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.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism movement.?My report appears today at Religion Dispatches. Instead of focusing on the arguments per se—for them, see a play-by-play at Common Sense Atheism—I spent my time hanging out with the debaters and the student organizers before and after the event. Here’s a bit of it:

Controversy was the intent all along. “The main reason we did it was for the discussion in the dorms,” says Malcolm Phelan, a junior, who helped put the debate together and gave the opening speech. He’s tall, a bit lanky, steady with his eye-contact, and erring on the side of clean-cut. Around here, he’s someone who can get things done and get money out of the administration. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an “upper-class Catholic Disneyland” and need to be shaken up. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an instigator, but—” he says, trailing off. His word, not mine.

Phelan’s co-conspirator behind the scenes was Arnav Dutt. Someone introduced him to me as The Thinker. While he talks, he looks down and pauses mid-sentence if it isn’t coming out exactly right, his eyes covered behind glasses and a Justin Beiber-type mop-top. He’s the child of a Catholic and a Hindu, both non-practicing. Like Phelan, Dutt considers himself an atheist, though his education has been mostly in Catholic environments. “This issue”—that of the debate—“has thrust itself on me my whole life.” He takes it seriously and wonders whether some of the critics are right; maybe a big debate is the wrong approach. When I ask what he thinks it will do for people, he turns pensive again. “There’s a big difference between what I think they’re getting and what I hope they’re getting,” he says.

While I was at Notre Dame, I had the pleasure of a long afternoon’s conversation with John O’Callaghan, a philosophy professor there who specializes in Thomist thought, and who runs the Jacques Maritain Center. Before the debate even happened—I guess the same afternoon we met—he put together a very different kind of essay from mine, a reminder that the debate’s apparent choice between religion and science isn’t one we have to make.

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.

The upshot of all this should be obvious enough: if you’re looking for the subtle truth, maybe a big staged debate like this isn’t the place to find it.

I remember an instance of good, anyway, with or without God, when Arnav Dutt and I were leaving the debate. A woman dropped her pocketbook as she started walking out into the rain. A handful of others around noticed, and called out—“Miss! Miss!”—and handed it to her. “That’s nice to see, after this,” I heard Dutt mutter. I think I also heard some irony.

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.

This week I had the chance to take part in my first “diavlog” at Bloggingheads.tv. I was fortunate to have as my counterpart Richard Amesbury, a scholar who has done some fascinating work about religion in human rights and the politics of New Atheism. We had a good conversation about those things, though I find myself wishing I could say most of it over again, a bit differently. It’s the reason, I guess, I write rather than TV-anchor or act. With writing, there is revision. There is silence and solitude. There is pausing and thinking. There is sharing with trusted friends, then revising again, in solitude, and sharing again.

That said, Bloggingheads does a great service by replacing the talking head with the talking person, such as we are.

My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our work here more under the auspices of art than plain reporting—to the point that we ultimately thought more about the press corps gazing upon the performances than the content of the acts themselves, whose Spanish we couldn’t fully understand anyway.

This was the scene: reporters gathered in a cordoned-off half-block of street in front of Arias’s house, with all their thick wires, cameras large and small, questions, computers, recorders, hook-ups, makeup, grumbles, and banter. There was a stage set up at the front of our pen, by the entrance to the house, surrounded by potted plants and guarded by tourist police in white shirts armed only with the friendliest-looking of clubs. Most press stayed all day, mainly waiting from morning through evening. We arrived in mid-afternoon. Not long after, at the back of the press area, on the opposite site of the press section from the prepared stage, a cluster of protesters arrived, bearing flags and banners in revolutionary red, shouting familiar slogans. There was a charge to the rear, pulling correspondents from their posts at the presidents’ stage. I joined.

Dozens of bored reporters finally had something to do, fixing their lenses and microphones and adrenaline on the passionate ones making so much noise through their loudspeakers. Against militarism. Against the powers that be and their inexhaustible corruption. One dressed as Che. An effigy burned. I let my voice recorder take in a speech from one of the ringleaders, far too fast for me to understand. I took too many pictures that have already been taken before in countless places, at countless protests. My hope was to find somewhere its unique vitality, doubtlessly somewhere, awaiting its capture by a sympathetic observer who could make this event really exist by recording it, by broadcasting it, by turning it from what it was to what it represents.

On the other side, the large, immovable cameras still awaited the presidents. They fixed on an empty stage, or on the door from which these men would emerge.

Will this sacred dissent be heard over the decorous speeches, I wondered? They were loud. We, among our cameras and our wires that ran under us like roots in a forest, were huddled between two competing performances, each competing for its presence in the final ontology of that moment. According to research I’ve seen in cognitive science, while people may be able to talk abstractly about the possibility of simultaneous things, “in fact” (says the science) no—in the intuitive processes of human minds, only one event can happen at any given time and be an event, fully. As gatekeepers of event-ness in media culture, the cameras adjudicated a contest of two events, one on either side of the street.

Each had its violence, each had its peace. On one side, a gracious act of conflict resolution among the heads of inevitably murderous states (even, one way or another, military-less Costa Rica). On the other, a riotous cry for an end to injustice and bloodshed.

But I should have expected what happened. Well in time for the actual arrival of the men, as I listened to (and recorded) a long speech about the tragedy of politics from a Honduran photographer, the protests calmly faded away. I didn’t see if it was police or simply being finished that did them in, though I suspect some eerie combination of the two. The air was clear and quiet for, not too long after, the arrival of the powerful.

We stayed only for the appearance by Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the Honduran coup, flanked by Arias. Micheletti spoke—something about elections and the rule of law—but I watched Arias intently. He has a wonderful expression on his face, apparently always. So sad, so stern, so mournful. Whatever he is, for whatever it could possibly be worth, he does look like he carries all the suffering of the world in his expression, as one perpetually in the presence of futility, either right there before him or, at least, during a fleeting moment of progress, in the corner of his eye.

But I don’t know if that’s worth anything at all. I didn’t even get a good picture of him. And I still have to read all the papers to figure out what’s (really, factually, politically) going on, and who I think is on the brave side of right and peace and justice, which is the only peace. On the evening Costa Rican newscast, it goes without saying, only one of the two performances appeared. Only one event, apparently, really happened.

(Photos and video are mine, not Lucas’s, by the way.)

Jean-Luc Marion, at the outset of God without Being:

One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.

During the year of my becoming a Catholic, that frought and crazy and inevitable year, I bought a New Oxford Annotated Bible from my college bookstore. Its over two thousand pages flop between paper covers, now themselves covered with scotch tape and images, cards, and memories that have found a way there over time. Other bibles have come my way since, in translations other than Oxford’s sanitized New Revised Standard Version, and in other shapes and sizes.

But this one, alone, I write in. After six years now, sitting by my bed with a ballpoint pen inside, underlines and reactions and questions mark my paths through the holy thing. From when I wrote more poems, poems found the empty pages. Marginal questions written one year get answered by marginal answers written another. The scripture is edging closer to something else, an indistinct space where the word of God meets commentary upon commentary, and nothing emerges undisturbed.

To quote another Frenchman using the same word, the title of Roland Barthes’s book comes to mind: The Pleasure of the Text.

Making these scattered marks has been many things: incomprehension, exultation, curiosity, discovery, longing—and wishful thinking. But what settles to the top is pleasure, as one might remember a secret friendship, even if it were often painful, that took place mainly in the eerie moments that come before falling asleep. Together, we have created doctrine, we have thought theology.

Who, though, has license to mark up the words of God? Certain heresies might disqualify me. Yet this very Oxford edition, often assigned in Bible-as-literature courses, has met the pens of countless nonbelievers and blasphemers, heretics and idolaters, just like any other literature so assigned.

Months pass when I ignore the text and it ignores me. The old notes become artifacts of a former self, of a long-gone mood. Yet they remain on these pages of this book I’ve made my Bible, in indelible ink, whether I affirm them now or not. I can’t help but read them and be pulled through the layers upon layers of old questions and convictions—scripture sacrificed at the altar of its earnest reader.

Meanwhile, my head has of course been rapt in theories of nonviolence, inevitably summarized in Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha—truth-force—as well as in American adaptations. The overlap between this classic pragmatism and satyagraha are considerable. And indeed, both played central roles in the making of 20th century American progressive politics, in progressivism and the civil rights movement, respectively. Both, furthermore, play a part in the politics promised by the Obama administration. Think, for instance, of Obama’s well-acknowledged debt to the nonviolent legacy of civil rights and his pragmatist penchant for constructing public truths out of performance.

The connection between these systems breaks down—and for roughly this reason a friend recently described pragmatism to me as “demonic.” Menand puts the problem this way:

Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one. (p. 375)

In the brand new book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy, Joseph Kip Kosek adds:

The radical Christian pacifists found the pragmatist view incomplete, despite their alliances with Dewey and other pragmatists on specific issues. They held that the method of weighing relative moral goods and reserving absolute commitment provided a shaky foundation during crises, namely crises of violence. (p. 9)

There is, at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical program, a fatal flaw of nihilism. In the end, it offers nothing to which we can hitch our lives. But can truth-force save pragmatism? Should we bother trying?

To begin, I’ve been assembling a list of common patches of ground shared by pragmatism and nonviolence.

• Means cannot be subjugated to ends; see my earlier discussion of this for nonviolence and, for pragmatism, I’ll quote Menand:
  

  The [pragmatist] solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. (p. 432)

• The imperative of freedom of ideas and the longing for openness to possibility
• One’s own beliefs must be treated as provisional and incomplete; particularly in James’s “pluralist” pragmatism, one must paradoxically respect the truth held by those one disagrees with
• A tendency toward radical pacifism (Jane Addams, William James, sometimes Dewey, among pragmatists)
• Truth can arise through performative acts—often it must
• We arrive at truth through a process of experimentation, trial and error, lending opportunity for analogies with Darwinism—though satyagraha alone lends it a deeper sacredness, even divinity

The way I’m thinking, it is this last point that is the crux of the difference, and of what satyagraha can lend to American pragmatism. In a limited sense, it already did, through the Christian nonviolence tradition that Kosek chronicles in Acts of Conscience (more on that to come). What it means is the conviction that there is a truth above all, within all, pervading all. Pragmatism is the story of our grasp of it. Satyagraha is the story of its grasp on us. The love of that truth is the best love out there. It’s a love you can hitch your life to. And because it’s truth, it’s true.

So what, then, might pragmatism have to offer in return? A language, one that is deeply resonant with American modernity, in all the places that a Gandhian primitivism doesn’t fit.

Thanks for your patience with these scattered notes. Next, I’m on to Rorty, to see what archaeology can be done there.

Of course this is not the position taken by the Pope, who has committed his papacy to opposing strident secularism, or by any stretch of the Catholic mainstream. But the voices of these few vocal elites might pave the way for a new discourse—one that holds on to Catholic tradition and experience while listening to the New Atheist concern about supernatural doctrines. It almost brings to mind Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, which frames Jewish identity entirely in terms of ethnic community rather than religious belief.

Modernist Protestants made a go of this in the 1960s, during the last major atheist surge. Their “Death of God Theology,” represented by thinkers like Thomas Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, and Harvey Cox, tried to accommodate Christianity to what they thought was the inevitable secularization of the world. Cox’s The Secular City did away with virtually every feature of religion short of the badness of pornography. But the movement didn’t turn out a great success. As the “desecularization of the world” began to be noticed in the late 1970s and 1980s, many of these same thinkers decided that the death of God was both premature and a dead end for theology (duh).

Could Catholicism offer a more fertile ground for atheism-friendly religion than Protestantism? After all, Catholics don’t have to worry about Luther’s sola fide doctrine; there is more to religion than faith in supernatural conditions. Since tradition, rather than sacred scripture, lies at the center of Catholic thought, it seems possible to decide that “the tradition” might move in favor of atheist positions. Tradition changed, for example, when the Church moved toward acceptance of democracy under the influence of John Courtney Murray in the twentieth century—that among so many of the other traditions that Vatican II was so willing to rethink.

When I mentioned this observation to my priest, he pointed to the Vatican II-era document Gaudium et Spes—”On the Church in the Modern World” (19-21). It has no friendliness for atheism, which it counts “among the most serious problems of this age.” Yet it proposes an interesting dialectic calls believers to task for the emergence of atheism:

Undeniably, those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and try to dodge religious questions are not following the dictates of their consciences, and hence are not free of blame; yet believers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation. For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.

Indeed,

she [the Church] strives to detect in the atheistic mind the hidden causes for the denial of God; conscious of how weighty are the questions which atheism raises, and motivated by love for all men, she believes these questions ought to be examined seriously and more profoundly.

Are these “reconstructionist Catholics” simply taking the message of Gaudium et Spes to heart? They agree that atheism raises valid questions that people of faith should internalize, and none of them falls short of denying theism outright. Or are they beginning to step beyond the clear divisions between theist and atheist that Gaudium presumes?

How, by the way, are atheists receiving this posture among Catholics? Are they welcoming the agreeable Catholics with open arms? I’ve already described how Christopher Hitchens reacted to Albacete (evisceration). And, in an interview, this is what Bill Maher had to say about Fr. Foster:

Here’s a guy who lives down the hall from the pope. We saw where the pope lives. And he’s just saying, “Ah, they’re all just stories.” It gave us a real insight that perhaps some of these people who are in the hierarchies of the religions—they don’t really believe it. But they understand that you can’t tear it all down for the common man, that people need their stories. It’s just amazing that he would say it to me publicly, and on camera.

That is to say, the reconstructionists are hypocrites—the worst of all. I doubt this is what Gaudium had in mind.