Heads you win, tails I lose

If we start from the assumption that neurotypicals are ‘normal,’ and autistics are ‘disordered,’ then poor connections between neurotypicals and autistics inevitably get blamed on some ‘defect’ or ‘deficit’ in autistics. If an autistic person can’t understand a neurotypical, it’s because autistics have empathy deficits and impaired communication skills; if a neurotypical can’t understand an autistic person, it’s because autistics have empathy deficits and impaired communication skills. (Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies)

To put it another way, a good deal of the disability experienced by autistic people is actually created by the failure of neurotypical society to accommodate their neurodivergence.

Israel, Gaza, and war crimes: an update

The Ehud Olmert article I referred to a couple of days ago has now been translated into English and can be found in full (here) in The Guardian.

Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025)

Sebastião Salgado, one of the great documentary photographers, died on Friday. I have been fascinated by his work since I saw the film The Salt of the Earth, a documentary about Salgado directed by his son Juliano and Wim Wenders. His dramatic, contrasty black-and-white images are a large part of what has inspired me to shift towards black-and-white photography.

But, given my concern for the environment, it is not surprising that I think his environmentalism was as important as his photography. With his wife Leila, he set up the Instituto Terra in 1998 with the purpose of restoring part of the Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Since then, it has restored 2,000 hectares of land and produced nearly 7 million seedlings. It has also become a major centre for environmental education.

Israel, Gaza, and war crimes

I have just come across this quote:

.…What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with reckless abandon. Yes, we are committing war crimes.

This did not come from the pen of an anti-Zionist or a pro-Palestinian. It is an extract from an article written by former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and published in the Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz on 22 May.

A Kindle question

 

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I find myself wondering how Amazon works out what items to recommend to me on Kindle. Specifically, I have questions about their recommendations allegedly based on my recent purchases. A couple of examples from today’s recommendations:

• A chess book. I have never bought a chess book (or anything chess related) from Amazon. The odd thing is that a couple of weeks ago, I did an Internet search for reviews of chess apps. As a result of that research, I decided to install Lichess on my tablet.
• A book on ChatGPT and another on AI more generally. Again, I have not bought anything AI related from Amazon. However, some of the blogs I subscribe to do discuss AI from time to time, e.g. its dangers; the immorality of training AI on copyright material; the academic use of AI (specifically, Claude) as a research assistant.

Coincidence? Or does Amazon install tracking cookies to pick up leads for potential sales?

Thought and action

In a recent Expressive Photography newsletter, Alister Benn makes the following comment:

If you don’t think about something at all, it has no value to you.
If all you do is think about something and then do nothing about it, you are of no value to it.

Alister was talking about photography, but I feel this has much wider application. For example, you cannot honestly say you value the natural world if you never give it a second thought. Conversely, if all you do is talk about caring for nature while continuing to live a typical modern Western lifestyle, you are certainly of no value to it.

Radical Orthodoxy may be a health hazard

Here is my second extract from Elizabeth Smith’s ‘Radical Orthodoxy for Dummies’:

The Fine Print:  Radical Orthodoxy May Be a Health Hazard

Now, a word of caution to the would-be Radically Orthodox. If one or more of the following apply to you, you may not be cut out for a career in this branch of theological endeavour. 

1. Your interest in sex as a subject for theological reflection still carries a concern for the practical and social and spiritual liberation of women. Radical Orthodoxy seems to be better at problematising the gender of Christ than it is at deproblematising the economic and political downside of the gender of actual women. However, if you are a woman theologian who is happy to continue speaking of “God himself,” you will probably be fine.  
2. You think think that theology is fun to do, but it still matters to you that it’s fun for anyone else to read. Radical Orthodoxy seems to have jettisoned clarity of English syntax in favour of bandwagon vocabulary. However, if a sentence like the following appeals to you, you will most likely do well in Radical Orthodoxy: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, this search for the universal and the ‘superhuman’ reveals itself as a hopeless and ultimately nihilistic account of form and essence, since it maintains that forms can appear apart from what they inform, and universality upholds only its self-depiction and has no necessary or obvious regard for the particulars it could instantiate.”  (Phillip Blond, “Perception:  From modern painting to the vision in Christ,” in Millbank, Pickstock, and Ward, eds, Radical Orthodoxy:  A New Theology , p. 229.)
3. You quite enjoy reading and interpreting the bible. Radical Orthodoxy hasn’t quite worked its way back past Augustine to scripture as a source of inspiration, let alone as a major primary contributor to theology. However, there is probably another rediscovery of patristic biblical hermeneutics waiting to happen, and possibly yet another a re-appreciation of the bible as artful verbiage (“literature”) worthy of some attention in its own right, so if you want to help inspire the Radically Orthodox to reappropriate the word “biblical” the way they’re reappropriating “platonic,” by all means go for it.
4. You are a sacramental theologian or liturgical theologian. Radical Orthodoxy is acting rather as if it had invented, with a little help from its postmodern and platonic friends, the entire concept of an “outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible reality,” while you and your mates have been exploring this very field of endeavour for decades already.  You may feel a trifle resentful that Radical Orthodoxy does not give due credit to the liturgical life of the church for persevering with an environment that is rich in metaphor, visual image, sensory input and embodied prayer, while all around were foundering in the sterility of metaphysics and rationality.  However, if with Prince Charles you suspect that the last 50 years of liturgical renewal have been a bad mistake and a waste of time, or if you think liturgists are really terrorists who can’t be trusted with real theology, you may well find a way to enjoy Radical Orthodoxy.
5. You can’t muster up much theological nostalgia. Perhaps you think that the best and most fruitful theology is yet to come and your energy is best directed into constructive rather than deconstructive projects. Perhaps you get exhausted just thinking about the embedded patriarchal assumptions in 99.5 per cent of theology to date, and despite your genuine admiration for Aquinas you would rather put your hand to the plough and not look back. 

If you still want to become Radically Orthodox, dodging, embracing or transforming the issues described above, you may find you can do it even without footnotes to Hans Urs von Balthasar.