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Our nonstop travel has created a crisis in truth. With our modern transportation systems, we can travel almost anywhere, and with our modern information systems almost anything can travel to us. Truth is in constant transit. And it is unnerving. The fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative, I think, ...
When Jacques Derrida would come to Philadelphia, I would say to him, “Let me take you on a tour. Let me show you the Liberty Bell or Valley Forge.” But he didn’t want to go. His way to explore a city was to walk until he got lost and then try to find his way back. In the process, he would discover all kinds of things. ...
Why do you focus so much on Derrida and Augustine?
Derrida’s heart is very close to Augustine’s “restless heart” at the beginning of the Confessions. That restlessness is the soul of the search for truth. It is religious. The religion-secular divide does not hold up when you search for truth. We can see this same restless searching in many places, in an artist or in a ...
Human beings stand on the border between the knowable and the unknowable. The universe was a relatively knowable place in the 19th century; it was just a question of getting enough research done to know it all. But in the 20th century, that concept of the closed containable universe shattered. Now in the 21st century, ...
What do you think religious people most need to know about truth from this point of view?
I think that postmodern theory is a way out of the modernist concept of truth, which kept everything locked up in boxes: religious and secular, public and private, subject and objective, fact and value. It opens up the space of truth and allows it to assume a more plastic form, and a richer mien, which is comfortable w...
I make a distinction between faith and belief. Belief is a proposition, a creed formed by a council, leaders agreeing on a belief system. I don’t think creeds are unimportant, but I think they rigidify. To be true to faith, you have to keep those things flexible and recognize their contingency. What matters is the form...
Are you saying that faith is somehow less specific than belief?
Faith is a form of life and so it also has a specific form. I wouldn’t say that faith is more general; I would say it is deeper. It gets expressed in a specific form like liturgy. It is an exercise of the whole person: affective, bodily, performative. It is making the truth.
If we didn’t have the specific historical religious traditions, we would be much the poorer for it. Without Christianity, we wouldn’t have the memory of Jesus. We wouldn’t have the books of the New Testament. You need these concrete, historical traditions that are the bearers of ancient stories and are cut to fit to va...
This is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity: you can’t boil everything down to one common thing. There are many ways of doing the truth. There can’t be one true religion any more than there can be one true language. The truth of religion is not the truth of a certain body of assertions. It is not about a core set of ...
In your book you say, “The future is always better.” What do you mean?
If you had to single out one of the theological virtues that would apply to postmodernism, it would be hope. Postmodernism has important things to say about faith, like the distinction between faith and belief. And love is important because postmodernism turns on love for the other. But I think that its keynote virtue...
The world is transforming itself at such an unprecedented rate that we are terribly anxious about what is ahead. Today we have an acute sense of radical change. The virtue you need in that time is hope. Fear of the future needs to be answered with hope.
The future is unnerving. Things have changed more in the last 100 years than they had in the last 2,000, and the rate of acceleration is increasing. Imagine 1,000 years from now! People will look back on this time as just the beginning of a radical transformation. It is transforming what we mean by human life itself. I...
Who are your theological or religious heroes?
For me, the most important theologian is Paul Tillich. Operating inside the confines of theology, he nails it for me when he says God is not a being. To the idea that God is the highest being, the proper theological response is atheism. Tillich is posttheistic: religion is found wherever there are people who probe the ...
As a Roman Catholic, I admire Hans Küng, who challenges the self-appointed and self-authorizing power grab of the Roman Catholic Church. Bonhoeffer is important because of the idea of religionless Christianity.
In the classical tradition, my heroes are the mystics: those men and women who give the established church trouble and are constantly harassed and martyred. Marguerite Porete is someone I have been reading more of lately, and I am deeply impressed by her. The very first book I ever wrote was on Meister Eckhart and Heid...
And there are many activists that are heroes of mine: the Berrigan brothers, Dorothy Day, and Desmond Tutu. People who translate this stuff into political action.
Ever since Mother Teresa published the book on her doubts, she has become a hero of mine. Before that I admired her as a heroic woman who translated her faith into action. But in these letters to her confessor, she doubts everything except her work. Her work is the kingdom of God.
I don’t think she abandoned her faith. The content of her religious beliefs began to waver while her confidence in her work never wavered. The name of God is not the name of a being; it is the name of the call.
How do you yourself put this into practice?
I am an inveterate intellectual, so my practice will always be writing, thinking, and communicating. But my own personal community is Catholic. I grew up in a Catholic world, and I am intellectually and culturally formed by the Catholic intellectual tradition. I taught in a Catholic university for almost my entire care...
Thank you for the interview with Caputo. I am a philosopher as well as a pastor, and I found myself agreeing with just about everything he said. I am delighted that he lauds Paul Tillich as his favorite theologian, and that he understands God as call rather than entity. We need more intellectuals like Caputo to save us...
John Caputo puts little stock in creeds mapped out long ago by seasoned travelers—one person’s (or religion’s) illusions are as good as the next. He prefers the call of a deeper, more flexible way of faith.
Faith, for all its pliability and appeal, is vulnerable and naive: without doctrine compelling good works it is dead, and without the compass of belief it is aimless and apt to end in sentimental charade.
PRINCEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — James Howell Jr. lost big two years ago when Hurricane Matthew swelled the Tar River, less than a half-mile from his home. Finally persuaded it was too dangerous to stay, he returned two days later to discover that 2 feet of standing water had turned his insulation moldy, forcing a rebuild of h...
The land about 75 miles (121 kilometers) east of Raleigh has been repeatedly inundated by the Tar River — at least eight times before Matthew. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd’s rains overwhelmed a dike and submerged the town in water 23 feet (7 meters) deep in spots.
In Beaufort County, more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) east of Raleigh, emergency management officials planned to use school buses Wednesday to move residents in flood-prone areas to higher ground in Washington, the county seat, where a high school will shelter up to 500 people. The county is split by the broad Pamli...
This morning, at about 9:30, I hopped on the 4, headed to my bazillionth obstetrician appointment. (Due date was Sunday and BB2B, who is apparently taking after Big Sister, does not seem eager to make an appearance.) It started out as an uneventful ride–a crowded and quiet (wrapped) trolley inching its way west on Jeff...
Even though I had brought my bus read, I chose to spend the ride staring out the window and daydreaming, so I immediately noticed an odd woman standing at the stop, pulling her t-shirt up over her nose and flailing her arms (as if preparing for a race) while everyone else was boarding. Just as the driver was about to t...
She grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and yanked, slapping and hitting her anywhere she could reach, all the while yelling and ranting at the top of her lungs. Another woman tried to stop the assault and was hit several times for her trouble. To our shero’s credit, she didn’t let up. The attacker continued to lunge...
SPD arrived within a minute. The woman ran off the bus as soon as she saw the cops, though whether it was to get away from or confront them, I am not sure. Whatever the case, they apprehended her without much effort, though not before she managed to tear off her t-shirt and toss it at them. She was arrested, face down ...
I’m still rattled, for so many reasons it’s hard to isolate why.
I’ve been riding Metro buses for 30(+) years, and I’ve witnessed my share of drama, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt afraid on a ride. I should say, of course, that this attack wasn’t specific to the bus; it could just have easily happened to someone walking by this woman on the street. (And Lord knows, crazy ...
This wasn’t a fight between people with a specific beef, which can be disturbing but rarely feels threatening; it was a random attack on a woman who was minding her own business on her way to work. (It also happened to be a woman I’ve been seeing on buses for years–and who I consider to be part of my “bus family“–which...
I take normal precautions to stay safe (don’t travel alone at night except to places with substantial foot traffic, don’t wait at isolated stops, stay aware of my surroundings), but I’ve always felt that broad daylight on a crowded bus (or street) is about as safe as it can get. All of a sudden, even though I know inte...
And that’s another thing: Only one person on that entire crowded bus lifted a finger to help the woman who was being attacked. Yes, we were all in shock (and many of us–especially big, lumbering, off-balance me–wouldn’t have been of much help), but mostly, I think, we were just worried about our own safety. I wanted th...
And that, after all of yesterday‘s celebrating and marching and talking and thinking and teaching my kid about peace and justice and concern for one’s fellow human, is more than a little disappointing.
Over the last week we’ve had the Michelle Wolf comedy crisis, the Rudy Giuliani interview debacle, and the Kanye West apocalypse, so it’s understandable if you’ve already forgotten the hubbub Tony Robbins caused a little over a month ago. So here’s a recap.
A woman in the audience at one of Robbins’ events stood up and said she wanted to talk about how the #MeToo movement was addressing challenges to women’s safety. The response of the 6-foot-7, 265-pounds-of-solid-muscle life coach was to bound onto the floor of the arena, call the woman out for having a “victimhood” men...
Members of the press and the Twittersphere predictably ranted and argued about the episode. But then a rare thing happened. Maybe because he realized that he was, on this occasion, out of step with the tenor of the times, the man whose followers tend to place in the same category as the Buddha, Martin Luther King, and ...
So the press moved on. As for Robbins, he was free to return to charging followers $400 to burn the skin off the soles of their feet.
In the midst of this mini-scandal, what few people talked about was that confronting audience members in this way was nothing new for Robbins. A brief gander on YouTube will uncover clips of him speaking the “truth” to his fans about all their negative qualities—the ones that keep them single, poor, and ordinary.
For anyone expecting Robbins to give up this practice any time soon, they have another thing coming. The one-time Guthy-Renker pitchman knows that publicly calling out those who look up to you is a tactic far too powerful to let go.
Robbins’ approach is nothing new. The most successful cult leaders, revivalists, revolutionaries, and business gurus in history have been using it for ages.
It was a tactic that early 20th-century guru G.I. Gurdjieff used to propel himself from obscurity to international acclaim. At his spiritual center, which would come to attract some of the wealthiest and most prominent people of his time, he would regularly point at attendees and tell them that their ideas and talents ...
Much later in the century, Tom Peters—who many consider to be the original management guru—would spend a good portion of his high-paying speaking engagements lambasting the middle managers in his audience who slavishly hung on his every word. And in his popular online video show #AskGaryVee, entrepreneur-celebrity Gary...
If you were to go around in your daily life telling people how much they were to blame for their own misfortune, you’d regularly get punched in the teeth. Professional gurus know this as well as anybody. Yet they do it anyway.
What the most successful gurus understand better than the rest of us is that life is inherently uncertain and that that is completely terrifying. To cope with this reality, we humans construct myths, belief systems, and societal self-soothing mechanisms to make ourselves feel secure.
Publicly calling on us to “look in the mirror” taps into this powerful dynamic. It tells us—along with everyone watching—that life’s trials aren’t simply the result of chance. Ironically, it give us hope that all it takes to make our dreams come true is to change the way we are. As such, it isn't long before our sense ...
Does this mean that in you need to be a total jerk to become the supreme guru in your field? Not necessarily. That said, you should point out where people are going wrong whenever possible. And when you do so, make sure to position yourself as the only one who knows what they should do instead.
If you'd like a list of books about how to master the art of hype, go here.
In online chat groups, thousands of small investors who had put their savings into dubious digital products plotted a big protest in Beijing this week.
Under pressure from local officials, one woman’s family begged her not to go. After a visit from the local police, a man’s boss threatened to break his contract if he participated. At airports, bus and train stations across China, scores of people making their way to Beijing were confronted by police officers who urged...
Those who did make it to the headquarters of the Chinese banking regulator in Beijing on Monday faced hundreds of police officers sent to quash it. Some were dragged off, while others were shoved into buses leaving the city.
For Chinese officials, the financial is quickly becoming political.
In recent years, millions of ordinary investors across China have plowed their savings into online financial products that promised big profits with little risk. But the sudden collapse of hundreds of these peer-to-peer lenders in recent months has prompted a panic, leaving many investors with little information and li...
Frustrated investors are appealing to local and national authorities. As many see it, the government encouraged the growth of these online lenders, which were intended to connect mom-and-pop investors with borrowers. The state, these investors say, should make them whole.
While the Communist Party always tries to tamp down protests to maintain social stability, the current discontent among investors belies a bigger problem for the Chinese authorities. A vast, unruly shadow banking system, where some companies have lured people with get-rich-quick schemes, has created hidden debt bombs t...
“I don’t believe in the government,” said Liu Yu, a 35-year-old shopkeeper who traveled 13 hours to Beijing on Monday to protest. He said he lost $9,000 on a lending platform called Catch the Money Cat, which notified investors on July 20 that it was having problems paying back investors and that the police in the city...
When these digital products emerged in China a decade ago, they were pitched as an outlet for small-time borrowers, who were mostly ignored by the country’s big state-run banks. For investors ponying up the money to lend, the gains were tantalizing, with some promoting returns as high as 40 or 50 percent.
Lightly regulated, they attracted ordinary people — from students to grandparents — in droves through an advertising blitz on mobile apps, in movie theaters and even in residential elevators. Many products appeared to have the government’s imprimatur, since they used state-owned banks to help facilitate payments and cr...
Tang Zehui, 42, a factory worker who rode a 30-hour train to Beijing this week from southwestern Sichuan Province, said she had turned to these investments, as many others in China had, because the interest rate on regular savings accounts was too low.
“We don’t have any good ways to manage our finances,” said Ms. Tang, who said she lost about $22,000 to Leadercf.com, which is based in the southern city of Guangzhou. Ms. Tang said she trusted it because the state’s support seemed to be implicit.
The platforms were supposed to be matchmakers, providing a place for savers to meet borrowers who needed short-term loans. But with little regulation, many of these companies pooled together investors’ money and then tried to find borrowers, creating a potential mismatch when it came time to pay out.
In 2016, they were told to register with local financial regulators and comply with new rules or face being shut down. But the deadline was postponed to an unspecified date.
There have been blowups in the past. The founder of a $9 billion lending platform called Ezubao was sentenced last year to life in prison for bilking investors. In January, more than $5 billion of investor money disappeared from a popular investment portal called Qianbao, which had been praised by the official state ne...
A deeper worry started to set in this summer, after the government warned about the risk of losses.
Almost immediately, the concerns prompted a run on the industry, as investors demanded their money back. A wave of defaults followed, with each collapse setting off the next, like a set of dominoes.
Some executives shut down their businesses and fled with client money, while others suspended operations following a flood of demands from investors for repayment. Many are now under investigation.
“I started to panic,” said Chen Shuaipeng, 30, a salesman who flew to Shenzhen for the protest from the eastern city of Tianjin. He said he had $93,000 of savings in a Money Pig account before it was frozen.
In Hangzhou, a group of investors who showed up to talk to officials was large enough to fill two sports stadiums, according to state news media reports. Others have gathered to protest in Nanjing and Shanghai, according to news reports and widely circulated videos online.
“The entire industry is facing panic, and the speed of collapse is still accelerating,” said Xue Hongyan, director of Suning Financial Research Institute, which studies the industry.
Officials trying to control the situation are faced with a fast-moving crisis. In July alone, 168 lending platforms halted their operations, according to Wangdaizhijia.
In recent weeks, large numbers of disgruntled investors have started to share their experiences online, updating one another about investigations. Soon, investors were talking about banding together for a big protest in Beijing on Monday.
China’s censors quickly took note, and soon one chat room after another was closed down. Investors switched between different chat apps to avoid censorship, using forums like QQ, WeChat, YeeCall, Qunduoduo and Telegram.
Mr. Gao, who asked not to use his full name for fear that he might lose his job at a machine manufacturing company, first learned online about plans for the protest in Beijing. He had lost nearly $126,000 when the lending portal Tangxiaoseng collapsed.
He went to Beijing a few days before the planned protests only to discover that a dozen government officials had visited his company and urged his boss to ask him to return. When he got home on Monday, his company asked him to sign a letter promising not to engage in protests; otherwise he would be fired.
“I think I won’t be able to keep my job,” he said.
NORTHAMPTON, Pa. (AP) - A former volunteer firefighter is charged along with a woman in a series of barn fires in eastern Pennsylvania.
State police said 20-year-old Justin Emmons was arrested during a Friday evening traffic stop in Bucks County and returned to Northampton County to face charges including causing or risking a catastrophe, conspiracy and arson. Twenty-four-year-old Samantha Keeney was taken into custody earlier on similar charges.
The defendants are accused of setting fires that destroyed several barns, including two used by the firefighter’s former employer. Investigators said the former Northampton firefighter lost his job with a local farmer a week before the fires began in mid-March.
Court documents don’t list attorneys for either defendant; a listed number for Emmons couldn’t be found Saturday and a number listed for Keeney wasn’t in service.
Short version: The Stoning of Soraya M. is an important film that needs to be watched - especially considering the current world political climate.
Screen Rant reviews The Stoning of Soraya M.
The Stoning of Soraya M. is based on a true story and a book by Iranian-French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam. It is about the stoning death (murder, more accurately) of a 35 year old woman in a small village in Iran during the rule of Khomeini in 1986.
James Caviezel plays Freidoune, an Iranian expatriate visiting Iran on assignment when he runs into Zahra (played with usual intensity by Shohreh Aghdashloo), Soraya's aunt, who convinces him to visit her to listen to her story. He is reluctant at first (seemingly sharing some native attitudes about womens' lack of wor...
Soraya (Shohreh Aghdashloo) has two boys and two younger girls and is financially trapped in a marriage to her prison guard husband Ali (Navid Negahban). Ali wants a divorce so he can marry a 14 year old girl, but does not want to commit to the financial support of Soraya and their daughters. Soraya would not be able t...
Ali beats Soraya, who has been rejecting him due to his treatment of her and his dalliances with prostitutes, but being a "man" is adamant that he will not let her have her way in an equitable divorce agreement. The film takes place just a few years after the Shah was overthrown, and there are people who were loyal to ...
There is also the mayor, Ebrahim (David Diaan) - he was a Shah supporter but is doing the best he can to get by in the current regime. He seems essentially fair - but weak.
One thing leads to another and a conspiracy is formed to accuse and convict Soraya of adultery - a crime punishable by public stoning to death.
Just based on the title, you know the ending is inevitable - and the further I got into the film the more my heart was in my throat anticipating that ending. Soraya is portrayed as an honorable woman, just trying to do what she needs to in order to support her children. But two false witnesses are assembled (all that i...
Zahra remembers life before head to toe burkas and stands up to the men in power in town (and Soraya's husband). There are no marks against her since her husband died and I guess widows are at least treated with a bit of respect - but she is ineffective in convincing anyone of anything (she is still just a woman after ...
Eventually the title event of the film arrives - the closer we get to it, the slower the film seems to move... making it seem right around the corner but taking its time arriving. It is a brutal scene and not over quickly. Yes, it's very hard to watch (and some people, my wife included, may not be able to watch the ent...
Of course it's not indicative of all men in Middle Eastern countries, but it does show a prevalant attitude that exists in the minds of much of the leadership in the area - and still goes on today despite denials from those same governments.
It's not an easy film to watch, but you really should see The Stoning of Soraya M.
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – Mrs. Tennessee Petite America 2014, Crystal Nyhus, hosted a collection drive for Sanctuary, Inc. on Aug. 9 at Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery in Clarksville. Sanctuary, Inc. is a nonprofit agency committed to the provision of preventative and restorative services to victims of sexual assault and domestic ...

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