Walker

Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013. He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.

“Jesus Said To Them, ‘My Wife…'”

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Discussions regarding Jesus’ marital status have become quite popular over the past few years. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with any real familiarity of Gnostic writings (the Gospel of Philip is typically the one invoked) and more to do with The Da Vinci Code.

However, a controversial papyrus scrap reads “…’Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…” Recent tests on the papyrus’ ink and writing have dated it between the 5th and 9th century A.D. The results have been published in the April 2014 issue of Harvard Theological Review. While far removed from 1st-century Christianity, the text nonetheless is insightful. “Early Christians were grappling with the question of whether you should get married and have children, or whether it’s better to be celibate and virgin,” the study’s author Karen King told The Atlantic. “This fragment seems to be the first case we have where a married Jesus appears to be affirming that women who are mothers and wives can be his disciples.”

Be sure to check out National Geographic‘s coverage and Christianity Today‘s interview with Wheaton professor Nicholas Perrin about the fragment.

The Interracial Marriage Analogy

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The Atlantic has a recent piece contrasting the claims that to opposition same-sex marriage is just like previous opposition to interracial marriage. This allows those favoring gay marriage to see their cause as similar to that of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously painting their opponents as bigots on par with the Jim Crow South. The author of the piece (who supports equal marriage rights for gays) writes,

Opposition to interracial marriage was all but synonymous with a belief in the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. (In fact, it was inextricably tied to a singularly insidious ideology of white supremacy and black subjugation that has done more damage to America and its people than anything else, and that ranks among the most obscene crimes in history.) Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it’s also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone. That’s why it’s wrong to stigmatize all opponents of gay marriage as bigots…Opposition to interracial marriage never included a large contingency that was happy to endorse the legality of black men and white women having sex with one another, living together, raising children together, and sharing domestic-partner benefits as long as they didn’t call it a marriage.

The author finds the arguments of same-sex marriage opponents unpersuasive, but not necessarily bigoted (though some certainly are). Of course, the claim that the analogy doesn’t work isn’t new. It just doesn’t show up very often in popular media outlets like The Atlantic. In fact, philosopher Francis Beckwith of Baylor University had an essay a few years ago analyzing the analogy. He found that there was no ban on interracial marriage at common law. This “means that anti-miscegenation laws were not part of the jurisprudence that American law inherited from the English courts. Anti-miscegenation laws were statutory in America (though never in England2), first appearing in Maryland in 1661 after the institution of the enslavement of Africans on American soil. This means that interracial marriage was a common-law liberty that can only be overturned by legislation.” Anti-miscegenation laws were also diverse throughout different regions, ranging from indictments against whites marrying blacks, Mongolians, Malayans, mulatto, and even American Indians. “The overwhelming consensus among scholars,” explains Beckwith, “is that the reason for these laws was to enforce racial purity, an idea that begins its cultural ascendancy with the commencement of race-based slavery of Africans in early 17th-century America and eventually receives the imprimatur of “science” when the eugenics movement comes of age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” It is often forgotten that Loving vs. Virginia overturned the eugenics-based Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This is why the interracial marriage analogy is so problematic:

o_brother_pardoned-151For if the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws was racial purity, such a purpose only makes sense if people of different races have the ability by nature to marry each other. And given the fact that such marriages were a common law liberty, the anti-miscegenation laws presuppose this truth. But opponents of same-sex marriage ground their viewpoint in precisely the opposite belief: people of the same gender do not have the ability by nature to marry each other since gender complementarity is a necessary condition for marriage. Supporters of anti-miscegenation laws believed in their cause precisely because they understood that when male and female are joined in matrimony they may beget racially-mixed progeny, and these children, along with their parents, will participate in civil society and influence its cultural trajectory. In other words, the fact that a man and a woman from different races were biologically and metaphysically capable of marrying each other, building families, and living among the general population is precisely why the race purists wanted to forbid such unions by the force of law.

Beckwith concludes by acknowledging that there are “plenty” of “other arguments for same-sex marriage other than the anti-miscegenation analogy…some of which are serious challenges to the common-law understanding of marriage as requiring gender complementarity.”[ref]One of the best arguments I’ve read in favor of same-sex marriage (which has been highly influential on my own thinking) comes from William & Mary law professor Nate Oman: http://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bxii2wEOc220cDV5SGVQdFlidGc/edit?pli=1[/ref] However, “once one understands the purpose of the anti-miscegenation laws and their relation to the common law understanding of marriage, the analogy not only breaks down, but may actually work against the case for same-sex marriage.”

There are better reasons for supporting same-sex marriage than false analogies. Let’s stick with those, shall we?

Climate Change Solutions

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[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

So concludes an excellent op-ed in The New York Times. I remember reading in The Economist a couple years ago that America’s CO2 emissions had decreased largely due to fracking and the shale gas boom. Yet, many environmentalists continue to object to both natural gas and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.

Just one more reason why I think a serious scientific issue has been hijacked by political agendas.

Book Review: Authoring the Old Testament

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I had the opportunity to read and review David Bokovoy‘s (Ph.D., Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East) new book Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis – Deuteronomy for Greg Kofford Books over at Worlds Without End. The book description is as follows:

For the last two centuries, biblical scholars have made discoveries and insights about the Old Testament that have greatly changed the way in which the authorship of these ancient scriptures has been understood. In the first of three volumes spanning the entire Hebrew Bible, David Bokovoy dives into the Pentateuch, showing how and why textual criticism has led biblical scholars today to understand the first five books of the Bible as an amalgamation of multiple texts into a single, though often complicated narrative; and he discusses what implications those have for Latter-day Saint understandings of the Bible and modern scripture.

This is an incredible book for those interested in biblical studies, especially Latter-day Saints. Check out it out.

Gender Occupational Fatality Gap

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Economist Mark Perry has a rather different take on the gender wage gap:

Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100 % male), fire fighters (96.6% male), police officers (84.8% male), correctional officers (72% male), farming, fishing, and forestry (77.3% male), roofers (98.5% male) and construction (97.5% male); BLS data here. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of women work in relatively low-risk industries, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (73.3% female), education, training, and library occupations (73.6% female), and healthcare (75% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to work-related injury or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women more than men prefer lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death.

In a recent debate, feminist Camille Paglia made a similar point:

Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments.  It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.  Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world.  These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role–but women were not its author.

I’ve adjusted for hours worked (full-time vs. part-time), education choices, job choices, time off, etc. when analyzing the gender wage gap. Can’t say I’ve ever taken fatalities into consideration.

Cut Off By Technology?

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Criticisms of iPhones, Facebook, the Internet, etc. have been around for years. The complaint is often along the lines of “texting is destroying language” or “kids these days are antisocial because all they do is play on their phones.” People have been making strikingly similar claims for centuries and it has never really come to pass. My own skepticism of these claims and those similar emerged when I read science writer Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Plus, even if the criticisms were true, the benefits of these new technologies seem to far outweigh the costs.

An article from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley explores several recent studies that analyze the connection between technology and social capital. The conclusion?:

Taken together, these three studies hint at a compelling story—that social networking services can be a significant way of developing, maintaining, and strengthening our social connections, both online and in person. Using social networking services builds social capital in a number of ways: greater emotional support, lower levels of loneliness, and more feelings of connectedness. But these studies also contain a note of caution: Too many followers and too much participation can lead to information overload, depression, and feelings of disconnectedness.

The bottom line? I’m going to keep my iPhone and my Facebook account—but I think I’ll also keep setting limits.

Check it out.

Portraits of Reconciliation

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He killed her father and three brothers during the Rwandan genocide twenty years ago. In their faces there is pain. There is suffering. There is, as the powerful New York Times piece says, “little evident warmth…[A]nd yet there they are, together.” As one survivor said regarding a man who had participated in his brother’s murder,

Sometimes justice does not give someone a satisfactory answer — cases are subject to corruption. But when it comes to forgiveness willingly granted, one is satisfied once and for all. When someone is full of anger, he can lose his mind. But when I granted forgiveness, I felt my mind at rest.

Read it. And stare into faces that have experienced true evil and true forgiveness.

Extra-Biblical ‘Noah’

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Darren Aronofsky’s Noah rose above (or likely because of) the controversy surrounding it to have an impressive $44 million opening weekend. I was writing my review, but getting bogged down in some technical details regarding the Watchers. I’d much rather focus on some of the themes from an LDS perspective, so I thought I’d share this blog post from Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis (Adjunct Professor of Rabbinics, University of North Texas) that covers a lot of the interesting extra-biblical bits of Noah with further links. (I’ll likely build on these in my own review, but now I don’t feel obligated to explain it all.)

These include:

  • Watchers: “The fallen angels, based in Gen. 6:4 and grandly elaborated on in the Book of Enoch and the Book of Giants, are a big part of the storyline…Aronofsky elides the more lurid part to the tradition, their coupling with human women and producing giant offspring, focusing instead on their role in Enoch as the bringers of knowledge and technology to humanity.”
  • Tzohar: “The glowy-explosive substance used repeatedly in the movie is based on the tzohar, a miraculous gemstone that tradition tells us illuminated the interior of the ark.”
  • The Garment of Adam: “…I assume this is where the idea for the magical-glowing-serpent skin-arm tefillin worn by the shamanic patriarchs of Seth is derived from. In Jewish tradition, the garment is made from the hide of Leviathan [i.e. the sea serpent]. Here, it’s the sloughed-off, pre-corruption skin of the edenic serpent.”
  • Tubal-Cain: “The terrifying and terrified king is constructed from a single verse of Genesis where he is credited as a worker of bronze and iron, but is then fused with the midrashic King Nimrod, the power-mad tyrant of rabbinic fantasy who attacks God’s messengers.”

Drawing on a parable from the Zohar, Dennis writes,

Hopefully…people are finally coming to understand that the fundamentalist critics of this film are all masters of wheat as alluded to by the Zohar. They think that in cleaving only to the bare bones of the biblical narrative, they are masters of all aspects of the story, but in fact they are, to a great extent, suffering from a kind textual indigestion, or perhaps a spiritual ciliac disorder, in which they fail to absorb the full nutritional value of the biblical narrative because of their restrictive way of reading.  The Noah story as received, a mere one hundred verses, with little dialogue, minimal motivation, no character development or insight, no struggle, is a mere skeleton which the readers must flesh out with themselves, projecting their experiences, emotions, and conflicts, and imagination onto the scaffold of plot to fully realize its many on complex meanings and implications. The movie Noah steps into those many gaps and fills them with clever, and sometimes crazed, midrashic storytelling.

I couldn’t agree more.

 

Here are a few more Noah-related posts from biblical scholars and biblically literate moviegoers:

 

Science and Seances

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Nathaniel posted this past week on the relationship between religious faith and scientific evidence in the wake of new evidence for cosmic inflation. I followed up with a brief post about religious scientists (including Big Bang discoverer Georges Lemaitre). To top it off, this month’s issue of Nautilus has an excellent article entitled “Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark.” The author presents a fascinating history of modern science. Here are a few gems:

  • “Who now will stand up for the British physicist Edmund Fournier d’Albe, who in 1908 put forward the theory that the human soul is composed of invisible particles called “psychomeres” possessing a rudimentary kind of intelligence?”
  • “[W]hen science first began to fixate on invisible entities, many leading scientists saw no clear distinction between such occult concepts and hard science…Victorian physicists were particularly prone. Some conjectured that there exist intelligent, unseeable beings on the subatomic or the cosmic scale. Others speculated that high-frequency waves outside the visible range could transmit thoughts between minds, or that immortal souls were consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Anything seemed possible, as it often does when we awaken to our ignorance.”
  • “It is no coincidence that these discoveries [e.g. radio waves] happened at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for spiritualism, in which mediums claimed to be able to contact the souls of the dead. The two trends supported each other. The new physics hinted at explanations for thought transference, whether from other people or from spirits; and a widespread belief in invisible influences and intelligences created a receptive environment for ideas in physics that seemed scarcely less incredible. If radio waves could transmit invisibly between a broadcasting device and a receiver, it did not seem so hard to imagine that human brains—which are after all quickened by electrical nerve signals—could act as receivers.”

And so on. Check it out.

U.S. Communities and the Gallup Well-Being Index

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Gallup released the results of a recent survey of across 189 U.S. communities from 2012-2013. The results are as follows:

The results are broken down further in the full post. Check it out.