FDA and food safety: important appointments

This just in: two important Obama appointments that will affect all of us in the U.S. (and probably others too - I know of at least one case of FDA staff working with an overseas government).

Read it here.

Healing Psalms, Day Five

P. is out of heart surgery and now begins the recovery, some of it short and some much longer. (The sternum takes a while to heal.)

Modern medicine is amazing, when you think about it, and so is the human body. Glory be to Godde for both of them, the science and the person. And please, Congress of the United States, can we have decent health insurance for all, and soon?

Back to our sequence of Psalms, recommended for both R'fuat HaGuf (Healing of the Body) and R'fuat HaNefesh (Healing of the Spirit). Rabbi Nachman of Breslov identified these ten psalms as the Tikkun HaKlali, the Complete Remedy.

Rabbi Nachman, or Rebbe Nachman as some call him, lived from 1772 to 1810, not terribly long. People died younger in those days. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 38. He lived in the era of the French and American revolutions, deist philosophers, the days of the Terror in France, and Napoleon - and very far away from them all, both geographically and philosophically, in Czarist Russia. He was a Hasidic master and the great-grandson of the Ba'al Shem Tov, the great Jewish mystic and leader whom the editors of our book call "the progenitor of the Hasidic trend in Judaism." This movement stressed the mystical and emotional dimensions of Judaism to complement its intellectual and carefully structured dimensions. Rebbe Nachman was --among many other things-- a great believer in the power of prayer.

Today's Psalm is Psalm 59, with Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg as commentator. I'm going to be brief because I've just realized I'd better stay within Fair Use. And you really do want to buy this book. (Info at bottom of each post.) It's quite wonderful and you don't have to be Jewish to use or appreciate it. It might make you a little more Jewish, though.

Rabbi Peltz Weinberg writes:

This very personal psalm contains the cries of someone searching for help in the face of life-threatening danger, beginning with a plea in despair and ending with a song of praise and thanksgiving. It moves from terror to serenity in a three-fold structure telescoped into a mere 18 lines.

Just a few lines tonight, and then you can read the full psalm on your own.
...
Rescue me from enemies, my God:
***from those who rise up against me --strengthen me!
Rescue me from those who act treacherously;
from bloodthirsty people --save me!
For they lie in ambush for my soul,
***brazen ones gather against me;
***yet I have not transgressed,
*******nor sinned against them, Adonai!
...

But you, Adonai, You laugh at them,
***You scorn the evil among the nations.
***My Strength--
******for Your Help I wait,
******for God is my Haven
God, my Hessed/Faithful One,
***You will go before me. ...

Rabbi Peltz Weinberg writes:

... As the enemy is named and acknowledged, so is God, source of help, strength, and support. Three words appear in the Hebrew. Each word as it is pronounced allows the suffering person to leap across a chasm of hopelessness. The words are names of an intimate reservoir of help, an answer to the cries at the height of panic. The words are personal - ozi, My Strength, misgavi, My Haven, and hasdi, My Faithful One. As we name the unseen hands that cradle us in our most bereft moments, we can allow ourselves to lay some of our heavy burden in those hands. The psalmist takes a breath. We pause. Selah.

Previous posts on the Healing Psalms are here:

Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four

From Rabbi Simkha Y. Weintraub, C.S.W., ed. Healing of Soul, Healing of Body: Spiritual Leaders unfold the Strength and Solace of Psalms. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1994.

Mary Hunt on the recent Brazilian abuse/ pregnancy/abortion/excommunication case

My friend and colleague Mary E. Hunt has an essay at ReligionDispatches.org again. This time it's about the recent and tragic case in Brazil. The mother of a nine year old girl who was pregnant with twins (a pregnancy which would have killed her) was excommunicated for helping her have an abortion. The doctors were excommunicated too. The girl's stepfather has admitted to sexually abusing her.

Dr. Hunt, a Roman Catholic feminist theologian, writes:

........ My sadness in this case comes not only from what has been done in the name of God to people who are living a nightmare, but from what might have been done to help. Sexual abuse, especially incest, is hard to stop. But once perpetrated it need not be made worse by ecclesial sanction.

A proper pastoral response would include: support for the pregnant child as she lives through an abortion; care for the mother who is responsible for the child and the rest of the family; protection for the family from the stepfather whose arrest may trigger backlash behavior; sensitive work with the other daughter who has also been sexually abused; HIV and venereal disease testing for the girls and the mother; economic support for the family; counseling for the family, the community, even the neighbors and parishioners who have been affected by this trauma; prayer and pastoral attention, including reception of the sacraments according to the family’s wishes. They need a spiritual community more than ever. Instead they got excommunication. “Is there anyone among you, who if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” (Matthew 7:9). Apparently there are several in Rome and Brazil.

..... They claim to know the law of God. But here’s the rub: even if they do, an overwhelming number of Catholics and others of goodwill do not care. We do not believe in the cruel, vindictive, callous God they cite. Many believers put our faith in a loving, merciful divinity whose response to human tragedy is to weep not condemn, to embrace not exile. That is a Catholic view, well-supported by scripture and life experience. The bishops are welcome to their views, but beware of people who think they know more about God’s will and God’s law than the rest of us. They are selling a product we are not buying.

.............Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority such bishops might make, and the beginning of a new era when local communities determine their own members.

Read the full text of Mary Hunt's commentary here.

The essay is titled "Excommunicating the Victims."

Science-and-religion resources (and foodie postscript)

No, this is not about creationism or intelligent design or science in the public schools. That's a whole other set of resources, websites, and organizations.

This is about the conversation between science and religion, which is alive and well. It's not my field, but I know a few things about it and have had colleagues and teachers who specialized in this area. It's fascinating and important.

I had dinner last night with the Adorable Godson, who as you may or may not recall is a budding astrophysicist. He has a bachelor's in computer science already and is getting a second bachelor's in physics so that he can go on to graduate school in this field, which he has decided is his vocation. We caught up on the summer and various matters not for blog consumption, he told me about his summer internship and taught me all sorts of interesting things about light and telescopes and and stars and galaxies, and we had a brief conversation on science and religion. I promised I'd follow up with some resources, and having just written him a letter that took over an hour to compose because of all the hyperlinks, I thought I'd post it here (with the personal bits taken out) as a resource for blog visitors.

There were two questions that led to this letter. One was whether there were physicist-priests out there. (The answer is yes.) Another was a more general one about science and religion. The Adorable Godson has been reading a book on this topic by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

It's really fun having a godson and having him be local. I have two goddaughters who are the same age (all of them are in the 22-23 year old range) but they are not in town --one lives in Europe-- and neither is an Episcopalian. I love them all dearly, so this isn't an issue of favorites. I'm just tickled to have one of them be local and involved in the same congregation as I. As you may recall, he's a recently baptized member. Also, he can explain computers and stars. And he and Her Grace, the fabulous Maya Pavlova, are fond of each other. What's not to love?

Okay, here is the slightly edited letter. Enjoy the resources.


The best known priest-physicist is John Polkinghorne, who was the recipient of the Templeton Prize half a dozen years ago. A short bio is here. There is a website about him with all kinds of links here. You can find the text of an interview of him (from sometime in the last decade, I think, maybe late 90s) with a bibliography at the end.

Maybe an even better place to start: A lovely intro to Polkinghorne and issues he addresses is the episode of the excellent, excellent radio show Speaking of Faith called "Quarks and Creation." There is an interview of Polkinghorne there. The show has podcasts, too :-) but its website is also worth exploring at length.

There are three U.S. centers for science-religion dialogue. They always host a reception together at the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the professional society whose meeting I attend every November.

One of them, CTNS, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, is part of the GTU where I did my Ph.D. studies. Poke around their website (I made a hyperlink, as you see) - it has great stuff on it.

The other two centers are the Zygon Center for Religion and Science in Chicago and IRAS, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. They co-publish the journal Zygon.

CTNS has gotten a ton of grants from the Templeton Foundation and they had a project (one among many, you can see on their site all the books their affiliated scholars have produced re: religion and science) called "Science and the Spiritual Quest." That is also the title of the book I mentioned to you; I have the book in my office. All the essays in it are by leading scientists who have varied religious affiliations and backgrounds.

CTNS has had several joint projects with the Vatican Observatory, which is not just at the Vatican but in Arizona. The main researcher there, a very sweet guy, is a Jesuit priest and physicist named Bill Stoeger. You'll like his bio -- I think some of the work he's done is in areas of physics in which you are interested.

CTNS's founding director is a physicist (Ph.D. in physics) who is also an ordained United Church of Christ (U.C.C.) minister. His name is Robert John (Bob) Russell and he was my friend Kirk's dissertation chair.

Kirk Wegter-McNelly is my classmate and he specializes in the dialogue between physics and religion. He was a physics major as an undergraduate and wrote his dissertation in theology on quantum nonlocality and the Christian theology of creation. Click on his publications and you will see he is the author of a forthcoming encyclopedia article on physics and religion! Kirk just got a humongous research grant for a wild project with Raymond Chiao at UC-Merced.)

A former professor at the GTU who was also part of CTNS is now teaching at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church (know as "General"). His name is Mark Richardson. (That link will also show you the Metanexus Institute.) Very nice guy.

They are all nice guys. Yes, this is a male-dominated field. There are a few women in the science and religion biz and at one point they founded their own support and research group. The main person I know from that group is Lisa Stenmark, whose major work has been in high-tech-related science as I recall and who teaches in the area of Magic, Science, and Religion according to the San Jose State website. (The other major person I knew in that group was Lou Ann Trost, whose doctorate is in theology, and I see that she's now teaching with Lisa in CA.) I see that Zygon, the center in Chicago, has just appointed a woman as its new director. This is a big deal and a first. Her name is Gayle Woloschak and she is an Orthodox Christian. She's a molecular biologist and medical school professor.

The issue of course is not just having women in the field but including in the field feminist, womanist, and other theoretical or theological approaches. Here's a very short essay or piece of essay on this. Also a short essay , "An Ecology of Knowledge," by Lisa Stenmark. (A lot of the issues raised are epistemological as well as ethical.)

Oh, and CTNS also has a new project called STARS. Check out the research topic and the theme! Lots of physics there.

For one of the basic books on the whole religion and science dialogue, go to the works of Ian Barbour and see his short When Science Meets Religion. But he has, as you will see by the bio, written a lot of books. And yes, he is a physicist. Here's another bio of him.

I'd be very interested to hear more about the book by the Dalai Lama. Eric and Don's course [These are my colleagues -- Eric Mortensen in religious studies, my department, an expert in Buddhism, shamanism and folklore et al., and Donald Smith in physics; they team teach a course on science and religion; I'd love to take it!] probably has perspectives from Asian and other religious perspectives that the folks above have not explored in depth, if at all. So of course, a look at their syllabus would be really important. The science-and-religion field is vast. It is also serious and scholarly and a lot of people don't realize this -- which is why it's great that Krista Tippett has done shows like the one with Polkinghorne. Another thing that helped spread the wealth, so to speak, was a curriculum contest (I have friends who applied for grants via this competition back in the day) and program on teaching religion and science. CTNS called it the Science and Religion Course Program.

That should get you started ;-) .

* * * * *
P.S. JohnieB, Pablito, TCR, and others will want to know what we had for dinner.

I cooked, if you can call such a simple meal cooking. Four courses:

1. Crenshaw melon.

2. Salad of mixed greens with heirloom tomato slices, avocado slices, red bell pepper strips, and cold salmon (not much, left over from my dinner of the night before -- cooked en papillote with absolutely nothing, just the fresh fish, and yes, it was the ecologically okay kind, wild caught from Alaska, thank you to my local supermarket, big ol' corporate Harris Teeter), dressed with extra virgin olive oil and freshly ground French sea salt.

3. Whole wheat fusilli with pesto. (Pine nuts are too pricey and hard to digest, though classic pesto calls for them; I was out of walnuts; and the only nuts I had in the house --I keep nuts in the freezer so they won't go stale or rancid-- were cashews, so I experimented. Besides the cashews, the classic ingredients: olive oil, garlic, fresh basil, grated parmesan.)

4. Small amount of Julie's Organic Mocha Java ice cream with blueberries on top. (Originally it was going to be just the ice cream; but the Adorable Godson caught sight of the blueberries in the fridge and said, "Mmmm, blueberries.")

The melon, tomato, pepper, basil, and blueberries were from the farmers' market.

Oh, and to drink, iced peppermint tea; it was a no-wine evening.

The Adorable Godson says he's cooking next time.