'A Pound of Flesh, Or An Eye for An Eye': At the Crossroads of Empathy and Forgiveness

Hard times in the Chateu D'If

As I go through the routines of my dad-to-day, it's hard not to notice that so much of the world seems constantly in the throes of 'getting what is owed to them.' Hardly a day goes by without something I read or real events pressing onward with the seemingly universal desire revenge or some kind of material justice. This most recently struck at me deeply several months ago, while the violence was escalating in Syria, particularly the church bombings, and news broke that a serious wave of new sexual abuse allegations was being leveled at my home archdiocese. One of those intersections of daily events that make me acutely aware of our human fragility, pain, and division.

Societal reaction to the priestly abuse scandals is emblematic of the strange concept of justice that we've come to expect in our modern world. Many allegations have be made over the past decade with financially and legally exploitative motivations, some of them truthful. But in most cases we hear over and over again how victims want not only emotional and spiritual healing, but also financial restitution. The mystery of how we expect large sums of money to heal such rifts is a topic for another post, another day, but it's certainly not reserved for clergy sexual abuse. Divorce? My ex has to pay. College degree didn't get me a job? My school has to pay. Short-changed childhood experience? Parents have to pay. Bakery won't make a cake for my wedding? The owners have to pay. The litigiousness is astonishing, especially here in the U.S., where "fighting for what you deserve" seems to reach new levels of ridiculousness every day.

It's even more ridiculous given that 'tolerance' has become the new global mantra. Here's the world, beating it into us that 'live and let live' is the only noble way to engage with society and build peace, while simultaneously demanding an eye-for-an-eye at the turn of every petty (and not-so-petty) disappointment. Strangely Old Testament for a world that seeks to free us from ancient oppressive moral codes.

As I read and thought over the past several months, I have chewed on this topic often. Why are we always at odds with each other? Why are we never satisfied? The human urge for revenge is certainly not reserved to the modern world-some of the greatest stories ever written have revenge at their very core (Hamlet, Coriolanus, and The Count of Monte Cristo among them). But the modern kind seems to be particularly insatiable. The strange realities of our world's sense of 'practical justice' seems to dovetail with something else often present in my intellectual cud-our similarly distorted understanding of forgiveness.

Librarian Problems...

When your friends mistake John Dewey and Melvil Dewey for the same person:

No, the Dewey Decimal System is not part of some pragmatist philosophical conspiracy. It's actually pretty great.

Roosevelt Island: Confrontational Reading

I rarely ever carry my camera with me, especially on long runs and hikes (too much looking through the lens instead of at what's in front of it), but I wish I had brought it along on my run this morning. On my trek over the river, I spent some time at the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial on the island. Flanking the central statue of Roosevelt himself are four giant stone panels with some of his most memorable words. A nice little hidden inspirational place. Below is an image of one of the panels. I have reproduced the text of the others below. I was so struck by the timeliness of Teddy's proverbs. Hardly anyone seems to favor 'righteousness over peace' anymore. Conservation, both in respect to natural resources and intellectual and cultural heritage, continues to have a reputation as a static, rather than dynamic activity. And the world, in various regions, seems unduly obsessed with 'order without liberty' and promoting 'liberty without order.' I just love how the bold and chiseled words confront and challenge the viewer so directly (each panel is probably taller than 20'). I think public sculpture plays a surprisingly important role in nurturing contemplation, especially when books are increasingly being sold and consumed as entertainment.

MANHOOD

A man's usefulness

depends upon his living up to

HIS IDEALS

in so far as he can

The Deceit of Reading and Moral Seriousness

I opened my computer this morning to find this fascinating pair of pieces from First Things and the New Yorker, two great additions to my 'philosophy of reading' files. In the latter, Teju Cole chronicles his initial hope, and then disappointment, in our most recent 'literary president':

Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history-as befits a former law professor-and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction...We had, once again, a reader in chief, a man in the line of Jefferson and Lincoln... 

The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will. 

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature's vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky's eerie 1979 masterpiece, "Stalker," the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people's deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

Reading is My Drug

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

There's an oft-repeated old story about a tropical island on a vast sea that was surrounded by a massive wall. Explorers thought this was a shame, for the natives were missing out on all the beauty of the surrounding waters. So they knocked down the wall, and shortly a storm came along that destroyed the island, which, but for the absence of the wall, would have not caused such devastation. With all the wonders of the information age, one can easily get too enthralled in the wonders of technology and also those of information. It is justifiably exciting when we can pull up maps on our iPhones, instantly look up that random useless fact that has been nagging us all day, or especially when we have the ability to have a whole reference library in our backback, such as the Logos Bible software allows us to do. E-readers give us the exciting ability to store most of a personal library in our pocket, with nearly endless potential for reading enjoyment.

But more and more recently, I have been noticing just how easy it is to become a slave to reading. It's not just for books anymore. Reading material is everywhere these days-in our books, on our phones, on billboards, in the doctor's waiting room, and our computer screens. I am generally a voracious reader under normal conditions, but when stress is added to that mix, I am especially susceptible to reader's binge. Somehow, I have still not perfectly mastered control over the backwards instinctual logic that attempts to remedy stress and excessive mental preoccupations with adding yet more preoccupations to the mix. In the midst of perusing too thoroughly the latest in the Catholic blogosphere, my Twitter feed,  the newly arrived issues of professional association publications, and the rest of todays news, and eyeing the books on my tea-tray, I had to stop myself.

Sometimes we are more chained too books than we realize.

The Angel at the Chalkboard: Fulton Sheen, Catechesis, and Information Literacy

When life gets busy, blog gets neglected. All I can muster about the past several busy weeks is a big Minnesota "Uffda!" As usual, the internet blazes forward without me. Its loss.

Late last week there was word that one of my favorite, favorite priests of all time-Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen-has been named 'Venerable'. I have not used much space on this blog to expound on my undying love for this man, but trust me, it is indeed very expansive and undying.

My first memories of Sheen go back to seeing him occasionally on EWTN and hearing him on the radio when my parents were tuned in. I later rediscovered him in college, when I found that some brilliant individuals had made nearly all of his talks available to stream for free on the web (Behold: http://www.fultonsheen.com.)

I consider Sheen the anti-dote to the modern TV personality. His effectiveness is surely attributable to his commanding personality, wit, and his exceptional rhetorical skill, but at the root of it all is his unabashed focus on the pursuit of truth. In describing how one goes about how to talk, Sheen, while  making the disclaimer that he is not the model orator, explains that the best way to prepare any speech is to fully immerse yourself in the subject matter until it is a part of you, for as the gospel tells us, "from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks" (Lk 6:45). Contrary to his own claim, Sheen was a tremendous speaker, not only because of his wit, but because he was both incredibly instructive and pastoral (sincerity, clarity, and flexibility served as his main precepts for speaking). 

So what does Sheen have to do with libraries, you ask?

At it at the blackboard.

Well, he did indeed write a lot of books, but that is beside the point. Whenever I start thinking of Sheen, my mind inevitably gravitates to two things: the significant attention being given to information literacy today, and the sad state of the modern catechesis.

With the advent of the internet and the abundance of information that has accompanied the recent explosion of information technology and advances in both personal and scholarly communication, there has been a growing emphasis on what is known in the library world as "information literacy." According to the ACRL, "Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information." But this is what students are supposed to be learning in the first place, isn't it? Ideally, yes. However, the reality is that most students are taught how to do research, but this usually amounts to professors teaching them how to synthesize information gleaned from multiple sources and then make inferences and draw conclusions from it. The process of finding those sources and understanding how information is organized in the first place is usually left to the students themselves. Hence the occasional class trip to that one computer lab in the library where the librarian attempts to teach them about databases, other e-resources, and how to do a book or citation search (although many students tend ignore this and resort to the classic 'Googling strategies work universally' frame of mind). 

Information Literacy is a rather hot topic in the library world right now. Higher education is certainly suffering from a myriad of crises, and most librarians want to do their utmost so that these problems don't get the best of students. Instructional librarians are very passionate people-in many cases, they do more to educate students than professors do.

It is no secret that Catholic catechesis has been in a similar state of crisis over the past few decades, and in some ways, longer than that. Cardinal Piacenza, Prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy, alluded to this educational crisis when recenetly speaking about the formation of priests. The most common problem is that the faith is not taught well in the first place. The other significant problem is that when catechesis is initially done well, many Catholics are ill-equipped to continue that catechesis throughout the remainder of their lives. Only a madman would claim that one could learn everything there is to know about the faith in a few months of confirmation class, but many Catholics act as if their Confirmation is an anointing to live in ignorance for the rest of their lives, not a sacrament that strengthens them for the journey ahead. It is true that we are not all called to be expert theologians, but every Catholic should be equipped with the skills and resources to continually learn and integrate the faith into his or her daily life, and to critically examine issues of the modern world in light of their beliefs. 

Information Literacy needs to have a place in catechesis. Most Catholics are taught the faith, but are not left with any handy reference library to navigate their future challenges and questions. My home diocese has for a while engaged in the honorable practice of providing every confirmand with a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This is a good first step. But more needs to be done. Educated Catholics have no excuse to be ignorant when the vast majority of church documents can be found on the web.

As part of this effort, I have thus compiled a basic list of useful resources for Catholics, found under the 'Catholic Reference' tab above. This list is by no means exhaustive, but serves as a good guide for the information-hungry Catholic (or not) on the internet. I will continue to add to it as I remember or discover other resources.

Fulton Sheen once wrote that "Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more" (Life is Worth Living). Certainly part of the beauty of an institutional church is that it has such a rich documentary heritage, and it is a serious task to study it. But although books and information literacy enable us to know the faith, "The Church's educational mission, as Cardinal Piacenza says, must continually be reinvigorated, reinforced and restarted from th[e] authentic passion for man, a passion that, as the etymology of the term 'passio' indicated, is first of all the shared participation in the same condition of 'asking about meaning.'" Armed with this attitude and proper information tools, individuals will be properly equipped to both learn about the faith and effectively engage others in conversation about it.

Ave atque Vale!: Libraries, Virtue, and the Sacred

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."

-J.R.R. Tolkien 

After a more chaotic than expected finals week, and completing the last of my MLS coursework, I can now call myself a bona fide librarian! As much as graduations merit at least a little reflection, they are almost always, in my experience, occasions more for chaos than ceremony, and so, after a couple weeks of being whisked along by the momentum of final projects, last days at work, bidding final farewells to friends, paperwork, packing, and moving, I finally have found a few spare moments in which to write. I cannot say that mind all the distraction this time around. My relationship with Bloomington has not, on average, been far from adversarial. I will, however, miss the excellent public library, the huge selection of good Eurasian restaurants, the year-round farmer's market, the university's vast library system, and the walkability of the town. While my home for the past couple years is not my heart's paradise, I cannot say that my time here was time wasted, for my understanding of, and capacity for humility and detachment have grown immensely in this place.

A large state school is, for me, particularly well-suited to purging self-importance, pride, and attachment to success and spiritual comfort. These conditions seem, to me, to mirror the opportunities for humility and detachment provided by libraries and librarianship itself. The immensely diverse and compassionately wrought backgrounds and philosophies of my colleagues is a constant source of humility, gratitude, and challenge. I am very grateful for this, among other things, in my profession. This simple truth, however, would hardly be appreciated in a library school application essay, or in public declarations of the value of librarianship.

In my fledgling career, I have had the luck and privilege to work at some of this country's most prized institutions, if only as a humble page and intern. Their collections, steeped in tradition, history, notoriety, and appraised at astonishing monetary value, are cause for wonder, especially to those setting their eyes on them for the first time. Libraries, for this reason (among others), remain one of the only universally recognized sacred spaces. I still remember vividly the adrenaline-ridden gravitas of my first encounters with ancient Greek papyri and a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, and that rapturous first visit to the British Library's Treasure Room. In my childish delight and awe, I truly felt that these were portals to other worlds and times, and my student-imagination romantically imbued the handling (and viewing) of these items with a sense of sacred ritual.

Preservation Week: April 22-28, 2012

It is quite busy as this last semester comes to a close, but this week is also Preservation Week! As I currently work in preservation, and since conservation served as my first window into the world of librarianship, I have a soft spot for preservation in my heart.

Everyone who uses libraries plays a role in the preservation process. Just by keeping food & liquids away from books, refraining from marking in library materials, and carefully handling them, you are helping library items last longer. But when books fall victim to aging, wear and tear, and natural disasters, conservators come to save the day.

In a sense, library preservation owes a great deal to mother nature. The 1966 floor of the Arno river in Florence, Italy was the mother of all modern library disasters. Alli Burness has a great post about the event here:

Thoughts on the Working World, Education, and Librarianship

Once again it is not a completely decent hour for me to be writing. I blame evening classes (thank goodness I only have to endure 2.5 more weeks of these impertinent disruptions in my natural work and rest patterns) and my chronically restless mind. But I digress.

Although I have the good fortune of having some temporary work immediately following graduation, launching my post-student career and nurturing my future professional life have been heavily on my mind.  In light of the continually stagnant economy, the struggles of finding work and the value of education are being heavily discussed today. "Educational Return On Investment" seems to be a popular topic of discussion, flanked by contentious debates about student loan debt and encouraging purely utilitarian attitudes regarding educational choices. LIS degrees (Library and Information Science, for the non-librarian folks) tend to be brutally attacked in these discussions. A recent Forbes article listed an MLS as one of the worst educational investments one could make, mainly based on salary data. Despite the [wildly fallacious] rumors of an aging librarian workforce, librarians are now retiring late, and once they do, they are not being replaced (although this pattern cannot continue forever without the workforce entirely dying out). Many, like these sisters, ponder if a university education is really all it is chalked up to be for the price. In another realm of the debate on educational value is the ever popular undergraduate degree in business, which has come increasingly under attack for its apparent inability to produce professionals that can think critically and creatively. Alternatively, liberal arts degrees are being attacked (as they've been for a while) for their apparent inability to generate earning power and produce graduates who can make themselves truly useful. Bitterness abounds. More on the education debate later.

It isn't easy studying what matters.

Intolerance, Censorship, & Other Requirements of Rationality

From time to time I will likely reflect on censorship here, because it is an issue that demands more nuanced examination in the modern library landscape. Not, however, the kind of attention that library advocates usually give to it. Most of the library world (in my view) has a visceral reaction to any mention of "censorship," as if its very name was capable of beckoning twisted Inquisitionists back from the dead to steal our freedoms (I silently roll my eyes every time I sit in an LIS class and hear my professor ask us rhetorical questions about our opposition to censorship). Library advocates, most notably the American Library Association, are decidedly opposed to censorship in any form. The ALA's Library Bill of Rights states:

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of the their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

So there is a general patent assumption that censorship is intrinsically bad and an impediment to intellectual freedom. (My local public library even recently re-affirmed its decision to not filter p*rn on its computers, in the name of not invading patron privacy, and I guess, avoiding the expense of filtering software). Considering popular historical associations with censorship, such as government and school banned books lists, and the reputed Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued by the Catholic Church, any discussion of censorship still carries significant political and emotional charges. 

I don't think we ought to up and start banning books again, but I do think that the ALA's outright opposition to censorship is an erroneous position. I also think that many librarians need to re-think their approach to public service in regards to serving patron 'wants'. This may have more bearing on personal philosophy than on library policy, but trusting too much in Enlightenment values can be an obstacle to intellectual freedom in itself.