Monday, January 22, 2007

Interesting Online Reading

* A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. For discussion, see Towards a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management (PDF).

* How well do you know Jesus' words? Three quizzes at "Kingdom People".

* The Virtual Absinthe Museum is an interesting resource for information about the Green Fairy of the Belle Epoque.

* This article by Chris Hedges on a suburban theology of despair has been going around. Macht has an insightful comment on it. What people should have taken away from Hedges's article, if they were serious about it, is his claim that the radical Christian right is the result of a long and serious neglect of working-class people and their needs. It's not a new message. Marx famously claimed that religion was the opiate of the people: oppressed and overburdened, people turned to religion for comfort from the pain because it was the only forum available to them in which their interests and needs were actually taken seriously. By turning to religion, people could take the edge off their anger and weariness. (Of course, Marx doesn't think the medicine religion offered to be any more than palliative, a pain killer; he didn't think it could cure the disease. Only revolution could do that.)Hedges's argument is a contemporary version of the same; the only difference is that Hedge, unlike Marx, thinks the coming proletariat revolution is a bad thing! Of course, a great deal of the argument in either case depends on that prediction of revolution....

* A rather funny parody of John Lennon's "Imagine". (ht: Gideon Strauss)

* Currently reading:
Morgan Rempel, Nietzsche on the Deaths of Socrates and Jesus
David Bronstein, Hegel and the Holocaust
Sean McGrath, Toward a Technology that Allows the Beautiful to Occur
Vance Maxwell, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker's Discourse on Natural Law in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation
Daniel Steel, Rethinking the Naturalism vs. Interpretivism Debate in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (PDF)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Discussion of C. H. Cooley's 'Social Consciousness' (1907)
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis
Josiah Royce, The External World and Social Consciousness