At its core, Bayes’s theorem depends upon an ingenious turnabout: If you want to assess the strength of your hypothesis given the evidence, you must also assess the strength of the evidence given your hypothesis. In the face of uncertainty, a Bayesian asks three questions: How confident am I in the truth of my initial belief? On the assumption that my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? And whether or not my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate?

via NYTimes.com.

Shivamma stands in front of her house, braiding her little girl's hair. Her feet are bare, her sari is simple, and she is rail thin, but she speaks to visitors with boldness. She is the face of the new Christianity in India. Shivamma's home is nestled inside a concrete storm sewer discarded by the factory where she and her husband work. The neighborhood, hidden in an overgrown back lot, consists of huge pipes lined up like mobile homes. Her family of four lives within 84 square feet.

For a Dalit and a woman, Shivamma is doing well. In traditional Hindu thinking, Dalits are not quite human, lacking the right to enter the temple, read, or eat with members of other castes. A person who touches a Dalit must immediately purify himself. (One church planter notes the awful exception: "When it comes to social life, they are untouchable. For rape, they are touchable.")

To be Dalit is much worse than being poor, for no matter how much education or wealth a Dalit accumulates, he or she remains polluted, a shame on the face of the earth. Dalits are like biblical lepers, except that in mainstream Indian culture, they cannot be healed. "Not even God can save them from pollution," the Catholic Dalit advocate A. Maria notes sarcastically.

But although Shivamma comes from generations of people accustomed to bowing and disappearing, she does not cringe any more. She came to the pipe village as a new bride 11 years ago, seeking to escape the jobless poverty of her home village. She and her husband together make $5 a day, more than most Dalits.

For three years she was barren.

Then, a young Dalit Christian named Bangarraju (most Dalits are known by a single name) came to Shivamma's home to pray for her. "I didn't know why he came or to whom he prayed. I thought Jesus was one of the gods." She conceived and gave birth to a son, and later had a second child, a girl. When her daughter was three months old, the girl became severely jaundiced, passing blood. Bangarraju came to them and prayed again, and the daughter was healed.

"I realized that Jesus is the living God," Shivamma told Christianity Today.

"We used to drink and every day we would fight, fight, fight. Jesus Christ brought peace to our family. I have no fear, because I have come to know the living God. I trust him."

via Christianity Today.

Peter Foges on Simone Weil:

One of her “big ideas” was that the sickness of the modern world is caused by “uprootedness.” We are, Simone Weil believed, lost. The only antidote is a social order grounded in physical labor. Only manual work can save us.

Weil herself was preternaturally a worker by brain, not by hand. Small, myopic, physically awkward and weak, it is difficult to think of anyone less suited to toil in a factory, workshop or field. Weil was a French intellectual of the purest sort. Considered a prodigy from childhood alongside her brother Andre, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians, she had mastered classical Greek by age twelve, was steeped in advanced mathematical physics by fifteen and at twenty came top in the entrance exam to the super-elite École Normale Supérieure. That was the same year, 1928, that Simone de Beauvoir had finished second.

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

Born into a comfortable, secular Jewish home, she repudiated this already threadbare link to her ancestral roots, carrying on in later life—following a vision at the age of twenty-eight in the chapel of St Francis in Assisi—a mystical love affair with Jesus.

via Lapham’s Quarterly.

...the spiritual Simone was becoming increasingly mystical and Christian —she drew close to the Catholic Church in her later years, but resisted the final baptismal step. This led her to crave release from academia and the abstract life of the mind and lose herself in obedience. Like early medieval mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross, she prayed that her individuality be obliterated by the necessities of toil, that her intelligence might be extinguished through punishing physical fatigue. At times she turned for solace and inspiration to the Bhagavad-Gita and other sacred Hindu texts. These notions—anathema to left-wing French intellectuals then and now—became her vocation. Like Leo Tolstoy, she saw a connection between physical fatigue and spirituality, and hoped, however foolishly, to have a religious experience on the factory floor. “Physical work” she wrote in her best known book Gravity and Grace, “makes us experience in the most exhausting manner, the phenomenon of finality.” Workers, she wrote, “need poetry more than bread, and religion alone can be the source of it.”

Perhaps the purest expression of Weil’s mystical notion of the sanctity of physical labor comes at the end of her essay “La Condition Ouvrière,” published, as were most of her writings, long after her death. “If man’s vocation is to achieve pure joy through suffering, manual workers are better placed than all others to accomplish it in the truest way.”

Weil died at thirty-four by self-induced starvation in wartime London, the coroner recording a verdict of suicide “while the balance of her mind was disturbed.”

Terry Eagleton, reviewing "The Joy of Secularism", George Levine (ed.):

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere, not just when church attendance drops or Roman Catholics mysteriously become childless, that secularisation proper sets in. Like art and sexuality, religion is taken out of public ownership and gradually privatised. It dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain. As the cynic remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up. In this respect, it has a curious affinity with alcohol: it, too, can drive you mad.

Most recent defences of secularism, not least those produced by "Ditchkins" (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), have been irate, polemical affairs, powered by a crude species of off-the-peg, reach-me-down Enlightenment. It is scarcely a caricature of Dawkins's work to suggest we are all getting nicer and nicer and that if it wasn't for religious illusion, we would collectively outdo Kenneth Clark in sheer civility. (I refer to the deceased patrician art critic, not the living, beer-bellied politician.) One might call it the view from north Oxford.

This present collection of essays, by contrast, is a much less fiercely contentious affair. Here, there is no callow and triumphalist rationalism, which in any case is simply the flip side of evangelical fervour. Indeed, the blandness of some of the book's contributions could benefit from a judicious dose of Hitchens-like was­pishness. In customary American style, the editor, George Levine, couches his acknowledgements in a language soggy with superlatives and sentimental clichés. One can already hear the sound of the Hitch sharpening his darkly satirical daggers.

Not many of the contributors seem aware of the copious body of literature about secularisation, which ponders, among other things, the question of whether it actually happened.

After all, eroding the distinction between sacred and secular can be traced back to the Christian gospel. Salvation is a matter of feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, not in the first place a question of cult and ritual. There will be no temple in the New Jerusalem, we are told, as all that religious paraphernalia is finally washed up and superannuated.

via New Statesman.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

Finally,

No sooner had the postmodernists and end-of-history merchants concluded that faith was as antiquated as the typewriter than it broke out in blind fury where it had been least expected - in the wrathful, humiliated world of radical Islam. The globe was now divided down the middle between those who believed too much and those who believed too little, as dark-skinned fundamentalists confronted lightly tanned CEOs. And if that were not irony enough, the fact is that these two camps are not simply antagonists. They are also sides of the same coin.

Brilliant. Lucid & clear-headed stuff.

Nick Owchar reviews Sarah Sentilles' Breaking Up With God: A Love Story:

"I believed in a male God," she writes, early in the book. "I loved him. I needed him. Sometimes he was gentle and kind. Sometimes he frightened me."

Like many, she started with a child's Sunday-school version of God — the kindly man watching our lives through a hole in the clouds. "Breaking Up With God" describes her childhood in New Jersey and Texas, her beginnings as a Catholic and her quest to shed that juvenile version of God during years of academic achievement and distinction at Yale and Harvard, and explores her loneliness and self-esteem issues. She also spends time in Southern California as a teacher in Compton in the Teach for America program (see her 2005 book "Taught by America") and as a member of All Saints Church in Pasadena, where she discovers a loving, welcoming community. They treat her like a little sister or a daughter, showing her love in the smallest of gestures:

"People knew what was going on in my life. They prayed for me, prayed for my students, let me cry, brought me soup when I had the flu, sent me home with hot toddies after night meetings when I had a sore throat… I belonged.… When the priest dismissed the congregation at the end of a church service one Sunday she said, 'We are home,' and I knew it was true."

They're also the ones who tell her that she has spiritual gifts and should consider entering the Episcopal priesthood. She does.

"Other twenty-three-year-olds I knew didn't want to be priests, and that was, at least in part, why I chose the vocation," she says with brutal honesty. "Wanting to be a priest marked me as different, and being different felt like being chosen."

But it doesn't work out. Sentilles struggles too much with the judgment in so many people's attitudes toward faith and God, especially self-proclaimed God-fearing people who use religion to attack other people's sexuality and lifestyles. As an apprentice pastor she learns that no one wants to hear provocative political talk from the pulpit even though, she says, "faith and politics weren't separate for me … I went to divinity school … because I thought churches could help make the world more just and life-giving for everyone." After struggling with an Episcopalian discernment committee helping her make a decision about her vocation, she calls it quits.

via latimes.com.

On the night of March 8 Yasser Makram was on his way home from work, his pick-up truck full of garbage as he turned up the winding dirt road on the edge of Egypts capital, to approach his home in the crowded Cairo slum known popularly as Garbage City. As he inched around a curve, he saw a swarm of people running towards the truck in his rearview mirror. "I didnt know what was happening," he says. But before he could consider the possibilities, the mob had pulled him from the truck. "They demanded to know if I was Christian." Makrams hospital report says the 27-year-old suffered "nerve damage" and "multiple deep wounds and fractures" that night. A long, sinister scar — a knife wound — now cuts across his face, ear to ear. And it will be at least a year before he can drive his garbage truck again. The mob stabbed him in the chest and beat him with pipes, breaking an arm and one of his ribs, before stripping him naked and dragging him, semi-conscious, up a dark and dusty road to the foot of the Citadel, a medieval Islamic fort.

Three months later, no one has been charged with the crime, the police apparently having shown no interest in filing a report while Makram was hospitalized. And Makram has no idea who his attackers were. But he remembers their response to the strangers who finally intervened to help him: "This is a Christian son of a bitch," they said. "Were going to kill him."

via TIME.

Barth, CD I/2, p. 750-751:

The human impossibility of the Church's proclamation consists simply in the impossibility of the attempt to speak of God....

Of God it is impossible to speak... If we speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him. In this matter we cannot do what we want to do and we cannot attain what we should like to attain. This is the iron law under which all Church proclamation without exception stands. That what happens here is frailty is far too weak an expression for the real situation. This is not frailty. This is death. This is not difficulty. It is sheer impossibility. What happens here is not something imperfect. Measured by the standard of what is intended, it is simply nothing.

If there is proclamation, if the attempt does not fail, it is just at the point where success is achieved that it can and will be understood, not as human success, but as a divine victory concealed in human failure, sovereignly availing itself of human failure.