Spotlight: Spring 2001

by Various Authors

Like mother, like daughter?

“A world in which cloning is commonplace confounds every human relationship, often in ways most potential clients haven’t considered. For instance, if a woman gives birth to her own clone, is the child her daughter or sister? Or, says, bioethicist Leon Kass, ‘let's say the child grows up to be the spitting image of her mother. What impact will that have on the relationship between the father and his child if that child looks exactly like the woman he fell in love with?’ Or, he continues, ‘let's say the parents have a cloned son and then get divorced. How will that mother feel about seeing a copy of the person she hates most in the world every day? Everyone thinks about cloning from the point of view of the parents. No one looks at it from the point of view of the clone.’”

Once cloning is a viable option, an infertile couple might like a cloned child. Grieving parents may want to replace a lost baby or a child killed in an accident. “Should grieving parents really be pursuing this route? ‘It’s a sign of our growing despotism over the next generation,’ argues Kass. Cloning introduces the possibility of parents’ making choices far more fundamental than whether to give them piano lessons or straighten their teeth. ‘It's not just that the parents will have particular hopes for these children,’ says Kass. ‘They will have expectations based on a life that has already been lived. What a thing to do—to carry on the life of a person who has died.’”

—Nancy Gibbs in Time, February 19, 2001 .

Science and wonder together

“Scientists can tell you that music is vibrations of the air, the neural excitations of the eardrum, that sort of thing—all of which is true and interesting—but the mystery of music, the reality of music, eludes science. And I’m not content in my search for truth to have a sort of truncated understanding that says, ‘Well, these things—music, wonder, religious experience—are just sort of froth.’ They seem to be much more serious than that. And I want to find a way of understanding that embraces all these things.”

—John Polkinghorne, particle physicist and Anglican priest, in Science & Spirit, quoted in Context, May 1, 2000 .

We can’t hide the rough edges for long

Last issue we quoted Mark Kingwell (“Smooth, Real Smooth,” p. 23) on our culture’s aesthetic of the soft and smooth. Here’s more: “As Rem Koolhaas noticed two decades ago, it is really the traffic jams that reveal the delirious heart of a city. Likewise, breaks and irruptions in the flow of data remind us of the messy infrastructural conditions of our communications, with its precommitments and biases and class differences. Now we have exposed, maybe for the first time, in these clogged streets and broken networks the dirty machinery of our own production. The struts and girders of inequality, and cantilevers of effort, are no longer covered by molded steel cladding or plastic coating. The guts of craft and luck and error, of exploitation and hype and deceit, are now spilling out. They have their own peculiar kind of beauty: not the easy, comfortable beauty of smoothness, but the much more demanding beauty of truth.”

—Harper’s Magazine, July 2000.

Crazy God

“I don’t experience God as the One, Pure Being, Quiet Nothingness, but as aboriginal and eternal Act, Crazy Yahweh. Fortunately for preaching, the Bible is on my side (at least most of the time).”

—Robert Neville, dean of the Boston University School of Theology, in Soundings, Fall/Winter 1999.

Islamic France ?

The latest wave of immigration threatens to change what Frenchness means. . . . The best estimates of the country’s Interior Ministry put France ’s Muslim population at four million. Overall church attendance by Christians in France is under 5%, and practicing Muslims number 27% of the four million figure. If trends continue, Islam may someday be France ’s predominant religion.

—Source: The Atlantic Monthly, November 2000.

Who are we kidding?

“The most obstinate misconception associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the gospel is welcome in this world, . . . that the gospel will be found attractive to people, become popular, and a success of some sort. The idea is curious and ironic because it is bluntly contradicted in Scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history.”

—William Stringfellow, in the book The Witness, quoted by Martin Marty in Context, November 13, 2000 .

Virtual Classrooms on the Rise

Popularity of online classrooms has grown rapidly at Illinois colleges and universities since the Illinois Virtual Campus went online last year.

The number of students enrolled through IVC grew 77 percent to about 26,000 between fall 1999 and spring 2000. Illinois students make up 95 percent of the enrollment.

—National On-Campus Report,

November 1, 2000

Whatcha Readin’?

These were the top ten books on campus in the last month:

1. Interpreter of Maladies , by Jhumpa Lahiri

2. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

3. The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

4. Genome, by Matt Ridley

5. Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel

6. The Darwin Awards , by Wendy Northcutt

7. Paris to the Moon , by Adam Gopnik

8. A Short Guide to a Happy Life , Anna Quindlen

9. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson

10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone , by J. K. Rowling

—Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2001

Quote

“Being Christian in this day and age seems to be the most punk rock thing you could do.”

Dan Quiggle, front man for the musical group Disciple, quoted in Current Thoughts & Trends, November 2000.

So . . . Don’t Repent?

“I’m not sure I’m in favor of repentance. Sinners are the ones who get the work done. A strong sense of personal guilt is what makes people willing to serve on committees.”

—Garrison Keillor, in U.S. Catholic, March 2000, quoted in Current Thoughts & Trends, November 2000

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