Letting Go of God

Some months before I listened to The Year of Living Biblically, I had checked out Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney, another recent audiobook that uses humor to question the sanity of religious belief. The two books are very different. First, The Year… really is a book (it was abridged somehow for the audio format), while Letting Go…, is really a one-person show recorded in front of a live audience. A smallish book comes inside Letting Go’s CD case, but I chose not to read it.

As Letting Go’s title might indicate, Sweeney is reporting on her spiritual quest. Her story begins in childhood as a young happily Catholic girl, but her journey doesn’t really get underway until early adulthood when she is diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. Predictably, she turns to her childhood faith for solace and hope only to discover that the Catholic understanding of God no longer satisfies her. Spiritual experiments of various sorts ensue, but ultimately she decides that the most sensible course of action is to “let go” of God entirely.

Sweeney is a gifted comedian and performer, and her descriptions of religious encounters are often amusing, and occasionally hysterically funny (warning to LDS: fast-forward through Sweeney’s encounter with her neighborhood missionaries; everyone else be prepared for a good chuckle). However, the humor is of the standard “I can’t believe they [followers of religion X] really believe this” variety and it grows stale, especially for someone of my age for whom bizarre religious practices (and what ritualized practices aren’t bizarre in some respect?) have lost most of their shock value.

The humor is periodically punctuated by a much too serious “confession” on the spiritual nature of life, God, faith, and rationality. I guess something like this was felt to be necessary; otherwise, one would be left with an uninterrupted and slightly sanctimonious screed against religion. But satire and confession mix as well as oil and water. It isn’t the message so much as the way it is delivered.

Bottom line: a mixed blessing.

The Year of Living Biblically

I obtained The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible from the public library as an audio book. At the end of the last track, a voice said the book had been “abridged for audio.” I have no idea what I missed out on, but it’s hard to imagine a better way to enjoy this story.

The author, A.J. Jacobs, reads the book himself. He is no actor. His voice is unassuming, with a nasal grainy quality, and his pacing is so deliberate that I sometimes thought he was unfamiliar with the words. But rather than detract from the story, it lends it considerable heart. The tone of his voice is a good guide to the humor and puzzling frustration that cohabit these pages.

As a work of audio, the book has another interesting, and for the MP3-based listener, redeeming feature. Each chapter is short, begins with a biblical verse, and ends with one or two lines of reflection. The latter are sometimes annoying, reminding me of the cutesy turns-of-phrases that appear at the end of news magazine stories (I haven’t looked at Times or Newsweek in years, but I’m guessing that these habits have not died), but they provide obvious markers for turning off your MP3 player.

When it comes to content, the book points out many of the absurdities of biblical literalism, primarily by having the main character (Jacobs) struggle to incorporate biblical behaviors into his everyday life. When a college student writes him asking for an unpaid internship, Jacobs replies instantly that this is possible as long as the intern is willing to be referred to as his “personal slave.” Jacobs’ glee at being able to perform several biblical injunctions regarding slave owners, without having to violate any civil laws or suffer pangs of conscience, is contagious (perhaps I feel this because I have been employing interns for two decades and never thought to call them “slaves”?).

The slavery example is typical of Jacobs’ approach. His feelings towards religion, especially the literal kind, is gentle, fond, and of course, frequently puzzled. Would any rational modern creature refrain on biblical principle from shaving, wearing clothes with mixed or forbidden fibers, or dancing with members of the opposite sex? If you feel ready to answer any of these questions instantly, you should read this book because it will give you pause. The individuals who pass through Jacobs’ life follow these injunctions, they live in the modern era, and to all appearances, they appear rational.

The light touch lends itself to humor, but it dodges some of religion’s more repulsive aspects. I have listened to Jewish literalists cite Biblical verse as justification for occupying the West Bank. My children have had to endure Christian literalist classmates telling them that they would burn in hellfire for eternity. And on it goes, religion after religion. The ability to read literally is too often used to breed self-righteousness, hatred, and intolerance.

Teaching Math

Most people assume that mathematicians know how to teach math, but how much expertise do the practitioners of a discipline have in the teaching and learning of that discipline? Certainly they have gone farther in their study of mathematics than the rest of us, but does that experience qualify them as experts on how the rest of us learn, or the best way to get us to learn?

I ask this out of genuine curiosity and concern. The mathematics teaching community has become highly polarized in recent decades over the “right” way to teach math (as if there could be just one “right” way). Each camp angrily challenges the ideas put forward by the other camp. And bystanders are forced to deal with an uncomfortable truth: if one camp of mathematicians is right, then the other camp, i.e., a large number of mathematicians, are necessarily wrong.

If you think I exaggerate, consider this quote from a recent interview in Science (21 March 2008, p. 1605), “Larry Faulkner has successfully steered the National Mathematics Advisory Panel through some of the roughest waters in education” (my emphasis). Getting mathematicians to agree on how and when algebra should be taught is apparently a very, very tough job.

If you would like to read the report they produced, go here. Here are a few highlights of Science magazine’s interview with Larry Faulkner:

• “The 19-member panel was supposed to rely on sound science …, but only a relative handful of the 16,000 studies it examined turned out to be useful. The vast majority, says Faulkner, were of insufficient quality, too narrow in scope, or lacked conclusive findings. The literature is especially thin on how to train teachers and how good teachers help students learn.”
• “Q (Science): Why do so many students have trouble with fractions? A (Larry Faulkner): Fractions have been downplayed. There’s been a tendency in recent decades to regard fractions to be operationally less important than numbers because you can express everything in decimals or in spreadsheets. But it’s important to have an instinctual sense of what a third of a pie is, or what 20% of something is, to understand the ratio of numbers involved and what happens as you manipulate it.”
• “Q: How could schools lose sight of that? A: Well, they did.”
• “Q: What’s the panel’s view on calculators? A: We feel strongly that they should not get in the way of acquiring automaticity [memorization of basic facts]. But the larger issue is the effectiveness of pedagogical software. At this stage, there’s no evidence of substantial benefit or damage, but we wouldn’t rule out products that could show a benefit. If a product could be demonstrated to be effective on a sizable scale under various conditions, the panel would be interested.”