Culture

While President Obama, in his much-debated Oval Office Address last week, seemed to be calling Americans to personal prayer, activist Drew Landry’s vision is more collective, and possibly more practical. He believes the simple discipline of praying in unison will get people to pay more attention to the disaster being laid out at their doorsteps. Meanwhile, experts like Len Bahr say it is too late to restore the Gulf. The problem in dealing with the environmental disaster, he says, whether by prayer or science, is that nobody knows how bad it will get before it can get better.

The services I attended at Philadelphia’s Congregation Temple Bethel were loud and joyous, but I felt totally out of place. That was a familiar feeling, of course. My two Jewish parents raised me without any religious education. (My father, a butcher, takes an almost perverse delight in flouting his non-belief with gestures like giving me lard as a Christmas present.) But I was more at ease this morning, because it was not expected that I understand the rituals because I look like a Jew. I was one of the only white people in shul that morning, and it was nice to look as out of place as I usually feel.

Two of Galileo’s fingers (three, actually) are to be placed on public display, along with one of his teeth, in the newly refurbished Museum of the History of Science in Florence.

The student of theology revels in the grandeur, emotion and beauty of a clear moment of human interconnectedness. It is the student of ethics, however, that lets her eyes wander further beyond the pitch. With that drift the existential beauty becomes more complicated; potentially tragic.

The story told by Agora is supposed to stand as a beacon—like the lighthouse that towered over Hypatia’s Alexandria—of the danger that religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit.