Waving or Drowning?

AIDS: Reverse Your Perception

Simply amazing.

Source (h/t to @snolen)

More Words on Love

Perfect timing, I'd say. From an NPR interview with Cornel West yesterday...

COX: Let's begin with this, Cornel, if we might. You talk a lot about the lack of love. You say there is a lack of available love in black America. What do you mean by that?

Prof. WEST: Well, I think it's true in the society as a whole. We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit. You see it in our television culture that's obsessed with superficial spectacle. You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you. It's like an Aretha Franklin song, brother, or a Coltrane solo or Beethoven symphony, something that grabs you to the gut and gives you a sense of what it is to be human.

That's what we're more and more lacking, and it's very sad. It's a sign of a decline of an empire, my brother.

Read the entire transcript, or--even better--listen in here.

A Brief WorD: On Love

(Why I say this is about love. Artwork from the great Hugh MacLeod.)

Rethinking Our Wiring, Or...

Rewiring Our Thinking

A few weeks ago our friend Tim King pointed us to the recent work of Jeremy Rifkin in a post titled Hard-Wired Hope For Humanity. Based on Tim’s recommendation I’m about 25% through Rifkin’s latest book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. This book has been so jarring that I couldn’t wait until I finished it to commend it to you. (At 675 pages it’s also a long one, so it’ll be a while before I’m done anyway!)

Rifkin details recent advances in neurological science which indicate that we (and a few other mammals too, apparently) are soft-wired with what are called “mirror neurons”. These neurons allow us to feel another’s plight as if we were experiencing it ourselves. In other words, our brains are wired for empathy.

This research flies in the face of the popular recounting of Darwin’s earlier work which would have us believe that we are wired for self-interest, for competition, and that “survival of the fittest” is the governing principle of humanity.

Currently I’m in the section of the book covering child development, touching on how this empathic drive can be nurtured, or stamped out depending on the blend of nature/nurture. Fascinating.

This is very interesting work, but here’s why I’m so excited about it and what I see as it’s possible Kingdom implications:

Love your neighbour.

Crazy, right?

Maybe not. Maybe this was how we were created in the first place. Or more to the point, maybe the seed of this ability has been planted in our brains, and our collective journey towards Christ-likeness, toward the “Kingdom coming”, has been about nurturing this God-given characteristic, about the evolution of our collective consciousness.

Perhaps it’s ironic that as Followers of Jesus we grumble about how hard it is to be more like Jesus (and design our eschatology around the concept that we don’t need to anyway) because, damn it, we’re just so selfish… even while the scientists reveal that we’re actually designed to love the other!

We’ve talked before about our spiritual DNA, about how we are destined to remember that we are beings designed and created in the image of God. Some call it a journey to return to the Garden. I call it the Kingdom coming in it’s fullness. Maybe, in a sense, we’ve overly-spiritualized this. I don’t think Jesus will return “in the blink of an eye” but am becoming more and more convinced that biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, and we are left to “live into it.” Maybe Jesus returns in the sense that the collective Body of Christ (that’s you and me) continues to evolve into the role.

And now, research indicates there may a physical aspect to this. Amazing.

Of course, there's something I'm not telling you. Rifkin talks about the empathy/entropy paradox, in that we're starting to develop our empathic consciousness just as we're possibly on the cusp of destroying our environment. I'm not sure he would call himself optimistic.

Here’s one of those excellent RSA animated videos on a summary of this thinking, taken from a talk by Rifkin earlier this year. It’s well worth the 10 minutes. Let us know what you think. (The full 52 minute presentation this shorter film is cut from is available here. If you have the time, it is stunning.)