Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.

The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.

Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.

Schneider tips his hand a bit with the title God in Proof. This isn’t, thank God, another book about the proofs for God’s existence, but rather a search, at once historical and personal, for the God that lives in proofs. The reversal — from proof for God to God in proof — is both linguistically nifty and philosophically important. It isn’t that the proofs for God lead us to God, but rather that God may be found — or may be shrouded — in the language of proofs. People see God in different settings. Some see God in song, others in nature, and others still in humanity as a whole. Schneider, in searching for his God, finds it revealed in the souls who historically sought out proofs for what they believed in.

The review was also picked up two other wonderful blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish and 3 Quarks Daily. The quasi-New Atheist Jerry Coyne even says he’ll read the book. Based on his earlier assessment of my writings on proofs, I don’t expect he’ll like it, but you never know.

Resonanda was founded in December 2004 by Stephen Higa, who is currently a professor of medieval history at Bennington College. Since its inception, Resonanda’s members have taken an experimental approach to the performance of medieval song. In order to resurrect this antique repertoire, they work closely with medieval treatises and the nuanced period notation, relying heavily on improvisation, oral learning, and a wide variety of reconstructed vocal techniques. Resonanda savors lilting melodies, startling harmonies, and striking voices blending with fervent clarity and naked devotion.

Staff from Unnamable Books, an independent bookstore located nearby in Prospect Heights, will be present with copies of God in Proof for sale.

An after-party will be held following the performance with excellent beer, wine, and small dishes at Atlantic Co., 622 Washington Avenue.

RSVP on Facebook here.

For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As I wrote my new book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, I was drawing every step of the way — and my publisher, University of California Press, let me stick some of my pictures in the text.

In doing, I soon discovered, I was retracing the history of proof itself. Long before the mathematical symbols and notation we generally use today, ancient proofs were drawn in diagrams and images.

Now that the book is finished, I want to share the fun I’ve been having by making these drawings with you. The press has agreed to pony up some free books for a drawing contest, and here’s how to win one: Draw a proof of something, divine or otherwise, and tweet a scan or photo of it to #GodInProof, along with any explanation you’d like to add. (You can also email them to [email protected].) Selected proofs will appear here, where they’ll be entered for a chance to win a free book. Entries with the highest number of social media shares win. Multiple submissions are allowed, but only one book is allowed per winning author.

Download the PDF version of the contest postcard here.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

One theme that runs through Becoming God, though, is the one suggested in the title—that for its Greek practitioners, philosophy was a way of reaching (and not simply, as I say above, “thinking about”) the divine. Here’s a whiff of the interview:

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us—as some might chastise—that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by “secularity,” as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we’re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: “Do not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.” His warning came in the midst of the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance—which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger—makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as has revolutionary zeal, so I’m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.

The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius?De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is?religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry?of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

Here’s philosopher Mark Johnston to the rescue, with Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, a book published last year by Princeton University Press. It has met a warm, unusually wide reception; in The New Yorker James Wood called it “the non-fiction book I most enjoyed this year,” and it’s slated to wrangle an award at the American Academy of Religion meeting this November. In the elegant, one-page preface, Johnston spells out what we have to hope for, which tantalizingly coincides with what so many of us need:

One kind of ideal reader would be an intelligent young person who is religious, but feels that his or her genuine religious impulses are being strangled by what he or she is being asked to believe, on less than convincing authority, about the nature of reality.

What follows, true to his promise, speaks to the best features of the late-adolescent imagination, the mind of that crucial time when many people end up forming their lifelong religious commitments, hardly ever with the care and prudence such commitments might seem to call for. Somewhere between an academic monograph and a manifesto, Saving God alternates from epic, not-quite-substantiated pronouncements to obsessively-precise tangents. Either it’ll change your life or (to use Johnston’s words, not mine) waste your time.

The gist is this: most of what goes by the name of religion is really idolatry—especially the appeal to supernaturalism. The only kind of God that satisfies the ancient claim of being the “Highest One” is a God of this world, offering no selfish fantasy of paradise in the next. This God is perfectly in tune with the immanent, Carl Sagan-ite account of science, yet one can also find information about Him in scriptures and religious traditions, selectively read. It’s a God that calls to mind, for instance, Spinoza’s “God or Nature”; J. N. Findlay’s 1948 paper claiming that the object of the ontological argument for God’s existence must be something higher than the God of religion; and sociologist Philip Rieff’s critique of the gods we invent to serve our own desires—religious, clinical, and otherwise. The second half of Saving God features a series of technical moves that, as best I can gather, is an attempt to squeeze some kind of Heideggerian phenomenology into the back door of analytic philosophy, which in turn makes room for introducing a close-to Hegelian view of God as Being’s self-disclosure to beings in history—yada, yada, yada.

All this is to say (and here I am imitating Johnston’s alternating rhetoric referred to above) that God is here and now, not beyond. Inscribed in all the fluff and error of religion—even in the story of the Christian Passion—there are basic truths about the universe and the Mind that pervades it which philosophy, fortunately, has the means to extract.

I noted recently the use of this strategy of “truth-ing mythology” by Aristotle in the Metaphyiscs, the use of popular religious tradition as a bearer of hidden truth. Aristotle takes the belief that the planets and stars represent the eternal gods of myth to be the relic of a truer, ancient knowledge that the stars are actually eternal godlike orbs—not capricious Zeus and Hera, but geometric and impersonal. It’s a plausible conclusion for the fourth century BCE, though one rendered utterly false by modern astronomy; the stars are old, we now know, but they’re not eternal. Close, Aristotle, but no cigar.

It raises a troubling question for any such attempt: how can we be sure where mythology ends and true philosophy begins?

I’d like to carry this point forward with Johnston’s book further than I did before (distracted as I was by a reverie on the mythology of war). This same move of Aristotle’s is deeply-seated in the history and habits of how liberal-minded scholars study and think about religion today; Saving God is only the latest example. I previously mentioned the Eranos set: Eliade, Jung, and Campbell. But then there’s also Thomas Jefferson clipping away at his Bible, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Paul Tillich’s God as Ultimate Concern. Each took religious tradition as a thing which now needs to be translated and, most of all, extracted from. Each, in retrospect, can look rather silly and shortsighted—if not quite with the flat wrongness of Aristotle’s astronomy, at least as a mythology in its own right. If Jesus were just Jefferson’s moral teacher, everything else he said would’ve made him a lunatic. Feuerbach’s ideas took hold nowhere more than in the doctrines of Marxism. And Tillich’s eloquence aggravated and empowered the populist anti-modernists he meant to supplant.

One can see the appeal of going with Aristotle, with Johnston, with a reinterpretation by philosophy. I’ve done so myself sometimes. It offers both freedom of mind and the resources of tradition. It holds out the possibility of a necessary about-face, a brilliant and startling move that can change everything, saving God enough that God might be able to save us. But it’s not as easy as it looks. A few generations can pass and you’ll find yourself in error like Aristotle, or spouting mythology in your own right like Jung. Plus, philosophy is nearly always the occupation of but a few, who run the risk of losing track of what religion really is and means for most people in the rest of society.

If one is to take these risks, though, it’s hard to find an attempt that better satisfies the pressing need to reconcile science, human responsibility, and our debt to religious heritage than the brand of transcendence Johnston outlines here: “this world properly received.”

My passage concludes a particularly confounding chapter in the book—chapter 8—where he goes back and forth between whether there is one mover or many, a process which requires some weird resorting to prime numbers and the momentary conclusion that there are either 47 or 55 movers, only then to determine that there can be only one. Irrespective of that, however, he is quite satisfied to accept that the stars which these movers move are themselves eternal, and indeed are actually eternal gods. It’s obvious to his astronomy and his reason. And that’s where we begin:

We should also consider tradition. From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs. (Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred; Penguin, 1998.)

Why does this strike me so eerily? However much scholars today would like to forget it, the modern study of religion was founded on just this impulse. It was the hope of figures like Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell to take the myths and ritual of the “primitive” imagination and, by comparing and contrasting, synthesize for ourselves the truth buried under all the fluff, the essential archetypes that are real beneath, as Aristotle puts it, the “extrapolations” and “accretions.” There’s a noble ambition in such historical phenomenology, even though, as in the case of Aristotle’s eternal stars, it can be as mistaken as the mythologies themselves: to rescue the absurdities of one’s ancestors from themselves and find in them the truth that couldn’t be adequately appreciated earlier. Well, says Aristotle, now we can. This is what gods actually are and always have been: stars. Those wild mythologies are messengers, carrier pigeons whose messages now we can finally open. We need not declare war against our traditions, though they be false, for we can distill the truths hidden in them.

Speaking of war—as Alexander the Great traipsed across the Mediterranean and the steppes and the deserts building his great empire, he kept two things under his pillow: a dagger, and a copy of the Iliad that his teacher Aristotle had given him. Now Alexander wasn’t such a great student; born conquerors like him know early on that they won’t have much need for syllogisms. Gathering as much, the teacher didn’t bother giving his student any of his subtle philosophy, like the Ethics or the Organon, for the road. He gave him a good story. A mythology, about battle and glory and love and gods, and Alexander loved it enough to take it along.

Alexander conquered everything he saw, but of course after his death at age 32, the empire he built crumbled in the rivalries of his generals. It was fleeting, though its legacy was not. Those conquests spread Greek culture around the known world. As Alexander was clinging to his knife and his war stories, he was making way for scholars from Egypt to Persia to study his teacher’s delicate arguments, though they hadn’t stuck with Alexander himself. He, whether he knew it or not, with mythology under his pillow, was the carrier pigeon.