germany. Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the inspector for antiquities in the Dhi Qar Province, an area rich in pre-Islamic sites, was jailed in April on charges of corruption. After three months he was released, and the charges were dropped. But his job was then filled by a man with ties to Al Fadilah, an Islamist party aligned with the Sadr movement. . .

A link between Islamic militants and looting at pre-Islamic archaeological sites has long been suspected, but is difficult to prove. The Nasiriyah Museum was burned and looted in 2004 by militants affiliated with Sadr. The museum's guards reported that the militants promised to do to the antiquities there exactly "what the Taliban did."

The center for Iraq's illicit antiquities trade, Fajr, is also a stronghold for militants loyal to Sadr. And anti-Western graffiti has appeared at looted archaeological sites. . .

The Sadrist leadership in the new ministry has made its views known in other ways. Recently two pre-Islamic statues it returned to the Iraqi Museum were accompanied by a note describing them as "idols."

From the International Herald Tribune (originally from the NY Times). This is a very bad state of affairs, and I suspect it has been made even worse by something left discreetly unmentioned recently: Donny George was a proud and enthusiastic confidant of Saddam Hussein, whose patronage of the Iraqi archeological establishment appears to have left a lasting taint -- and especially for those neither secular nor Sunni.

Destruction by restoration in Myanmar

The bricklayers are paid $1.35 a day to rebuild the ancient ruin: a small, 13th century temple reduced by time to little more than its foundation.

But they have no training in repairing aged monuments, and their work has nothing to do with actually restoring one of the world's most important Buddhist sites. Instead, using modern red bricks and mortar, they are building a new temple on top of the old.

They work from a single page of drawings supplied by the government. Three simple sketches provide the design for a generic brick structure and a fanciful archway. No one knows, or seems to care, what the original temple looked like. Nearby are two piles of 700-year-old bricks that were pulled from the ruin. The bricklayers use them to fill holes in the temple.

Known as Monument No. 751, the structure is one of hundreds of new temples that have popped up all over the ancient city of Bagan, which ranks with Cambodia's Angkor temple complex as one of Asia's most remarkable religious sites. Once the scene of an international rescue effort, Bagan is now in danger of becoming a temple theme park.

The late Myanmar historian Than Tun called the restoration "blitzkrieg archeology."

"They are carrying out reconstruction based on complete fantasy," said an American archeologist who asked not to be identified for fear of being banned from the country. "It completely obliterates any historical record of what was there."

Full story here; reprinted here and elsewhere. This is egregious, but awful "restorations" have been carried out in countries far less benighted than Myanmar.

Zoonappings

Missing marmosets, abducted alligators, purloined penguins: Thieves are targeting Europe's zoos and safari parks to supply animal collectors who want to own ever more exotic species. . .

John Hayward, a former police officer who runs Britain's National Theft Register, the only national database of animal thefts in Europe . . . says on average Britain's zoos have suffered a major theft every week for the past few years, involving dozens of animals worth thousands of dollars. . .

Harry Schram, director of the 300-member European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, says some 40 percent of European zoos have suffered thefts.

From Discovery News.

Untouched Egyptian royal tomb?

AN UNDISTURBED royal tomb has been detected deeply buried in the Valley of the Kings, a British Egyptologist claims. The find, using remote-sensing equipment, lies only a few yards from the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922, and is likely to date to the same early New Kingdom period between 1550BC and 1300 BC, and perhaps even to Tutankhamun’s own 18th dynasty.

“From its location this tomb could prove to be a find of the greatest possible significance,” said Nicholas Reeves, director of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project. “Situated in a part of the Valley which was out of bounds to earlier excavators, moreover, the new find is almost certain to be undisturbed.”

From the Times of London. One thing is certain: the Egyptians won't be letting any foreigners unearth this one.