The Muhammad caricature controversy drew a thoughtful editorial from Christianity Today (03/14/06) which I happen to agree with. Centuries earlier, Byzantine Christians were caught up in bloody sectarian violence over depiction of saints and prophets that the years between 762 and 775 were known as the “decade of blood.” Thousands then were exiled, tortured, or killed. Looking back at the mid-1500s, veneration of relics and the display of “graven images” again resulted in mayhem and destruction, so the editorial reminded readers.

Back then it wasn’t the freedom of expression that was at issue. So what’s the correct response? When does freedom become offense?

Today, the ongoing tit-for-tat destruction and killing that’s taking place in Nigeria by vengeful Christians, tells us that we can’t be pointing to the speck in another’s eye when a plank is in our own. Yet at the same time I am not of the opinion that the principle of charity is any less relevant. In fact, if we want to survive, civilisation as we know it needs to practise it more than ever.

Link: Nigeria religious conflict

Achievers
who are homeschoolers are not unusual and scores make the headlines
every year. But when Melbourne Uni reported that its youngest ever PHD
grad was a homeschooler who was born in Malaysia ( his family lived in
New Zealand since he was three and later in Australia when he was 16),
lots of people here sat up and took notice.

According to the 2001 Newsletter of the New Zealand Mathematical Society,
Yao-ban was also an accomplished pianist who
studied piano performance (passed LTCL last year) and was a regular
accompanist
and singer with his church choir. At home, he palyed computer
games and table tennis. He also read extensively and wrote fantasy
stories and had s put up two origami exhibitions and conducted a
demonstration class.

Way to go Yao-ban!

Never thought the day would come when I would be on the same page as
the New Straits Times, the venerable Grand Dame of Malaysian press.
Well, they’ve been hauled up by powerful politicos and authorities and
slapped with a show cause letter. Police reports have been made too,
primarily by opposition party PAS leaders who as we speak/write
continue its weekly  ‘peaceful’ Death to the Danes march after Friday prayers at the national mosque. Editors have been summoned by the Internal Security Ministry  and suspension of their printing license is in the works.

All because of a Non Sequitur cartoon featuring a sidewalk artist with
a poster saying, “Caricatures of Muhammad while You Wait.”

There’s no offensive cartoon of the prophet to speak of, although it is
a wry commentary on the ongoing Muslim fury unleashed over Danish
cartoons worldwide. The NST put out a defiant editorial defending the
cartoon (read it here) while naming names and detractors. 
As always, we wait with bated breath while powers-that-be await a
verdict from the all-wise Prime Minister Pak Lah, who’s visiting Down
Under currently.

What in heck is going on?

 C.S Lewis: “On the Reading of Old Books”

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why – the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

 John Piper writes in:

“Am I missing it, or is there an unusual silence in the blogosphere about the Muslim outrage over the cartoons of Mohammed. To me this cries out for the observation that when artists put the crucifix in a flask of urine, Christians were grieved and angered, but not one threatened to kill anyone. Our longing is to convert the blasphemers with the Good News of Christ’s death and resurrection, not kill them. Our faith is based on One who was reviled not just in cartoons but in reality and received it patiently for the salvation of the cartoonists. These riots are filled with intimations about the glorious difference between Christ and Mohammed, and between the way of Christ and the way of Islam. And the cowing of the press around the world and the US government is ominous for the fear we are under of Islam–not just extremist Islam. I do not respect the teachings of Islam which when followed devoutly lead to destruction. So I have been pondering which will take me out first, Islam, Uncle Sam, or cancer. No matter, all authority belongs to Jesus. I just want to bear faithful witness to his glorious gospel of peace to the end.”

Quote lifted from Piper’s personal email first posted here.

“If it is our schools which are ‘teaching disabled,’ the symptoms of
this lack would still be visible primarily in the students and not
necessarily in the schools or teachers. When a doctor is incompetent,
it is the patient who dies” (The Paideia of God, Douglas Wilson).

I had previously posted about 12-year-old Malaysian autistic savant Yeak Ping Lian so it was good to read that he’s in NY participating in an exhibition, Autistic Savant Artworks: Don’t ‘dis’ the Ability at
the Henry Gregg Gallery in Brooklyn on Saturday.  Ping Lian’s work
is being shown together with 2 other well known autistic savant artists
Richard Wawro of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Iranian-born Christophe Pillault of Olivet, France. 

Autism educator and networker Dr Lawrence Becker of Creative Learning Environments, Austin, Texas, praised the trio saying they embodied the “quality and persistence of the human spirit.” 

I was going to say that ‘persistence’ was also a quality that Ping
Lian’s mom possessed in spades, because she believed in him enough
to put her own interest second to her child’s. Ping Lian could
never quite fit in conventional schools so his mother Sarah Lee
had him homeschooled, supplemented by additional special needs
tuition, and especially art.

Related link: Wisconsin Medical Society

So Tash Aw didn’t get a whiff closer to the
Booker Prize than a mention in the long list (Banvile won), but what a whiff
for someone who apparently appeared from nowhere. Never mind that.  Aw’s sophomore effort The Harmony Silk Factory,
was recently announced the Whitbread First Novel 2005 winner which is sure to
move more books off the shelves. It’s a competent story if not a little uneven,
and Aw’s forays into exotica is a mite too self-conscious.

The Harmony Silk Factory has a
Rashomon-like narrative presenting the recollections of 4 protagonists in
colonial Malaya before the Japanese invasion: Jasper, the scion of wealthy local strongman Johnny; Johnny himself; the beautiful
Snow Soong who became Jasper’s mother; and Englishman, Wormwood. Johnny whose
shady dealings earn him bragging rights as the richest man in Kinta Valley, comes
across as a typical Chinese man who is as inscrutable as he is unrefined – at
least compared to the delicate and high born Snow Soong who ends up becoming
his wife. Snow is the languid beauty caught in some kind of love triangle, but
you wonder what the fuss is all about because she is also the least interesting
of the four. What is interesting to me, however, is the backdrop – the
geography and culture – which is immediately recognisable to one who lives in Malaysia
and is familiar with its history.

The rising literary star is an engaging
storyteller and a genuine talent, and I predict, Aw could well be the next
Asian celeb writer. In time. 33 year-old Tash Aw was born in Taipei, but spent
his childhood in Malaysia before moving to England
in his late teens where he now lives. This explains why Malaysians are
embracing him as their own, as if Aw’s own achievement somehow redeems our
lowly station in a constellation of explosive Asian luminaries. It’s something
that embarrasses me no end and I don’t understand the media’s shameless complicity.

Related  links:
Review: Colonial fantasies put to rest
Interview: Tash for Cash

Got this interesting link from Lim Kit Siang’s blog. Whether they mean anything waits to be seen, but Ed Caesar
of the Independent believes the following list is a certainty. If so,
that’s a lot to chew on don’t you think? What is striking about a
seemingly value-free list such as this is not what it says, but what it
does not say. 

Adi Putra Abdul Ghani,
a six-year-old mathematics prodigy from Perak is drawing attention from
government types. Minister of Education  Datuk Seri
Hishammuddin is impressed. “He sat on my chair just
now. He looked so comfortable there that I started to worry that I may lose my
job to this brainy boy,” joked the Minister.

The boy’s father Abdul Ghani Abdul Wahid is a Tenaga
Nasional Berhad officer
while mother Seri Hana Ilias teaches English in a school. News reports
said Adi who was taught at home (he was never enrolled in a
kindergarten is what they mean) surprised everyone with his grasp of
algebra, trigonometry and indices. Meanwhile the Terengganu
State government announced that it was adopting Adi, and that educational expenses and training programme of the math genius
would be borne by the State government.

But what caught my eye
was what Hishamuddin said next.

According to Hishammuddin the ministry was looking into ways to promote
a more flexible education system which could be equally accessed by all
students regardless of their social backgrounds. “We don’t want to see any students in rural areas, who are poor,
handicapped or smart like Adi Putra, to be marginalised or deprived of access
to education,” he said.

Although I suspect homeschooling was not on the minister’s mind when he talked about a flexible education system, wouldn’t it be great if the MOE start looking at it as an option – and not just for rural kids?