Arts

Who Speaks for Islam?: Interview with Dalia Mogahed

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for who speaks for islamSome of the most interesting and infuriating things to witness on Facebook are the threads on Daniel Peterson’s wall. Peterson teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at BYU (he’s even authored a biography of Muhammad) and has been a big name in Mormon apologetics for some time. Because of the latter, he tends to be favored among conservative Mormons, both religiously and politically. However, his educated, sympathetic, and often favorable views of Islam tend to bring Islamophobic Church members out of the woodwork. I’ve seen ignorant Internet warriors attempt to lecture him on the “threats” of Sharia law, provide decontextualized readings of the Quran,[ref]They should pick up the fairly new The Study Quran.[/ref] explain how Islam is an inherently violent religion, and justify Trump’s Muslim ban. In the midst of one of these exchanges, Peterson suggested John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think based on the Gallup Poll of the Islamic world.

The book was eye-opening. For example, the authors summarize some of their findings as follows:

  • Who speaks for the West?: Muslims around the world do not see the West as monolithic. They criticize or celebrate countries based on their politics, not based on their culture or religion.
  • Dream jobs: When asked to describe their dreams for the future, Muslims don’t mention fighting in a jihad, but rather getting a better job.
  • Radical rejection: Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustified.
  • Religious moderates: Those who condone acts of terrorism are a minority and are no more likely to be religious than the rest of the population.
  • Admiration of the West: What Muslims around the world say they most admire about the West is its technology and its democracy — the same two top responses given by Americans when asked the same question.
  • Critique of the West: What Muslims around the world say they least admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values — the same responses given by Americans when posed the same question.
  • Gender justice: Muslim women want equal rights and religion in their societies.
  • R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Muslims around the world say that the one thing the West can do to improve relations with their societies is to moderate their views toward Muslims and respect Islam.
  • Clerics and constitutions: The majority of those surveyed want religious leaders to have no direct role in crafting a constitution, yet favor religious law as a source of legislation (pg. xii-xiii).

This is just a taste. The hard numbers paint a very different picture than what we typically see in the media. You can see an interview with Mogahed about her research below.

For the Cause of Righteousness: Lecture by Russell Stevenson

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for for the cause of righteousnessThe priesthood restriction in LDS history is one of the most controversial elements of Mormonism. Last year, I declared Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color to be “the book for understanding the history of the priesthood ban.” Yet, Reeve largely focused on Mormon racialization in the 19th century. Russell Stevenson’s For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 covers–as the title indicates–the history of blacks in the Church from its origins to modern times. While figures like Elijah Abel are becoming more familiar to everyday Mormons, few are likely aware of the various situations involving the Church in Africa prior to the lifting of the priesthood ban. Stevenson does an excellent job of fleshing out the global context of the Church’s shaky relationship with blacks. It’s a story that predominantly white American Mormons would do well to learn.

What I didn’t realize before starting the book was that it is split in half between historical narrative and important documents. This makes Stevenson’s book somewhat unique in that one can read the first half to get an informative overview of the black history in the Church, but then use the latter half as a reference tool. This approach was both unexpected and welcome. For me, Stevenson and Reeve are my go-to sources for black history in the Church. And this book is an excellent example of why.

You can see a lecture by Stevenson below.

Re-Reading Job: Interview with Michael Austin

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for rereading job“The phrase “the patience of Job” has become idiomatic among people who have never opened a Bible.”[ref]Re-reading Job, pg. 7.[/ref] So says Michael Austin in his Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem. He explains that

the Book of Job contains two fundamentally incompatible stories about a man named Job. The first Job story, which predates the biblical book by as much as 500 years, was a common Near Eastern folk tale about a guy who loses everything yet never complains to his god. The second Job story is a Hebrew poem that challenges many of the assumptions of the folk tale by having its supposedly complacent hero abandon all pretense of patience and complain, in excruciating detail, about his god (pg. 4).

Austin takes us through the book, laying bare the contradictions, the tensions, and the profound wisdom within its pages. Austin provides the historical and cultural background, but his literary analysis is where he shines the brightest. An excellent resource for understanding one of the most well-known (and least understood) books of the Bible, especially (but not strictly) from an LDS perspective.

You can listen to an interview with Austin here.

The Doors of the Sea: Interview with David Bentley Hart

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for the doors of the seaIn preparation for an upcoming talk in church on “trials and their purpose,” I purchased Eastern Orthodox philosopher David B. Hart’s book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. Written after the massive South Asian tsunami in 2004, Hart addresses the most common objection to God’s existence: the problem of evil. Instead of intellectualizing, justifying, and rationalizing the evil and suffering we see and experience in the world, Hart condemns it. He reminds readers that Christ was sent to conquer death and all those things associated with it. In short, death, evil, and suffering play no role in God’s ultimate purposes because these are the very things Christ’s atonement and resurrection are meant to be victorious over. Hart movingly concludes his book with the following:

[F]ortunately, I think — we Christians are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day — to look, that is, upon the entire littoral rim of Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children — and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the ultimate meaning or purpose residing in all that misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, and the forces — whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance — that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.

…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new” (pgs. 101, 103-104).

You can see a brief interview with Hart below discussing the problem of evil below.

Ex-Megadeth Guitarist: The “Ryan Seacrest of Japan”

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“Tornado of Souls” off Megadeth’s Rust in Peace is often considered one of the best–if not the best–solos by then guitarist Marty Friedman (solo starts at 3:09). Being a metal head in high school (and still a big one today), I listened to a lot of Megadeth. I’ve seen them live twice: once with Dream Theater and again with Slash. The majority of my Megadeth albums feature Friedman,[ref]The exceptions being Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? and The World Needs a Hero. The latter features Al Pitrelli of Trans-Siberian Orchestra on lead guitar.[/ref] who was with the band from 1990-2000. I hadn’t ever thought much about where Friedman went or what he was doing. Apparently, he ended up as the “Ryan Seacrest of Japan.” According to Billboard, Friedman has been there since 2003 and has since “logged more than 600 TV appearances;[ref]Keep in mind: this is a 2014 article.[/ref] landed major endorsements with such companies as Coca-Cola (Fanta), Sumitomo Bank and Suntory; written a monthly J-pop column and two best-selling books; acted in a feature film; become a manga comic and performed with some of J-pop’s biggest stars. It’s an incredibly long way from rocking a million faces with Dave Mustaine and Megadeth in their 1990s heyday.” The article goes on to detail his stint with Japanese singer Aikawa Nanase’s band to hosting a TV show called Mr. Heavy Metal in which Friedman woud “create live metal skits on guitar in collaboration with the guests, in which he would play traditional Japanese songs and mix them with heavy metal riffs. While the show did well, it was a biproduct that inextricably change Friedman’s career.” The show was remade into Rock Fujiyama, in which he would go head-to-head with other rockers in various music games. Case in point, Rock A to Z with Mr. Big’s Paul Gilbert:

“When Friedman arrived in Japan he was already fluent in Japanese,” reports Rolling Stone,

which he’d taught himself as a hobby, but it was the pull of a musical culture he’d long admired from afar – and as a visitor with Megadeth and his earlier band Cacophony – that compelled him to move halfway across the world. “It all comes down to the music,” he emphasizes. “That’s why I’m here. As much as I love Japan, I would not be living 7,000 miles away from my family and friends in America if it weren’t for the great music. If you look at the Top 10 on the charts here, I can pick any day of the week and nine of those songs, I would definitely say, ‘I dig that a lot.’ In America, I would be very lucky if there was one song in that Top 10 that I could enjoy.” Not for the only time throughout our day together, Friedman moderates that statement — he wants to make clear that he’s not looking down his nose at American pop. “It has nothing to do with good or bad or valuable or not valuable,” he says. “It’s just my own personal taste tends to be what’s going on in Japan.”

…Friedman explains that Japanese pop music is typically much more complex than its American counterpart. He compares the structure of Japanese pop songs – which he says might contain as many as 60 chords, compared to six or so in a typical Western pop song[ref]Or four. Axis of Awesome’s parody “Four Chord Song” really puts Western pop music’s simplicity on full display.[/ref] – to that of a jazz format but with extremely strong, pop-sensible melodies. “And this is not considered progressive at all,” he says admiringly, “This can be in the poppiest music you’ve ever heard.” Put another way, “the amount of information within a song if you were to reduce it to data would be a lot more than you’d find in Western mainstream music.” 

Friedman has expressed his adoration for Japanese metal idol group Babymetal and even the more pop-oriented Momoira Clover Z (whose “Infinite Love” he calls the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ of idol music”). But “[w]ould Friedman conside[r] moving back to the States after more than a decade in Japan?” asks Rolling Stone.

Maybe. “This is my home,” he says, “but I would love to be in L.A. My mom’s there, the weather’s good, the music’s good. I can barely get away long enough to tour for four or five weeks, so, living there.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t even know what to do in America.”

And now, enjoy him rocking out with Queen M. from Animetal the Second as they perform a metal version of the opening song to the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica (performance starts at 2:01).

How the Economy Works: Pepperdine Lecture by Roger Farmer

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

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Anyone familiar with my posts knows that economics is a major interest of mine. Hence, my interest in UCLA economist Roger Farmer’s book How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies. Farmer provides a nice, succinct overview of the history of major economic ideas, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes to Robert Lucas. He then provides an interesting merge between the principles of classical and Keynesian economics for economic recovery. Ronald Johnson of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics summarizes Farmer’s position better than I can:

He believes that fiscal policy might help, but it should not involve an increase in government expenditures. However, he also believes that fiscal policy acts more slowly than monetary policy, which he clearly prefers. Since 1951, the Federal Reserve has reacted to recessions by lowering the interest rate it charges to commercial banks. Following the 2008 financial crisis, central banks throughout the world engaged in an unprecedented set of new and unconventional policies known collectively as quantitative easing. This strategy involved the purchase of a kind of asset other than government bonds, namely, mortgage-backed securities. Farmer believes that quantitative easing was the right approach, but that it should have gone further. He proposes qualitative easing, which he defines as a change in the composition of the central bank’s assets. Specifically, he would have the central bank prevent large stock movements, both up and down, from adversely affecting the economy. The bank would assert this control by the use of an index fund, the intent of which would be to manage the value of national stock market wealth by targeting the rate of growth of the fund. The Fed would announce a price path for its index funds, and the central bank would stand by ready to buy and sell the funds each day at the announced price.

Farmer concludes his book with the following:

There is much to be admired in the market system. It is the single most powerful engine of economic growth that human beings have devised. But we have not lived in a free market system for at least a century. The question is not whether to regulate the market—it is how to regulate it. As we learn more about market systems perhaps we will understand better not just why they work well but also how they occasionally fail. It is my hope that we can learn to control the economy that we live in without killing the goose that lays the golden egg (pg. 166-167).

I found Farmer’s ideas interesting, if somewhat unconvincing. The book is useful nonetheless.

You can see a five part lecture by Farmer at Pepperdine University below:

Desiring the Kingdom: Lecture by James K.A. Smith

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

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I’ve written about James K.A. Smith’s work before, especially his You Are What You Love. According to Smith, that was what he thought he was writing when it wrote Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Instead, he ended up needing to write a popular introduction to the Cultural Liturgies project, the first of which was Desiring the Kingdom. To recap, Smith argues against the modern idea that we are simply “brains on a stick” and that Christian life is achieved by downloading the right spiritual data into our heads. We are not so much thinking creatures as we are lovers, i.e. creatures of desire and habit. He points out the gap between what we think and what we actually want. More disturbingly, he notes that we may not actually love what we think. Our wants are often shaped by what he calls “secular liturgies”: repetitive practices and rituals that orient our desires and shape our habits. Take for example (as Smith does) the mall: the mall doesn’t tell you what to think. It doesn’t hand out a tract with a list of propositions that the mall believes. Instead, it shapes your consumerist desires as it assaults your senses with sights, smells, comforts, etc. This is why Christian liturgy is important and necessary. Christianity is not just a rival worldview, but a rival set of desires. And those desires are shaped through repetition.

The book is excellent and one of my favorites so far this year. It is far more in depth; the academic approach to the ideas found in You Are What You Love. As someone who is drawn to religious liturgy, but often bored by my own faith’s offerings of it, this was a much-needed read on a personal level.

You can see a lecture by Smith below.

Top 10 Films of 2016

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The Oscar nominations for 2016’s Best Picture have been announced. I’ve seen all the nominees and while my list is very similar, I have a few changes. Here is my top 10 list for 2016:[ref]Based on what I’ve seen, obviously.[/ref]

*Update: I’ve changed the order since the original posting, moving Your Name to the top. I saw it for the second time this week since it was released in the U.S. over the weekend. Not only was it the best of 2016, but it’s one of the best films of the 2010s.*

 

1. Your Name: One of the most unique films I’ve seen in some time, mixing elements from romantic comedies, coming-of-age dramas, fantasy, and disaster films. The film is gorgeous to look at and the meditations on time, longing, and connection stay with you long after the credits have rolled.

2. Manchester by the Sea: A quiet, humorous yet heart-wrenching look at grief, love, and family. Affleck’s subtle, aching performance is fantastic as he navigates this case study of the fractured human condition and the burdens of mortality we all have to bear.

3. Moonlight: Much like the two films above, this explores the desire for human connection and, with it, the need for identity. The brokenness of the main character’s life–from adolescence to adulthood–triggers our own cravings for belonging and awakens us to the completion and healing we find in even the most unlikely of people.

4. Zootopia: Tackles the subject of prejudice—from the explicit to the more subtle—and the barriers and suspicions it creates: all done with humor, emotion, superb animation, and a message of inclusion and friendship. A thoroughly entertaining and moving slam-dunk from Disney.

5. La La Land: A charming, nostalgic homage to classic musicals with a modern twist and uncommon finale (for Hollywood musicals, at least). Gosling and Stone both give strong performances, exuding wonderful chemistry. Justin Hurwitz’s jazzy score is both foot-tapping and grand, complementing the more fantastical elements of the movie.

6. Arrival: A thinking person’s sci-fi movie exploring the themes of language and communication. Drawing on the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the film probes questions about how language shapes our understanding and experience of the world around us and our interpretations of those different from us. Less about aliens and more about us.

7. The Wailing: This disturbing South Korean film is one of the best horror films I’ve seen in a long time. Most modern horror films rely on cheap scares, rehashed plots, and/or an excessive amount of gore (“torture porn”). This instead offers an atmospheric slow burn wrapped in a foreboding sense of dread and haunting ambiguity, driven by powerful performances, particularly those of Kwak Do-won and Kim Hwan-hee.

8. Lion: An uplifting true tale of courage and resilience that doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of poverty and child homelessness in India. The two strikingly different halves are woven together by the concepts of home and identity, resulting in a tear-inducing, ultimately satisfying whole.

9. Silence: The majority of modern Christian films–Fireproof, God’s Not Dead, Left Behind–are superficial fluff; the equivalent of what Jeffrey Holland referred to as “a kind of theological Twinkie.” But Martin Scorsese’s latest engages subjects like faith vs. doubt, discipleship vs. orthodoxy, belief vs. action, and the problem of evil. In essence, it’s what lived religion looks like.

10. Hidden Figures: No doubt sentimental and perhaps formulaic, this is nonetheless an incredibly well-done, feel-good, family-friendly film. Henson, Spencer, and Monae each deliver stirring performances, which in turn bolster the already incredible story. While it doesn’t break new artistic ground,[ref]New ground isn’t always good ground.[/ref] it’s about as pitch-perfect as a lighthearted crowdpleaser can be.

 

And there you have it. Go watch them.

Honorable Mentions:

Train to Busan

Fences

Hacksaw Ridge

A Monster Calls

Sing Street

Moana

The Witch

Rogue One

Still Need to See:

The Nice Guys

Midnight Special

Loving

The Edge of Seventeen

Jackie

The Handmaiden

Mastering Civility: Lecture by Christine Porath

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

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When it comes to management research, Stanford’s Robert Sutton is someone I often look to. I follow his blog (which has unfortunately been dormant for some time) and take his book recommendations seriously. A year or so ago, I read his The No Asshole Rule. The main idea is that bullies and other toxic people–you know, assholes–negatively affects worker morale and productivity. I’ve written about his follow-up book Good Boss, Bad Boss here at Difficult Run. Needless to say, I like Sutton’s work. So when I read his Amazon review of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace by Georgetown’s Christine Porath, I knew I had to check it out. Sutton writes,

In the name of full disclosure, I read an advance version of this book and wrote an endorsement. That said, because I wrote a related book on “”jerks” a decade ago, I’ve since read many books on workplace jerks and what to do about them, and related matters, over the years– and I’ve endorsed a lot of them too. Mastering Civility is the best of the bunch. It is the most useful, most evidence-based, and the writing is delightful– Porath’s voice is strong and engaging. The blend of stories and studies and advice you can use right away are pitch perfect. If you like books by Adam Grant or Robert Cialdini, you will like this as Porath is one of those rare top-notch researchers who is devoted to making people’s lives better, and making our organizations more effective too. She also presents one of the most compelling arguments against treating others in rude and disrespectful ways that I’ve ever read. It’s a gem.

Porath’s survey of the research finds that rudeness and incivility can decrease creativity, disrupt attention, and increase errors. However, leaders and co-workers that practice civility a viewed more favorably by others, have more engaged employees, boost creativity and performance, help create a reciprocal, civil organizational culture, and improve decision-making. All those who work–which is pretty much everyone–should take note.

You can see a lecture by Porath below.

Rising Strong: Interview with Brené Brown

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for rising strongBrené Brown’s Daring Greatly made my top 5 list in 2015. I wrote,

Brown’s approach to shame and vulnerability has had a significant impact on my worldview, including how I interpret my religion…The book is a fantastic mix of research, anecdotes, and application. The insights within it are themselves therapeutic, providing a language capable of capturing many of the turbulent emotions we experience. The result is better self-understanding and increased self-awareness. A paradigm shifting book.

I also devoured her The Gifts of Imperfection after finishing Daring Greatly. But when Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. was released, I asked my therapist if she had read it and if it was anything new compared to her previous work. My therapist said that it was largely more stories expanding on her previous themes. Being one who is largely interested in hard data, the idea of additional anecdotes with few new insights didn’t appeal me. However, when I came across it on Audible and remembered that Brown was the narrator, I decided to give it a listen. My interest was further peaked by some brief research I was doing on boundaries and relationships.

Rising Strong was well worth the read. While my therapist’s description was accurate, my disinterested reaction was due to my failure to remember how much I enjoyed Brown’s anecdotes and how well she weaved them together with her professional research. It’s actually one of the major strengths of her books. In Rising Strong, she puts this strength toward describing a framework of

  1. Accepting failure and becoming curious about the emotions that come with it (the Reckoning).
  2. Honestly engaging the stories we tell about ourselves[ref]What she refers to as the “shitty first drafts” (pg. 85).[/ref] (the Rumble).
  3. Turning the process of reckoning and rumbling into a practice that leads to transformation (the Revolution).

One of my favorite insights, however, was about boundaries. According to Brown,

[T]he most compassionate people I interviewed also have the most well-defined and well-respected boundaries…They assume that other people are doing the best they can, but they also ask for what they need and they don’t put up with a lot of crap…Boundaries are hard when you want to be liked and when you are a pleaser hell-bent on being easy, fun, and flexible. Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment (pgs. 114-115).

Boundaries are an important part of generosity and integrity. “Generosity,” she says, “is not a free pass for people to take advantage of us, treat us unfairly, or be purposefully disrespectful and mean…[A] generous assumption without boundaries is another recipe for resentment, misunderstanding, and judgment. We could all stand to be more generous, but we also need to maintain our integrity and our boundaries” (pgs. 122-123).

These kinds of insights can help us all be our better selves. You can see a brief interview with Brown below.