Category Archives: Rationalism

Its a work of art, says Gary Gautier, standing on the black marble steps of a serpentine staircase inside Barcelonas Casa Batll. A silver curtain shimmers behind him, rippling like the scales on a dragons back, while beneath his feet the underbelly of the staircaseresembles the spinal vertebrae of the mythical beast. Gautier is a member of the Bernat family, who have owned the house designed by the famed Catalan architect Antoni Gaud since the 1990s. The family have fully restored his masterpiece and as CEO Gautier, 36, isnow future-proofing the tourist attraction (and Unesco World Heritage Site), which opened to the public in 2002,by collaborating with creatives such as Japanese architectKengo Kuma to enhance Gauds vision withinterventions that will create an immersive experienceinside the house.

The new staircase (13 tons of Spanish-quarried, robotcut, hand-sculpted and polished Nero Marquina marble) appears suspended in mid-air, spiralling down from the ground floor to the basement. It is a fitting emblem for thebigger ambitions of the museum a first, in that it isthe largest free-floating marble staircase in theworld, designed and engineered by British specialist Ancient & Modern: Chesneys Architectural. It really delivers a sense of wow, says thecompanys technical director Joo da Silva of thepiece, which winds 14m from top tobottom. We looked to Gauds extraordinary methodology and vision when designing Casa Batll. He was a fearless creative inspired by thewonders of nature and the aquatic world,he created a house with no straight lines. We usedancient stonemasonry skills as well as cutting-edge technology to honour his work, adds da Silva, who wastasked with finding black marblewith very littleveining before overseeing the installation, which was finalised during pandemic-enforced closures of the museum.

The staircases animalistic form and the pyrotechnic engineering continue Gauds legacy of fusing innovation with artisanal skills (the architect is thought to have learnt much about materials from his coppersmith father). It also links the past and the future, connecting the newly conceived spaces in the basement with the original house onthe upper floors.

Gautier and the team have expanded the museum by 2,000sq m to create a betternavigational flow for guests, as wellas bringing Gauds wild imaginative aestheticto life with multisensory technology. Thenew Gaud Dome room creates an immersive environment with an installation by Miguel Alonso a rotating platform from which visitors view a dome of more than 1,000 digital projections and21 audio channels (complemented by binaural sound and scent) that transports them inside the mind of the Spanish architect. The six-sided LED Cube, by Turkish media artist Refik Anadol, explores Gauds creativity with imagery and data from the worlds most comprehensive Gaud digital library, collated using artificial intelligence. It is all billed as the worlds first 10D Experience.

Kengo Kuma worked on the skin that transforms the staircase into a jaw-dropping art installation and guest experience. We imagined the space dressed in aluminium-bead curtains. Its meticulous materiality catches the light, as if it were a fishing net, revealing it to us in shapes, brightness, silhouettes and shadows, thus omitting the need for any other material, says Kuma, who collaborated with Italian light designer Mario Nanni on the showcase.

Imaginative new additions also appear in Gauds original house: magic mirrors (transmitting imagery triggered by micro-sensors in the visitors audio guide) have been installed throughout a suite of rooms that recreate scenes from the history of the house.

Five years ago we realised we were not on a good path because culture has not evolved in the past 50 years as it has with cars or tech, says Gautier ofthe impetus behind the houses makeover. So we asked what we could do to make our museum the most fun spot to be in thecity. How could we make people feel excitement and not just some people, but everyone? Gautier is the grandson of Enric Bernat, the founder of the Chupa Chups confectionery empire, and the desire to innovate and collaborate is deeply rooted in the family. It was Bernat, for instance, who in 1969 commissioned Salvador Dal to create the logo for his lollipops. The artist put the Chupa Chups name into a brightly coloured daisy shape an iconic design still used for its wrappers today.

Indeed, the story of Casa Batll is one of constant reinvention. Gaud did not build the house (first erected in 1877); rather, he was commissioned by its then owner, Josep Batll y Casanovas to remodel the faade, interior and inner courtyard, transforming it into something spectacular. The extensive work, which took place between 1904 and 1906, created one of the most talked-about addresses onthe prestigious Passeig de Grcia a shimmering mosaic (trencads) faade in art-nouveau style was set with Montjuc stone balconies thatappear almost liquefied with their sinuous columns and mask-like cast-iron rails. So distinctive is the aesthetic that locals call the building the house of bones.

Inside, the architect embraced the surreal magic of nature, geometry and the exquisite proportions of classicism. He had a fondness for helicoid spirals, parabolic arches and undulating surfaces. The original carved-oak staircase that leads from the lobby to Batlls apartment resembles a prehistoric backbone, and Gauds wondrous aquatic-inspired dream permeates every detail: the interior courtyard walls are covered in glazed tiles reminiscent offish scales in aqua tones; porthole windows are inset with jewel-coloured stained glass; the roof resembles a dragons back; and the arching ceilings andelliptical lines of the rooms echo the ecological otherworldliness of undersea caves and coral beds. You feel as if you are diving into the deep blue of the ocean.

The magic of the building exists in the realm of the senses. No matter what time of day, you feel something, says Gautier of Gauds design. Other buildings can be bigger, newer, but Casa Batll is like discovering a cave or an especially atmospheric place in nature. It has the ability to arouse emotions and connect with the soul. Everyone who has stepped inside will recognise that magic.

Antoni Gaud was the toast of Europe when he designed Casa Batll. He brought a dynamic modernity and a sense of daring to architecture. A newly minted industrial class, including early patron Eusebi Gell, commissioned Gaud for lamp posts, shopfronts, gateways, trade-fair stands, street kiosks, factories, homes and the Gell Palace and Park, which is perched on a hillside overlooking Barcelona. In 1883, he was tasked with completing the Sagrada Famlia (in place of architect Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano), taking the design in a completely new and adventurous direction. He worked on the basilica until his accidental death in 1926 and is buried in the crypt. Although modern buildings now obscure its view over the city, it is thought that at one time you could see the church from the rooftopterrace of Casa Batll.

We imagined the space dressed in aluminium-bead curtains. It catches the light like a fishing net

Gautiers early memories of the house are of a time when the lustre of Gauds magic had faded with neglect. Back in the 1990s it was in disrepair. The building was dark, dirty and messed up inside you would never take a selfie in front of it like today, he says. My mother Marta led the project to bring the building back to life. During the renovations, the larger rooms on the piano nobile were rented out for corporate events and weddings to help fund the project.

As a teenager, joining the family preservation project was not on the agenda and Gautier went on to graduate and work for a global consulting company. The transition from the financial world to cultural guardian did not happen overnight. My grandfather always said if you dowhat you love, you will love what you do, he says, but it took a stint at Singularity University in California (aninnovation laboratory using artificial intelligence, robotics and digital biology) to galvanise his interests. He returned to Barcelona to design and oversee the customer journey experience. I was comfortable working there and found my personal challenge can culture be as fun as other forms of entertainment?

The latest chapter of the building represents a 30m investment, roughly divided equally between structural renovations and technological enhancement. The first phase the extensive restoration of the piano nobile (including the pink plasterwork, tiles and stained glass and the addition of a skywalk on the roof) was completed by architect Xavier Villanueva and a team of 40 restoration experts in 2018. Once the bones were cleaned up, the second phase shifted to interventions. By way of research, Gautier and his team visited comparable spots around the world, but with the exception of the Van Gogh Museum, Tate Modern and TeamLab, in Japan, he found such institutions well managed but largely conventional.

For some purists, his tech-driven improvements might seem wacky, but millions of others will likely find them inspirational, educational and, above all, entertaining. Visitors will not, of course, be forced to consume Gauds favoured vegetarian diet of boiled eggs and green plants prior to arrival, but the experience might just feed the mind all the same. Gaud left behind an understanding of architecture that has helped its evolution. Instead of the rationalism of previous times, he found ways of merging functionality, craftsmanship and beauty in an innovative and a disruptive way, Gautier concludes. As this house testifies, the only constant in life is change and we need to adapt if we want to remain relevant.

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By the grace of Gaud: the reinvention of Barcelona's Casa Batll - Financial Times

The perceived tension between science and religion is a misunderstanding of the relationship between faith and reason writes Dr Andrew Meeszaros

The alleged incompatibility between a scientific worldview and a religious one has been a major and consistent factor in the rise of the nones, or those with no religious affiliation. Because religion seems to contradict the methods and conclusions of science, increased education especially immersion into STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) seems to coincide with a decrease in religious commitment. At the heart of this perceived tension is a misunderstanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

The Catholic worldview embraces both faith and reason, for they can never contradict. They are, as St John Paull II taught, like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. While the Catholic intellectual tradition has long defended the mutual vitality of faith and reason, a key and authoritative moment in the Churchs teaching on these two gifts came at the First Vatican Council in 1870, whose 150th anniversary was overshadowed by the pandemic.

While Vatican I is often remembered for its definition of papal infallibility, this council also promulgated the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, a seminal, under-appreciated, and all too often ignored text. It was in this great document that the Church affirmed not only that God is the creator and sustainer of all that exists, but also that God can be known by us through reason as well as by revelation; that divine revelation offers us truths that surpass what reason can deliver to us; that faith is a supernatural gift of God whose exercise is reasonable; that reason, philosophy, and science have a rightful and noble place in the humans search for truth; that there can be no discrepancy between faith and reason, and that they also mutually support each other.

Most intellectual ills within the Church and without, both in 1870 and today, can be traced either to subordinating faith to reason, or to relegating reason to the margins. Back then, they called these errors rationalism and fideism. Today, we still find both, whether in the Catholic who reinterprets or waters down the faith in order for it to become more palatable or reasonable, (i.e., rationalism) or the catechist who in his or her communication of the faith, shrinks away from using reason and all too quickly declares, Its just a matter of faith (i.e., fideism).

To help Catholics appreciate and benefit from the teaching of Dei Filius, St Patricks College Maynooth will host an online symposium to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vatican I. Spread over three different afternoon sessions on three consecutive days (22-24 April) the symposium will consist of invited scholars presenting and offering commentary on the key issues of the text. The goal of the symposium will be to offer all those interested (including students, scholars, religious, priests, lay pastoral workers, etc.) an opportunity to immerse themselves in an important, but much-neglected, text that explains the foundations of the Catholic faith.

Registration is free by clicking here.

Dr Andrew Meeszaros lectures in theology at St Patricks College, Maynooth.

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Catholics: don't be afraid of reason and science - here's why - The Irish Catholic

BETHESDA, Md., April 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EDITION Hotels today announced its further international expansion by the end of 2022, with the slated opening of eight new properties across three continents. The new openings include sites in Rome, Madrid, Dubai, Reykjavik, Tampa, Doha, Mexico's Riviera Maya at Kanai and EDITION's second property in Tokyo. With 11 hotels worldwide currently, these planned openings underscore the brand's strong growth and will bring the portfolio to a total of 19 properties globally. In addition to these new properties, EDITION Hotels expects to announce further expansion later in 2022.

EDITION Hotels redefine the concept of luxury through offering an unexpected collection of one-of-a-kind hotels. Conceived by hotel visionary and cultural icon Ian Schrager and Marriott International, the brand also benefits from Marriott's global scale and operational expertise. The commitment to uncompromising quality, true originality and impeccable modern service continue to challenge traditional perceptions of luxury and entrench EDITION's position as an industry leader. Every EDITION hotel is unique, reflecting the social and cultural milieu of the time and place of its creation. Each new property is individually developed in collaboration with one of the world's most eminent designers chosen specifically for that location, and introduces original food and beverage concepts from internationally renowned chefs. The end result offers the best of dining and entertainment, modern luxury services and amenities "all under one roof."

"I've always been committed to being involved in special projects on a global scale that reach new heights.I'm thrilled to work together with Marriott, and the opportunity to see these hotels come to life across the world is a dream come true." Ian Schrager.

Please find further details on the properties and their scheduled opening dates below:

The Reykjavik EDITION

Launching mid 2021

The Reykjavik EDITIONis anticipated to launch in summer 2021 in one of the world's most sustainable capitals. Located in the historical, scenic heart of downtown Reykjavik by Old Harbor port, the hotel is just steps away from Laugavegur Street, the city's vibrant shopping district, and the Harpa Concert and Conference Center.The hotel is the perfect jumping off point for exploring the wonders of the region, with the renowned Blue Lagoon within driving distance and the Northern Lights visible in the city during the winter solstice.

Ian Schrager Company has collaborated with architects T.arch and designers Roman & Williams to introduce EDITION Hotels to Iceland. Poised to offer 253 guestrooms and suites, The Reykjavik EDITION will house a rooftop, nightlife, spacious meeting and event spaces (502 sqm/5,402 sqft) and a spa. In addition, the hotel is expected to offer guests and locals a diverse culinary offering with a signature restaurant, destination bar and a caf.

The Tokyo EDITION, Ginza

Launching late 2021

Following the successful launch of the first Japanese EDITION hotel with The Tokyo EDITION, Toranomon in late 2020, the opening of the The Tokyo EDITION, Ginza will further strengthen the brand's position as one of the most exciting lifestyle pioneers in Asia. Slated to open in late 2021, The Tokyo EDITION, Ginza will be situated just off Chuo Street, one of the largest upscale entertainment and shopping destinations in the city.

The newly constructed property will include 86 guestrooms and suites, three incredible food and beverage destinations including rooftop bar, together with meeting studio and a state-of-the-art fitness center.

The Rome EDITION

Launching late 2021

Expected to open late in 2021, EDITION Hotels' first Italian property will feature 95 guest rooms and suites, including a Penthouse suite with a private 130 sqm (1,399 sqft) terrace. The Rome EDITIONwill offer uniquely designed food and beverage outlets, including a signature restaurant with outdoor dining space that will make locals and visitors fall in love with its cuisine and all that comes with it; a Punch Room Bar with exceptionally crafted cocktails; and a Rooftop Terrace where guests can have the choice of a seasonal bite, a drink overlooking the city, a private gathering with friends, or all of the above. In addition to customizable indoor and outdoor event spaces, the hotel will also be home to a rooftop swimming pool, a very spacious hi-tech gym, and two treatment rooms including a couple-massage experience.

With its central location a few steps from Via Veneto and Bernini's Tritone Fountain in Piazza Barberini, The Rome EDITION is within a short walk of all the best that the city has to offer, such as the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, the Borghese Gardens and Gallery, and many other wonders that make Rome a must-see destination. At the corner of modern luxury and history, the hotel is housed within a historical striking building designed by Cesare Pascoletti in collaboration with architect Marcello Piacentini, one of Italy's most famed architects of Rationalism in the early 20thcentury.

The Dubai EDITION

Launching late 2021

The anticipated opening of theThe Dubai EDITIONin late 2021 will mark a significant expansion for the brand into the Middle East's most popular travel destination. Situated in downtown Dubai, the hotel will be located in one of the city's most popular locations, opposite the world-famous Dubai Mall.

Designed with LW Design Group LLC, the hotel will feature 275 guestrooms and suites. The property will also be home to multiple food and beverage outlets, pool, spa and fitness center, in addition to dynamic events spaces boasting meeting rooms and a flexible ballroom.

The Madrid EDITION

Launching early 2022

The Madrid EDITIONwill showcase 200 beautifully appointed guestrooms and suites, some with terraces, and five unique food and beverage outlets including a signature restaurant, cocktail bar, Sky Bar and rooftop terrace, together with an outdoor pool, state-of-the-art fitness center and spa. Flexible studios with over 350sqm (3,767 sqft) of dedicated space will host creative meetings and events for large or small groups.

Set in a tranquil square surrounded by historic buildings, The Madrid EDITION is near Puerta de Sol in the heart of the Spanish capital, one of the city's most famous sites, and within walking distance to The Golden Triangle of Art three of the most important art museums in Madrid.

Slated to open in early 2022, the hotel will reflect the people and the culture of the city and will become a stunning microcosm of one-of-a-kind food, beverage and entertainment offerings, innovative design, and luxury service. The Madrid EDITION will be the second EDITION Hotel in Spain, following the successful opening of The Barcelona EDITION in 2018.

The Tampa EDITION

Launching early 2022

Planned to open in early 2022, The Tampa EDITIONwill become the fifth US property from EDITION Hotels. Situated withinthe new 56-acre Water Street Tampa neighborhood, the hotel will be home to172guestrooms and suites and six food and beverage outlets, including a signature restaurant, rooftop bar and terrace. The property will also feature a 204sqm (2,195 sqft) Penthouse Suite, expansive spa, fitness center and over 550sqm (5,920 sqft) of flexible meeting and events space. Bringing some of the world's best talents together into one project, design is care of the acclaimed New York-based architecture practice Morris Adjmi in collaboration with Florida-based firm Nichols Brosch Wurst Wolfe & Associates; with interiors designed by the renowned Roman & Williams. The hotel is situated within immediate proximity to the best that Tampa has tooffer interms of cultural institutions, entertainment, recreational, dining and shopping options.

The Riviera Maya EDITION at Kanai

Launching mid 2022

The Riviera Maya EDITION at Kanaiis expected to open in mid 2022. With 180 guestrooms and suites, the hotel will be situated within the luxurious Kanai development, and home to six food and beverage outlets including a signature restaurant, pool bar and beach club, destination spa and an expansive 206sqm (2,217 sqft) Penthouse Suite. In addition to multiple meeting spaces, the hotel will also house an extensive outdoor deck for large scale events and parties.

Located on a pristine beachfront site, EDITION Hotels' first property in Mexico will find its home in the blissful stretch of Caribbean coastline. Riviera Maya is known for its mangroves and lagoons, ancient Mayan cities, tropical beaches, ecological reserves and the world's second largest coral reef.

The Doha EDITION

Launching late 2022

The DohaEDITIONisanticipated to open in late 2022in Doha's central business district, West Bay,whichedgesthePersianGulf.The hotel will have 200 guest rooms including 29 suites, two restaurants, three bars and a nightclub and nearly 929 sqm (10,000 sqft) of event space. The hotel tower will punctuate the already eclectic Doha skyline and will house167 EDITION branded residences.

Note on Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of U.S. federal securities laws, including expected hotel openings, future expansion announcements and similar statements concerning anticipated future events and expectations that are not historical facts. We (Marriott International, Inc.) caution you that these statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to numerous evolving risks and uncertainties that we may not be able to accurately predict or assess, including those we identify below and other risk factors that we identify in our U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K. Risks that could affect forward-looking statements in this press release include the duration and scope of COVID-19, including the availability and distribution of effective vaccines or treatments; its short and longer-term impact on the demand for travel, transient and group business, and levels of consumer confidence; actions governments, businesses and individuals have taken or may take in response to the pandemic, including limiting or banning travel and/or in-person gatherings or imposing occupancy or other restrictions on lodging or other facilities; the impact of the pandemic and actions taken in response to the pandemic on global and regional economies, travel, and economic activity, including the duration and magnitude of COVID-19's impact on unemployment rates and consumer discretionary spending; the ability of our owners and franchisees to successfully navigate the impacts of COVID-19; the pace of recovery when the pandemic subsides or effective treatments or vaccines become widely available; general economic uncertainty in key global markets and a worsening of global economic conditions or low levels of economic growth; the effects of steps we and our property owners and franchisees have taken and may continue to take to reduce operating costs and/or enhance certain health and cleanliness protocols at our hotels; the impacts of our employee furloughs and reduced work week schedules; our voluntary transition program and our other restructuring activities; competitive conditions in the lodging industry; relationships with customers and property owners; and the availability of capital to finance hotel growth and refurbishment. Any of these factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations we express or imply in this press release. We make these forward-looking statements as of the date of this press release, and undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

ABOUT EDITION HOTELS

EDITION Hotels is an unexpected and refreshing collection of individualised, customised, one-of-a-kind hotels which redefine the codes of traditional luxury. Displaying the best of dining and entertainment, services and amenities "all under one roof," each EDITION property is completely unique, reflecting the best of the cultural and social milieu of its location and of the time.

Conceived by Ian Schrager in collaboration with Marriott International, EDITION combines both the personal and intimate experience that Ian Schrager is known for with the global reach, operational expertise and scale of Marriott. The authenticity and originality that Ian Schrager brings to this brand coupled with the scale of Marriott International results in a truly distinct product that sets itself apart from anything else currently in the marketplace.

For affluent, culturally savvy and service-savvy guests, the EDITION experience and lifestyle explores the unprecedented intersection and the perfect balance between taste-making design and innovation and consistent, excellent service on a global scale. EDITION manages 11 hotels around the world including two in New York, and one in each of London, Miami Beach, West Hollywood, Barcelona, Shanghai, Sanya (China), Abu Dhabi, Bodrum (Turkey) and Tokyo.

About Marriott International

Marriott International, Inc.(NASDAQ: MAR) is based in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, and encompasses a portfolio of more than 7,600 properties under 30 leading brands spanning 133 countries and territories. Marriott operates and franchises hotels and licenses vacation ownership resorts all around the world. The company offers Marriott Bonvoy, its highly-awarded travel program. For more information, please visit our website atwww.marriott.com, and for the latest company news, visitwww.marriottnewscenter.com. In addition, connect with us onFacebookand @MarriottIntl onTwitterandInstagram.

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EDITION Announces Eight Anticipated New Hotel Openings Across The Globe By The End Of 2022 - Herald-Mail Media

Early on April 4 morning, the following message appeared on the Twitter account of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the newly elected U.S. senator from Georgia: The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.

He later deleted the tweet, but not before strong reaction from both conservative and progressive Christians. Some conservative Christians denounced Warnock as a heretic for, in their view, downplaying the story of Jesus bodily resurrection and for claiming that humans can save themselves rather than God, who alone saves humans from their sins. Other Christians came to Warnocks defense, citing his credentials as a theologian and pastor of Atlantas Ebenezer Baptist Church. Rather than condemn his message, they applauded him for sharing a more humanistic message that included non-Christians.

As a Baptist minister and theologian myself, I believe it is important to understand how Baptists hold differing views on the meaning of the Resurrection.

Easter is the Christian holiday which commemorates the story of Jesus Christs resurrection. According to the Christian faith, resurrection is the pivotal event on which God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day after he was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and then buried in a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea.

While none of the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe the actual event of the resurrection in detail, they nonetheless give varying reports about the empty tomb and Christs post-resurrection appearances among his followers both in Galilee and Jerusalem.

They also report that it was women who discovered the empty tomb and received and proclaimed the first message that Christ was risen from the dead. These narratives passed down orally among the earliest Christian communities and then codified in the Gospel writings beginning some 30 years after Jesus death.

Earliest Christians believed that by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God vindicated Jesus from the torture and death he unjustly incurred at the order of Pilate, and that Jesus now as the crucified and risen Lord shares in Gods power to transform the creation and put an end to evil and suffering.

By affirming the resurrection, Christians do not mean that Jesus body was merely resuscitated. Rather, as New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson indicates, resurrection means that [Jesus] entered into an entirely new form of existence.

As the risen Christ, Jesus is believed to share Gods power to transform all life and also to share this same power with his followers. So the resurrection is believed to be something that happened not only to Jesus, but also an experience that happens to his followers.

Over the years, Christians have engaged in passionate debates over this central doctrine of Christian faith.

Two major approaches emerged: the liberal view and the conservative or traditional view. Current perspectives on the resurrection have been predominated by questions: Was Jesus body literally raised from the dead? and What relevance does the resurrection have for those struggling for justice?

These questions emerged in the wake of theological modernism, a European and North American movement dating back to the mid-19th century that sought to reinterpret Christianity to accommodate the emergence of modern science, history and ethics.

Also known as liberal theology, theological modernism led liberal Christian theologians to attempt to create an alternative path between the rigid orthodoxies of Christian churches and the rationalism of atheists and others.

This meant that liberal Christians were willing to revise or jettison cherished Christian beliefs, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, if such beliefs could not be explained against the bar of human reason.

Just like all other Christian denominations, Baptists are divided on the issue of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Arguably, what may be unique about the group is that Baptists believe that no external religious authority can force an individual member to adhere to the tenets of Christian faith in any prescribed way. One must be free to accept or reject any teaching of the church.

In the early 20th century, Baptists in the United States found themselves on both sides of a schism within American Christianity over doctrinal issues, known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.

The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist pastor who served First Presbyterian Church and later Riverside Church in Manhattan, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Rather, Fosdick viewed the resurrection as a persistence in [Christs] personality.

In 1922, Fosdick delivered his famous sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win? rebuking fundamentalists for their failure to tolerate difference on doctrinal matters such as the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth, and bodily Resurrection, among others, and for downplaying the weightier matter of addressing the societal needs of the day.

In his autobiography, the late civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explains that in his early adolescence he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

While attending Crozer Seminary in 1949, King wrote a paper trying to make sense of what led to the development of the Christian doctrine of Jesus bodily resurrection. For King, the experience of the early followers of Jesus was at the root of their belief in his resurrection.

They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality, King argued. This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. In other words, the bodily resurrection of Jesus simply is the outward expression of early Christian experience, not an actual, or at least, a verifiable event in human history.

Others within the Baptist movement disagreed. Like his fundamentalist forebears, conservative evangelical Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry argued in 1976 that all Christian doctrine can be rationally explained and can persuade any nonbeliever. Henry rigorously defended the bodily resurrection of Christ as a historical occurrence by appealing to the Gospels telling of the empty tomb and Christs appearances among his disciples after his resurrection.

In his six-volume magnum opus, God, Revelation, and Authority, Henry read these two elements of the Gospels as historical records that can be verified through modern historical methods.

Despite their predominance, the liberal and conservative arguments on the resurrection of Jesus are not the only approaches held among Baptists.

In his book Resurrection and Discipleship, Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen also outlines what he calls the evangelical approach, which seeks to transcend the distinctions of liberal and conservative approaches. He affirms, with the conservatives, the historical reality of the Resurrection, but agrees with the liberals that such an event cannot be verified in the modern historical sense.

Other than these, there is a liberation approach, which stresses the social and political implications of the Resurrection. Baptists who hold this view primarily interpret the resurrection as Gods response and commitment to liberating those who, like Jesus, experience poverty and oppression.

Given this diversity of perspectives on the Resurrection, Baptists are not unique among Christians in engaging matters of faith practice. However, I argue that Baptists may be distinct in how they engage the question of Jesus resurrection and why it matters for their faith.

According to Warnocks tweet, the meaning of Easter goes beyond the question of what happened to Jesus body, making resurrection a matter of what human beings can do to make a more just and humane society regardless of religious affiliation.

However, as some Baptists protested, the meaning of the resurrection is a matter of precisely what happened to Jesus body some 20 centuries ago which has implications for how Christians live out their beliefs today.

[3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter. Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.]

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How Baptists hold differing views on the resurrection of Christ and why this matters - The Conversation US

Amit Das recollects a little anecdote from his grandmothers life. If she ever saw any of us praying to an idol before going to school, she would immediately rebuke us, he says. Her point was that if one had studied properly then they would do well regardless of whether they pray to God or not. The 57-year-old is a fourth generation member of the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reformist movement that began in the early 19th century.

His great grandfather, Sundari Mohan Das, a freedom fighter, doctor and social worker of the late 19th century, was the first in his family to have joined the Samaj. Like many young Bengali men of the time, he too was a follower of Keshub Chandra Sen, who influenced them to dream of a world devoid of superstition; where widows could remarry and womens education was deemed essential, says Das.

One of the most influential religious movements of the 19th century that took birth in Bengal and spread far and wide from here, Brahmoism is today reduced to a few thousand members. The community, for the past few years, has been demanding minority status from the government of India. Das, an active member of the religious organisation, is a firm believer in the principles laid down by the Brahmo Samaj: denunciation of idol worship and polytheism, rejection of the caste system, emancipation of women, respect for all religions, and others.

Back in the 19th century, Brahmoism was established as an effort to reform Hinduism from within, in response to the criticisms being levelled against Hindu society by the West. It was a movement that struck a fine balance between reform and rejection. These were people willing to change contemporary Hindu society without uprooting themselves from tradition- obviously, this was guided by the emergence of a sense of cultural pride and patriotism to which, paradoxically, modern Western education had greatly contributed, says historian Amiya Sen over the phone. In other words, the Brahmo Samaj was both an effort to alter Hinduism through western ideologies, and at the same time stay true to its traditional principles.

Although the movement lost momentum by the end of the 19th century, the Brahmo Samaj did have an impact on the psyche of the Bengali middle class. At a time when the political landscape of Bengal is witnessing the possibility of inroads being made by the Bharatiya Janata Party, adherents of Brahmoism say the party will be unable to understand the liberal nature of religion practised by them.

Historian David Kopf, who authored the book The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of modern India, explains that the establishment of the Brahmo Sabha by the social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, needs to be understood in context of the Unitarian movement that was raging in large parts of the Western world since the 16th century. Unitarianism was a radical approach to religion, society and ethics which looked to substitute popular religious traditions with a rational faith.

By 1822 he (Roy) had helped form the Calcutta Unitarian Committee and by 1825-26, his scattered writings in their cumulative effect already contained a kind of syllabus for activists dedicated to Hindu reform, writes Kopf. Roy formed the committee in collaboration with a missionary, Rev. W. Adam. Apart from conducting Unitarian services, the committee also established the Vedanta College meant for churning out Hindu Unitarians. But Roy and Adam fell off soon after and the mission was abandoned.

Consequently, in 1828 Roy along with a group of wealthy upper caste men started a more Indian variant of the Unitarian movement. This was named the Brahmo Sabha and its first meeting was held on August 20, 1828 at a house in Chitpore road in Calcutta. Among the most notable supporters of Roy in the Sabha was Dwarkanath Tagore, grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore. Activities carried out by the group included chanting of verses from the Upanishads, and then translating them in Bengali and singing of theistic hymns composed by Roy. There was no organisation, no membership, no creed. It was a weekly meeting open to any who cared to attend. Ram Mohan believed he was restoring Hindu worship to its pristine purity, writes John Nicol Farquhar, a Scottish education missionary in Calcutta who authored the book, Modern religious movements in India.

Throughout this period, the Brahma Sabha played a key role in modernising Indian society. Roy successfully campaigned against Sati or the immolation of Hindu widows, he established a number of educational institutions including the Vedanta College, the English School and the City College of Calcutta popularising English education and promoted a rational and non-authoritarian form of Hinduism. He also played a pioneering role in opening the Hindu School in 1817, which is now the Presidency University.

With Roys death in 1833, the still infant Brahmo Sabha lost its wind a bit. It was in 1842 that the Sabha was given a fresh lease of life under the leadership of Debendranath Tagore, son of Dwarkanath Tagore. Debendra followed Ram Mohan in his belief that original Hinduism was a pure spiritual theism, and in his enthusiasm for the Upanishads, but did not share his deep reverence for Christ, writes Farquhar. He was also the one to give an organised structure to the Sabha. In 1843, he drew up a Brahmo convent or a list of solemn vows to be taken by every member. Some of these included abstaining from idolatry and to worship God by doing good deeds.

In 1857, Keshub Chandra Sen joined the Sabha, and he would soon turn out to be its third leader. Under his influence, Debendranath decided on giving up the tradition of Durga Puja in the Tagore family, which was a grand annual affair. The Sabha also discussed caste, with its members giving it up altogether. Debendranath too got rid of his sacred thread.

Sen was heavily influenced by Christianity. At his suggestion, the Sabha began to follow the example of Christian philanthropy, gathering money and food for the needy.

In 1860, members of the Sabha realised the need to spread out from Bengal. In 1861, the preacher Pundit Navin Chandra Roy went to Punjab to spread the new faith. He established the Brahmo Samaj in Lahore. Another preacher, Atmuri Lakshminarasimham went to the Madras Presidency to spread the Brahmo teachings in the Telugu speaking areas.

Brahmo Samaj was not just restricted to Bengal. It was the first pan Indian movement of Hindu reform, says Sen. But Bengal was the first province to come under western influence through British colonialism. In cultural terms, Bengal was indeed the province of paradoxes. It was to produce the first crop of western educated intelligentsia, many of whom were anglophiles. On the other hand, this early and excessive enthusiasm for Western ideas or ways of life eventually also produced a wave of anglophobia which took the shape of a reactionary, antireformist position, he adds.

But the Brahmo Samaj was a very small community and that too an urban and elite community, explains researcher Snigdhendu Bhattacharya who authored the book, Mission Bengal: the Saffron experiment. Although it was a miniscule community, it remained one of the most influential ones since it included some of the finest social reformers and personalities of Bengal. Two of the most influential Bengali families, the Tagores and the Rays, were both Brahmos, he says.

Speaking about the kind of influence that Brahmo families had on middle class Bengali society, Bhattacharya says, every child in any urban area grows up reading Sukumar Ray. When they read the Ramayana, it is Upendrakishore Roychowdhurys interpretation in most cases. Then of course there is Satyajit Ray whose films have influenced every child and adult in all of Bengal. The influence of the Tagore family not just in Bengal, but all over India, remains unmatched. The essence of all their work remained humanism and rationalism which emerged from the fountainhead of Brahmo philosophy, says Bhattacharya.

From the 1860s, a number of schisms and splinter groups emerged within the Samaj. In 1866, the first formal division between liberal younger Brahmos and conservative older Brahmos led to the establishment of the Brahmo Samaj of India under Sen. In 1878, the marriage of Sens daughter to the maharaja of Cooch Behar in violation of the Brahmo Marriage Act of 1872 caused yet another major schism in Brahmo history, resulting in the formation of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. These splits resulted in the dwindling popularity of the Samaj, says Bhattacharya.

I would say that the Brahmo movement began to decline from the 1880s. Firstly, there was a distinct Hindu counter discourse, or Hindu revival. Also by this time, the political overtook the social, says Sen. By 1885 the Indian National Congress was formed. The Hindus realised that the best way to fight against colonialism is to politically unite, rather than focusing on social reform, Sen says.

Despite their decline though, the Brahmo Samaj made an enormous impact ideologically and culturally to Bengal and created an enduring value system in the region. They were the people behind promoting womens education, introducing widow remarriages, inter caste marriages, questioning the very hierarchy of caste, and democratising education. Unlike traditional Hindus, Brahmos gave as much importance to moral uprightness as to a spiritual life. In traditional Hinduism, moral purity was considered subservient to the spiritual call. Not so for the Brahmos. says Sen.

Given the dwindling popularity of the Samaj since the late 19th century, a majority of Brahmo members today are those by birth. Nonetheless, there are instances of those who have taken formal initiation in the community in the recent past. Ketuki Bagchi (67) took up formal membership of the Samaj in 2004. She says her parents were staunch followers of Roy and thereby she had been associated with the Brahmo ideology since her childhood even though not a member. The influence of the Samaj was such that there were many Bengali families who believed and practised the principles of Brahmoism, despite the fact that they were not formal members, she says. She explains that her parents perhaps never formally joined the Samaj because the organisation never went about promoting its beliefs or engaged in proselytising activities.

Prasun Ganguly, 74, a fourth generation Brahmo says the first thing that any new member of the Samaj has to do is give up idol worship and follow the basic principles of egalitarianism and rationalism promulgated by Roy. That apart, the social ceremonies of its members like marriage and funerals are in stark contrast to those in Hindu society. For instance at a Brahmo wedding, the bride and the groom assemble in front of people and declare their vows to each other. Similarly, at a funeral first the preacher presiding over the ceremony says a few words about the departed soul and then the others join in to sing a few Brahmo sangeet (spiritual songs written by Roy and other influential members of the Samaj), says Ganguly.

Speaking about what the current political situation in Bengal means to the Brahmo community, Ganguly says, In most Bengali families even today, there is a reverence for Brahmoism because of the kind of social reforms brought by them. It believes in a kind of religion devoid of the ill practices and superstitions of Hinduism. In that sense, Brahmoism is the essence of Hinduism.

Any political party in power must not try to impose its own understanding of Hinduism on anyone.

Further reading:

The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of modern India by David Kopf

Modern religious movements in India by John Nicol Farquhar

Hindu revivalism in Bengal, 1972-1905 by Amiya Sen

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Celebrating the essence of Hinduism: How 19th century Brahmo Samaj altered Bengali society - The Indian Express

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In the new film from Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Norbu, a doomed man is thrust on a spiritual quest to find a lady with fangs and a moustache who could very well save him

In his fifth feature, Looking For A Lady With Fangs And A Moustache which premiered on virtual cinema recently, the Bhutan-born lama and write-director Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Norbu weaves a quiet, deliberately paced and deceptively simple story of a man who on discovering he has just seven days to live is propelled on a nerve-racking spiritual journey.

Tenzin (Tsering Tashi Gyalthang), a strapping human specie and a capitalist to boot, is a man committed to the supremacy of reason and skeptical of everything superstitious or religious, and like most skeptics is a bit of a grouch about it. He wants to set up one of the trendiest cafes in Kathmandu (Nepal).

One day while scouting for locations, Tenzin stumbles upon an old abandoned temple and promptly goes about removing things and taking pictures. This horrifies his best friend Jachung (Tulku Kunzang), a conservative, who tells him that the place is the womb of the goddess and as such should never be disturbed. Tenzin snickers.

Soon a series of phantasms upends the stability of Tenzins world. It begins with a vision of a young girl in a field of flowers followed by the chilling specter of his long-dead sister cleaning his kitchen.

When Jachung warns him This could be a bad omen and that he should at once seek a Buddhist monk oracle, Tenzin shrugs him off with a snort. You know those monks are just after your money. Jachung decides to bring the oracle to him anyway.

When the dark shades wearing and Google worshipping oracle with a penchant for good coffee (Blue Mountain and Mocha being his favorites) informs Tenzin, rather in an offhand way, that his visions were signs of his imminent death and that in fact he had only seven days to live, the incredulous Tenzin brushes him away.

But apparitions refuse to go. Until at last, beset with mounting fear and paranoia, Tenzin gives in to his friend to see the strange oracle again.

The oracle tells Tenzin that the only way to avert his fatal prophecy was to seek a peerless albeit an elusive lady manifest on earth known as a dakini. He directs him to a cranky old master sage for more information on the subject. The master sage, in turn, supply Tenzin with tips and ritual gestures to aid him on his journey.

A way to see the flaw as the truth

The search, a problem Tenzin must solve, form the dramatic heart of the film. How will he find the ambiguous dakini? Will he find one? These questions are answered with equal measures of wit and sublimity.

Khyentse Norbu lets the story unfold in a slow, poetic pace. Contemplation is given ample time in the form of long pauses between dialogues, phantasmic riverbanks and curiosities that Tenzin encounters as he rides his motor bike acrossthe narrow streets of Kathmandu.

The newcomer Tsering Tashi as the main protagonist Tenzin says so much without saying much, turning quiet moments of reflection and desperation into something rich and wonderful.

But it isnt until he meets the unconventional monk oracle and the raspy old sage (the master of the Left-Hand Lineage) that the film finds its lyrical voice and indeed its springboard for its playful and subtle, yet not so playful and subtle, messages.

The monk oracle, played deliciously by newcomer Ngawang Tenzin, is a total opposite of what most of us imagine a monk to be, or want a monk to be, which is of serene in demeanor and of decorous in attire and manner, much like a zen monk.

Sporting dark circular shades, red headphones, iPad, his maroon robe worn way above his ankles to show off a pair of black leather boots, rosary and holy threads tied around his wrists like a rockstar, Khyentse Norbus monk in the film looks like he might fancy a drive to a Paris couture show than to a monastery.

What comes out of his mouth is elliptical, designed to confound and provoke and, in our Tenzins case, infuriate. Tenzin: I dont know if I am dreaming or not. Maybe its just my imagination. Monk: Whats the difference? Anyway, youll die soon.

Or when he tells a baffled Tenzin that seeking out the evasive dakini was the only way to climb out from his misery. This is a special method. A way to see the flaw as the truth. And a way to see problems as the solution.

The monk oracle might as well be Khyentse Norbus alter ego. And he seems to be doing a lot more than poke fun at our morality and perception and at our attachment to our transitory bodies and selves, and at our laughable aversion to incontrovertible truths such as the impermanence of things.

But all that poking fun is not merely for poking funs sake. Its aesthetic splendors are tethered to an exalted purpose, which is to shine the light of the sacred on our foggy and fast moving reality.

The cantankerous master sage with a gift for wry sarcasm is an emblem of Tibetan mysticism, played to near perfection by Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche. Oh, you again, he tells Tenzin. So annoying! Or when Tenzin tells him he has only seven days to live, he responds dryly: If everyone believed they had only seven days to live, the world would be peaceful.

His grumpy persona, however, belie his wisdom. It was by design that he sends Tenzin on his spiritual journey, to open up his senses to the refreshment of impermanence, to the beauty of impermanence, to its infinite wonder and possibilities.

Cucurrucuc paloma

There are delightful moments of romantic comedy as when the master sage and the monk feed Tenzin with an assortment of secret dakini signals and pointers and Tenzin, as he watches and listens to them, is visibly torn between his loathing for superstitions and his fear of but what if. What if this is just an elaborate ruse? But, what if it is not?

Belief is at the centre of the film. But it doesnt come out preachy like other spiritually minded films. If anything, the film shines light.

Dakini, a divine feminine energy in Tibetan Buddhism, whose presence in the world is both the films overt subject and the source of its mystery, is used to convey, in the most subtle way a film can on the subject, the significance of belief and magic in our lives.

In many ways, the film is Khyentse Norbus nostalgia for the vanishing world of this magical aspect of Tibetan Buddhism. A world of magic diminished in the face of the all too powerful world of science and rationalism. But a world which the film says, is nonetheless accessible to us if only we keep an open heart.

Aiding to convey the films many layers of meaning is the masterful Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing (In The Mood For Love, Renoir) who is known to work with natural lights. He doesnt disappoint.

The slow tracking shots of the saturated river banks, the long stationary shots of the insides of an enlightened master sages home, the kinetic handheld shots of the streets illustrating Tenzins turmoil, are all employed with elegance and charm to help coax Khyentse Norbus vision into vivid cinematic reality. Almost every frame is an expressive photograph worth putting in an actual frame and hanging on the wall.

The film flows to equally sublime music. Cucurrucuc paloma a beautiful, haunting song from Mexico captures the turbulent state of Tenzin even if you dont understand the lyrics. The duet scene between Tenzin and his mother, where on the last day of his prophesied death he goes to meet her, is especially nostalgic and uplifting.

You can walk away with a thousand meanings. Watching the film is like being held up by an enlightened sage from the mountain, who grips you with a mystical and life-altering message in his tale. Its an exquisite return to cinema for Khyentse Norbu and one of his best.

Contributed by Kencho Wangdi (Bonz)

The writer is a former editor of Kuensel and can be reached @bonzk on Instagram

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Movie Review: What if you had just seven days to live? Kuensel Online - Kuensel, Buhutan's National Newspaper

The following excerpt from Roy SpeckhardtsCreating Change Through Humanism(Humanist Press, 2015) is part of theHumanist.coms month-long celebration of the AHAs 80th Anniversary in April.

Humanism has an impressive history. With deep roots in the early Greek philosophers and in Eastern thinkers well before them, humanism grew during the Renaissance. It continued to develop throughout the Reformation, Enlightenment, and scientific revolution and began to take its present shape in the late nineteenth century. As it took its present form it drew in knowledge and wisdom from still more sourcesfrom Jawaharlal Nehru to Nelson Mandela and more.

Beginning in 1927, a number of Unitarian professors and students at the University of Chicago who had moved away from theism organized the Humanist Fellowship. Soon they launched theNew Humanistmagazine, offering a path forward for the Unitarian movement. But most of the other church members were still thinking in terms of a capital G God as the glue necessary to bind ideas to people and people to each other.

Around the same time, Charles Francis Potter founded the First Humanist Society of New York. Formerly a Baptist and then a Unitarian minister, Potter began the society with the intent of it being a religious organization, calling humanism a new faith for a new age. Prominent members of this community included John Dewey, Julian Huxley, and Albert Einstein. Potter wrote a book entitledHumanism: A New Religion, outlining the basic premise and points of what he termed religious humanism. His philosophy openly rejected traditional Christian beliefs and replaced them with a humanist philosophy that incorporated various aspects of naturalism, materialism, rationalism, and socialism. Potters intent was to offer an ever-evolving philosophy that would update itself as new knowledge was gained.

A major humanist milestone was achieved in 1933 whenA Humanist Manifestowas written through the collaboration and agreement of thirty-four national leaders. This was a publicly signed document detailing the basic tenets of humanism. By 1935 the Humanist Fellowship was supplanted by the Humanist Press Association.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) was formed in 1941, when Curtis W. Reese and John H. Dietrich, two well-known Unitarian ministers and humanists, reorganized the Humanist Press Association in Chicago, into the American Humanist Association.

The goal was not to establish a religion as Potter had originally intended but instead to recognize the nontheistic and secular nature of humanism, organize its advocates, and align the organization for the mutual education of both its religious and nonreligious members. This makes the American Humanist Association the oldest organization addressing the breadth of humanism in the United States. The AHA began publishing theHumanistmagazine as the successor to the earlier publications, setting out to explore modern philosophical, cultural, social, and political issues from a humanist point of view.

At the end of the 1940s, the organization was supportive of Vashti McCollum in her fight against religious instruction in public schools. The mother of two boys, McCollum argued that religious instruction in public education violated the principle of separation of church and state. Her case traveled all the way to the US Supreme Court where, in 1948, she achieved a watershed ruling in her favor. In 1962, McCollum became the first woman to serve as AHA presidentlong before a number of Christian denominations began to ordain women.

Running parallel with this localizing and personalizing of the humanist philosophy was the empowerment of women within the organization. The second editor of theHumanistwas Priscilla Robertson, whose work began in 1956. One of the earliest of the AHAs Humanists of the Year was Margaret Sanger who received that award in 1957, honored for her activism for birth control and sex education. But Sanger was just the first of many of the leading feminist and reproductive rights activists to work closely with the AHA. Just among those in this category who received the AHAs top award were Mary Calderone and Betty Friedan in the 1970s, Faye Wattleton and Margaret Atwood in the 1980s, Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1990s, and most recently Gloria Steinem in 2012.

In the 1960s, the AHA became active in challenging the illegality of abortion. It was the first national membership organization to support abortion rights, even before Planned Parenthood expanded to address the issue. Humanists were instrumental in the founding of leading pro-choice organizations, such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, which continue to defend and support elective abortion rights.

Humanism and the AHA reached another milestone during the 1970s when the AHA released a major new humanist text,Humanist Manifesto II. Drafted by Edwin H. Wilson and Paul Kurtz, the work was released in 1973 to unprecedented media fanfare including a New York Timesin-depth, front-page article exploring humanist philosophy and the new manifesto. Welcomed by many commentators, the manifesto was denounced by religious conservatives as anti-religious and anti-God.

Following this release, the AHA continued on its energized path of starting new endeavors and publishing major statements on death with dignity, objections to astrology, support of sexual rights, evolution, and discrimination in the workplace.

The 1980s saw the beginning of an onslaught of attacks by the Religious Right against secular humanism and the AHA. In an attempt to counter the smears, the AHA began its own campaign, which included media appearances, public debates, nationally published articles, press conferences, lobbying, and legal action. Interested in this debate, world-renowned author Isaac Asimov joined in as the elected president of the AHA in 1985.

As the AHA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1991, theHumanistbecame a major alternative medium for social and political commentary. Through such efforts, the magazine has attracted and published the writing of such luminaries as Alice Walker, Lester R. Brown, Aung Sung Suu Kyi, Noam Chomsky, Ted Turner, and many other leading journalists, writers, political leaders, and activists.

Kurt Vonnegut was named Humanist of the Year in 1992 and went on to become the AHAs honorary president. Always true to his character, Vonnegut wrote a decade later to the AHA offices: Find here my permission for you to quote any damn fool thing Ive ever said or written, through all eternity, and without further notice or compensation to me.

The AHA was one of the first organizations to become fully active online with the introduction of its website in 1995. It remains a leader in online and social media communications with hundreds of thousands of followers throughout its active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

One of the AHA leaderships biggest decisions was to move the organization to Washington DC. Previously the AHA had moved from Yellow Springs, Ohio, to San Francisco, California, to Amherst, New York. Matters of convenience and economy had dictated the selection of each of these locations. But now the organization made a strategic choice: A move to Washington DC would take humanism to the center of power and influence.

This wouldnt have been possible without the support of the AHAs endowment fund, now called the Humanist Foundation, along with a seed grant from Lloyd Morain for a building in the nations capital. Relocation to the new Humanist Center was completed in 2002 under the leadership of Executive Director Tony Hileman. Through this move, the AHA was empowered to substantially increase the humanist voice in the public debate. [In 2017, the AHA made another move to an upgraded national headquarters in the heart of Washington, DC.]

The philosophy of humanism itself took a major evolutionary step in 2003 with the release ofHumanism and its Aspirations, the third humanist manifesto, signed by two dozen Nobel Prize winners. More concise than its two predecessors, the third manifesto set out to continue the trend of clarifying the humanist philosophy in a way that paid tribute to core humanist values while challenging humanists to take action toward making this world a better place.

It was in DC where the AHA began to take advantage of best non-profit practices, achieving full ratings by charitable accountability organizations such as the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator, and GuideStar. The AHA maintained and improved theHumanistmagazine, created the weekly digital newsletter theHumanist.com, and added theEssays in the Philosophy of Humanismpeer-reviewed journal.

The gradual conversion of the organization, from a merely philosophically forward-looking organization to its current capability to actually accomplish humanistic change, created a new environment where advocacy for humanist values became the AHAs focus.

Looking ahead, the American Humanist Association, its members, chapters, affiliates, and publications vow to not only support and defend core humanist values but also to press the public to consider and discuss humanist issues and social concerns. Guided by reason and humanitys rapidly growing knowledge of the world, by ethics and compassion, and in the pursuit of fuller, more meaningful lives that add to the greater good of society and humanity, the members of the AHA envision a world of mutual care and concern where the lifestance of humanism is known and respected, and where people take responsibility for the world in which they live.

See more here:

AHA Through the Years - TheHumanist.com - The Humanist

Kolkata: The Communist Party of India (Marxist)s West Bengal state secretary alleged that the Election Commission is biased and accused it of allowing undue concessions to the ruling parties at both the Centre and in West Bengal, at a press conference on April 8.

The veteran CPI(M) leader was addressing a press conference at the Press Club in Kolkata, where he alleged that the EC has been prejudiced over the air transmission of the Prime Minister and other political leaders speech on poll days in West Bengal where Assembly elections are currently underway.

Notably, the serious allegation against the Election Commission has come at a time when the CPI(M) as well as the Sanjukto Morcha, the electoral alliance of which the Left party is a part, have been restrained over its comments on any quasi judicial body.

Dr Mishra alleged that the dates for the different phases have been arranged in such a manner that a single district is going to polls in several phases. As a result, speeches targetting live voters are being aired, but have been ignored by the Election Commission despite violating norms.

He also took a shot at incumbent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for urging the voters, particularly in rural areas, to confront the central forces and criticised her for camping at a booth for over two hours. He further alleged that the elections are held in an atmosphere of communal polarisation created by the BJP and TMC and added that democracy and secularism are under attack by these forces.

Not only that, the CPI(M) state secretary levelled allegations against the central police force and a section of media who are trying to increase the politics of polarisation. The corporate funded elections are beneficial for the BJP and also the TMC, he claimed. We are telling the people that a vote to TMC will be like voting for BJP and vice versa. TMC cannot fight against the BJP, he said.

Highlighting that Election Commission is changing officers rapidly without any real gains, Dr Mishra said that the EC is adhering to the ruling partys demands, not checking the EPIC cards of central forces being one among such demands.

While rationalism is under attack, the Bihar election results have shown that the popular mandate is still with rationalists a fact visible from the minimum difference in vote share, he said, adding that allegations of CPI(M) of having a hand in poll attacks are false.

The Left leader also denied suggestions that the SM will extend support to the the TMC in case of lesser numbers, adding that there aim is to defeat both TMC and BJP by over 50% votes.

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Bengal Elections: EC Biased, Giving Concession to TMC and BJP, Alleges CPI(M) - NewsClick

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Our society has fabricated a self-pitiable education system in which qualifying exams has become a delusional testimony of how good or bad a person is.

A person who doesnt perform well in solving meaningless tasks of school program mostly monotonous, unimaginative, counter creative and barren are looked down upon as inferiors and face a life long social rejection while others are made to believe that they are valuable because they could fit into the uncreative monotony of a lifeless repetition.

Yes, a lifeless repetition, reducing the idea of expression to a mere function of capitalist utopia and completely doing away with emotions, experience and authenticity.

Dostoevsky had started warning against such utopianism. Converting human being into a pianno key, a rational computer, a robot.

He was followed by people like Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Jung, Adler, who showed to the western man that the problem with preaching thorough going rationalism, rational episteme, rational (blinding horizontal) mentality is that they wouldnt be even aware & their subconscious & unconscious would be dragging them to places.

This capitalist utopia sorts us into categories from the very childhood.

I remember when we were in school we were taught not to sit with, or befriend, those who were weaker students than us. One of our famous professors would tell us that if we didnt study we would end up being dukandaars. There were backbenchers and front seaters. When we could hardly differentiate a right from a wrong we had already been moulded into judging and discriminating between them and us, doctor and dukandaar, superior and inferior, material prosperity and poverty, we were initiated on a Capitalist note and its profit driven definitions of right and wrong.

Capitalism-inspired education got us into the habit of measuring things, and of believing that what cant be measured is either valueless or threatening.

The system trained students to conform to an alienated and class-stratified society, a society passive to realities of a social(ist) life. The class system in schools indoctrinated some children into feeling inferior to others, while others start believing they are better than the rest.

And it is this belief that the education system nurtures, the belief that some people are less valuable than others, hence helping in perpetuation of inequality and discrimination. The discrimination, the covet capitalist agenda is inculcated through a hidden curriculum that bases itself on principles of external rewards, subservience to the bourgeois norms, and an utmost focus on competition rather than team work.

Fidel Castro compares competition to hypocrisy and war when he finds capitalism repugnant, filthy, gross and alienating because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

Capitalist pedagogy reduced student achievement to mere income and employment, with absolutely no role in social justice and inclusion. It laid the cornerstone of the neo-liberal consumerism which has plagued the whole social fibre of the world.

As Michael Moore said, Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

The greed is imbibed from the earliest, through a reward driven repetitions of school system.

Schools in the current times are institutions set up to fulfil the popular political narratives. Spending the first quarter of their life in school, children are taught to do exactly what they are asked to. They are indoctrinated into conformism, and scepticism towards the higher authority is discouraged.

They are subtly manipulated into believing in the infallibility of official figures and accounts. They grow up with a notion that large media agencies are the most trusted source of information. Focus on life skills, civil freedoms and liberties is diminished. Once children leave the capitalist school they are unable to question its authority, they are rendered incapable of their own observations about the nature of events and are unable to find a meaning in anything beyond what is proposed by the political.

Kozol wrote in 1975: School does not exist to foster ethics and upheaval. It exists to stabilize the status quo. It exists to train a population which is subject to the power of such instruments of mass persuasion as the social order has at hand. It exists to get its citizens prepared for moral compromise. The first and primary goal of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people but good citizens. It is the function which we call in enemy nations,state indoctrination.

The only point of view possible to us (including me) is the capitalist point of view.

Capitalist philosophy has assumed almost an ontological form. It is crime against current standards of humanity to question science and its industry, to doubt the education and its indoctrination, to put class segregation and its watchdogs at stake, to see prodigious mechanisation as gigantic rape of everything intimate. Anything sane spoken against those these scandalous standards sounds outrageous.

And it is precisely this that all of us need de-schooling, if we want a social change.Khawar Khan Achakzaiis a published author, a medical Doctor by profession, and a student of history.

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It would be banal and nevertheless true to emphasize how much we miss the voice of Primo Levi today, in times of rising xenophobia, racism, and far-right movements, at a time in which public intellectuals have almost disappeared in Italy. But lamentation was never Primo Levis style of thought, and is best avoided.

The destiny of classics is to be permanently reinterpreted, and Levi does not escape this. There are, however, certain misconceptions concerning his legacy. His relation to Enlightenment thought, his definition as a Jewish writer, and, last but not least, Levis role as a literary witness of the Holocaust a word he disliked and with which today he is completely identified have been misconstrued in recent decades.

Over twenty years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote Remnants of Auschwitz, a remarkable book built on a sort of posthumous dialogue with Primo Levi, notably through a rereading of his last essay, The Drowned and theSaved (1986). Drawing on Levi, Agamben proposed a vision of the extermination camps as the secret law of Western civilization and the naked life of the deported (the Muselmann) as the modern expression of its underlying paradigm, homo sacer.

By invoking Levi in this way, Agamben unwittingly encouraged the misconception that the author of If This Is a Manwas somehow the forerunner of a radical break with the Enlightenment tradition. But, in fact, it was that very tradition that defined the philosophical horizons of Primo Levi. He may have pushed this tradition to its limits, almost putting it into question, but Primo Levi remained a critical enlightener, a writer for whom reality was a material, anthropological, cultural, and historical product rather than a linguistic construction or a semantic structure. In spite of their missed dialogue, he probably shared Jean Amrys stoic claim of a positivist spirit: the spirit of somebody who believes in experience, who clings to reality and its enunciation.

Classicism and positivism are the pillars of Levis first books. If This Is a Man (1947) is shaped into the model of Dantes Inferno deportation as a fall into Hades, the camp with its circles, the inexhaustible variety of the pains inflicted on the inmates, and the great diversity of its characters, from his suffering comrades to the omnipotent torturers whereas The Truce (1963) tells of his coming back to life: the journey that allowed him, after his liberation from Auschwitz in January 1945 and an interminable peregrination throughout Central Europe, to reach his home in Turin.

Besides Dantes literary model, If This Is a Man reveals a second, fundamental source, which is a scientific paradigm: the legacy of a chemist who describes, orders, classifies, and scrutinizes the overwhelming experience endured in Auschwitz. The literary sensitivity of the writer and the analytical gaze of the chemist are the foundations of his entire work. The Nazi camps were for him an anthropological laboratory in which, besides the serial destruction of lives, the human condition revealed its extreme limits. Of this anthropological laboratory, Levi was first a fragment what the Nazi lexicon called technically a piece (stck), i.e., a victim and then a witness; even more than a witness: an analyst.

Witnesses always filter their experience through their own culture, select and interpret their recollections according to their own knowledge and questions. Witnesses ask themselves what is the meaning of their suffering, and their answers are neither unique nor immutable. In the eyes of Levi, the Holocaust remained a black hole, a definition borrowed from the language of natural sciences, but this mysterious abyss had to be explored, studied, and possibly understood. He explained this is the legacy of his books that it is impossible to investigate the Nazi camps without the testimony of the deportees. The point was not to add a touch of color or authenticity to a whole of facts clearly established; the point was to use an irreplaceable source for understanding the extermination camps, for penetrating both the phenomenology and the meaning of an experience that transcended the archival materials and whose evidence its architects had tried to erase. This is why If This Is a Man has become a fundamental link in the chain of an open discussion on the conflicted yet nonetheless vital relationship between memory and history.

This posture reveals a form of rationalism that Levi had inherited from his scientific education, a rationalism that guided his career as a chemist and became a permanent feature of his mind. One of the lines describing the diagram that opens his personal anthology, The Search for Roots, reads the salvation of understanding (la salvazione del capire). It is marked by four names tracing, from antiquity to the twentieth century, a scientific and rational canon that inspired his intellectual journey: Lucretius, Darwin, Bragg, and Clarke. As Levi stressed during his conversations with Tullio Regge, he was attached to a romantic vision of science: a science with a human face, he said, that carried on the joyful explorations of the Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars, opposed to the lethal performances of instrumental reason. In his few science-fiction stories, he warned against Promethean and totalitarian projects for dominating nature and annihilating humankind by means of modern technology.

Primo Levis work thus has to be put under a pre-Foucault lens, even if his definition of Auschwitz as a gigantic biological and social experience clearly suggests a definition of National Socialism as what Foucault called a biopolitical power. This is an example of how Levi reinterpreted and pushed to the limits the classical tradition from which he came.

It is interesting, from this point of view, to compare Levi with Jean Amry (Hans Mayer), the Austrian writer and critic and author of Jenseits von Schuld und Shne who was also deported to Auschwitz (where he pretended to have met Levi). Amry too claimed the legacy of the Enlightenment, which he defined as a kind of philosophia perennis; he never denied his intellectual roots in the tradition of Austrian logical positivism; and he did not hesitate to defend Jean-Paul Sartres humanism against the offensive of French structuralism, which he perceived as a betrayal. Interpreting history as the structuralists did as a process without a subject was nonsense, and the epistemological posture of Foucault, who stunningly proclaimed the death of subject, appeared to him as a provocation coming from the most dangerous enemy of Enlightenment (der gefhrlichste Gegenaufklrer).

As staunch Aufklrer (enlighteners), Levi and Amry did not endorse irrationalism or mysticism, and certainly would not have subscribed to Elie Wiesels famous sentence defining the Holocaust as an event transcending history but a gap remained between explaining (spiegare; erklren) and understanding (capire; verstehen). Critical reason might explain Nazi violence and grasp its roots, describe its historical background and deconstruct its context, distinguish its steps and indicate its actors, analyze its internal logic and point out its peculiar combination of archaic mythology and rational modernity, a spiral resulting in complete destruction but this is not yet understanding. All in all, Auschwitz remained, in their eyes, a black box of understanding: Levi defined it a black hole (un buco nero) and Amry a dark riddle (einem finsteren Rtsel).

The attempts to explain the Holocaust through a Sonderweg (special path) in which, from Luther to National Socialism, Germany would have deviated from the path of a supposed Western paradigm of modernity, were naive ways out, just like the Marxist efforts to grasp in the Nazi crimes sometimes an economic rationality and sometimes a symptom of a late capitalist eclipse of reason. To the eyewitness, none of these explanations were satisfactory none of them were able to resolve this black hole or dark riddle.

This posture should not be confused with that later formulated by Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker of Shoah, which often took a mystical, almost obscurantist slant. Neither Amry nor Levi posited the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust hier ist kein warum (there is no why) as a dogma that automatically stigmatized as obscene any attempt to historical understanding. Amry and Levi did not consider the Holocaust as a non-realm of memory (non-lieu de mmoire), a trauma that could only be resurrected by testimony but neither transmitted nor historicized. They never thought to celebrate a defeat of the intellect. Not only did such a mystical posture not correspond with their mental constitutions they probably would have rejected it as both ethically and politically unacceptable.

The second widespread misunderstanding of Primo Levi deals with his Jewishness: the tendency to classify him as a Jewish writer. Undoubtedly, Levi was a Jew. He never tried to hide this obvious fact: he had been persecuted and deported to Auschwitz as a Jew and spent most of his intellectual life bearing testimony to the Nazi extermination of the European Jews. Nonetheless, he was not a Jewish writer like Elie Wiesel, Aharon Appelfeld, or Philip Roth, to mention some of his contemporaries. The Italian-Jewish writers of the twentieth century deeply differed from their Israeli fellows, as well as from the New York intellectuals, however diverse the latter could be. Not only did he never consider himself the representative of a religious community his attachment to the tradition of science and the Enlightenment implied a radical form of atheism, which his experience of deportation strongly reinforced, even if he always expressed respectful feelings toward believers but he probably never felt part of a Jewish milieu with clearly defined social and cultural boundaries.

Rather than as an Italian Jew a definition in which Jew is the substantive and Italian the adjective he preferred to depict himself as an italiano ebreo, a Jewish Italian.

Interviewed by Risa Sodi after his successful lecture tour of the United States in 1985, he stressed that in Italy the notion of Jewish writer was very difficult to define. There, he said, I am known as a writer who, among other things, is Jewish, whereas in the United States he felt as if [he] had worn again the Star of David! Of course, he was joking, but he wished to emphasize that his education and his cultural formation had not been particularly Jewish, and that most of his friends as well as the overwhelming majority of the Italian readers of his books were not Jewish. In a lecture given in 1982, he admitted that he had finally resigned himself to accept the label of Jewish writer, but not immediately and not without reservations. This remark could be extended to most Jewish writers of twentieth-century Italian literature, from Italo Svevo to Alberto Moravia, from Giorgio Bassani to Natalia Ginzburg, and many others.

Between 1938 and the end of the Second World War (i.e., between the promulgation of fascist racial laws and his liberation from Auschwitz), Levi probably fit the famous Sartrian definition of the Jew: The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew . . . for it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew. In a conversation with Ferdinando Camon, he mentioned his Jewishness as a purely cultural fact. If not for the racial laws and the concentration camp, he said, I probably would no longer be a Jew, except for my last name. Instead this dual experience, the racial law and the concentration camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate: at this point I am a Jew, they have sewn the star of David on me and not only on my clothes.

Levi certainly was a Godless Jew (gottloser Jude), as Peter Gay depicted Sigmund Freud, but he probably would not have inscribed himself into the noble gallery of those whom Isaac Deutscher called the non-Jewish Jews (i.e., the Jewish heretics). After the war, Primo Levi did not feel targeted by antisemitism and considered emancipation from religious alienation and obscurantism a legacy of the Enlightenment rather than a task of the present. He did not consider himself an iconoclast or a dissenter within Judaism. He simply was not a believer or a religious man.

In many articles and interviews, Levi repeatedly affirmed that his Italian roots shaped his way of writing books such as The Periodic Table and The Wrench celebrate the Piedmontese Jewish culture and even the Piedmont dialect but had to be projected into a broader world. Auschwitz was the paradoxical site where, as an Italian Jew, he discovered cosmopolitanism. One of the first chapters of If This Is a Man significantly titled Initiation depicts the camp as a Tower of Babel where people spoke dozens of languages and where the capacity to overcome these linguistic boundaries became a condition of survival. Like The Truce, the book offers an extraordinary gallery of characters belonging to different cultures, from Poles to Russians, from Ukrainians to Greeks, from Frenchmen to Germans, as well as to different social layers, but merged in a world in which all traditional cleavages and hierarchies were turned upside down. Whereas in Italy, as a Jew, he was a member of a minority, in Auschwitz his particularism was Italian, not Jewish.

In both If This Is a Man and The Truce, his Italian origins become a prism through which he discovers and describes other cultures distant and unknown to him. This is true, first of all, for Yiddish culture, which appeared very strange, not to say exotic, to an Italian Jew. But he also reversed this gaze: in the eyes of a Russian or Polish Jew, the image of a Jew in a gondola or at the top of Vesuvius was just as exotic. Today, Auschwitz has become the locus par excellence of a Western memory of the Holocaust, but the world he described in such a colorful and sympathetic way is an Eastern Jewish, Slavonic, Yiddish, Central European, and Balkan world. And the richness of his books lies in this contrast. In Auschwitz, he learned of the existence of a national Jewry, with its own language and culture, made of traditions, practices, and rituals. His last novel, If Not Now, When? , is a saga of the Jewish resistance in Poland, experienced as a sort of national redemption. He was fascinated by this Judaism, a Judaism of which he had learned the history, celebrated the greatness, and mourned the destruction, but which was not his own.

Against the clich portraying the modern Jewish intellectual as a figure of exile and extraterritoriality, Levi was a striking example of rootedness in a national society, language, and culture. We could almost speak of physical roots, if we simply recall the words with which he evoked his family house in Turin, where he was born on July 31, 1919, and where he committed suicide on April 11, 1987. Presenting himself as an extreme example of sedentary life, he wrote that he had become encrusted in his apartment as seaweed fixes itself on a stone, builds its shell and doesnt move any more for the rest of its life. He passionately described the streets, the river, and the surrounding mountains of Turin, as well as the austere and industrious character of its inhabitants. In 1976, he portrayed his town with the following words:

I am very linked to my little fatherland (patria). I was born in Turin; all my ancestors were Piedmontese; in Turin I discovered my vocation, I studied at University, I have always lived, I have written and published my books with a publisher very rooted in this town despite its international reputation. I like this town, its dialect, its streets, its paving stones, its boulevards, its hills, its surrounding mountains I scaled when I was young; I like the highlander and country origins of its population.

In short, he was a rooted writer, who needed a deep anchorage in a particular social, cultural, national, and even regional background in order to express the universality of his themes and messages.

Maybe, he added, it was because of this remarkable rootedness that journey was the topos of so many of his books. Just as his melancholic Enlightenment was antithetical to the cult of science and conquering technology, his sedentary life was neither provincial nor nationalist. For him, science was not a blind, instrumental rationality, but rather a universal language inseparable from classical humanism (a category he never put into question, unlike postmodernists or structuralists); likewise, his Italian identity, both Jewish and Piedmontese, was able to enter into dialogue with any culture, just as how Faussone, the hero of The Wrench, traveled around the world to build bridges, barrages, and power plants.

A third misunderstanding of Primo Levis work deals with his role as a witness. After his death, he has been canonized as a witness par excellence of the Holocaust, and thus achieved the status of a paradigmatic victim which he did not have during his life. He wrote most of his books at a time in which the Holocaust had not yet entered our common historical consciousness as a central event of the twentieth century or even, in broader terms, of Western civilization. When he published If This Is a Man, the word Holocaust did not exist for defining the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and, later, he pointed out that this word, etymologically meaning a sacrifice offered to the gods, was inappropriate, rhetorical, and, finally, mistaken.

The memorial turn in Western culture the rise of memory as a central topic of public debates, the cultural industry, and academic scholarship took place precisely in the middle of the 1980s. Its symbolic landmarks were successful works such as Zakhor by Josef Hayim Yerushalmi in the United States; Realms of Memory, the collective volumes edited by Pierre Nora, and Shoah, a nine-hour movie by Claude Lanzmann, in France; the so-called Historikerstreit around the Nazi past that will not pass in Germany; and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi himself. Thus, Levi powerfully contributed to the emergence of memory in the public sphere, but this happened at the end of his life and most of his work should be located before this memorial turn. He observed this change with a critical eye I would say with a certain skepticism and felt unsettled by this metamorphosis in both the perception and the representation of the past, as his last, testimonial essay clearly shows.

Two features of this new era of commemorations are particularly significant: first, the transformation of the remembrance of the Holocaust into a sort of civil religion of the West and, second, its separation from the memory of anti-fascism, which had been a dominant memory for three decades in postwar Italy. The civil religion of the Holocaust aims at making sacred the foundational values of our democracies by commemorating the Jewish victims of National Socialism in a liturgical, institutionally ritualized way. It turns the survivors into iconic figures who witness violence and human suffering in their own bodies in short, homines sacri in the opposite sense of Agambens definition: not the ones permissible to kill but rather the selected ones to be commemorated.

Many of Levis remarks in his last essay, The Drowned and the Saved, today sound like warnings against the dangers of this civil religion of the Holocaust. He always rejected the temptation to turn victims into heroes. He refused to present the survivors as the best, those who put up the most relentless resistance to oppression. As he explained, his survival in Auschwitz was fortuitous, simply a matter of luck: the chemistry exam that spared him from being immediately selected for the gas chambers; the extra soup ration which he received daily from his friend Lorenzo Perrone; and his sickness, in January 1945, at the moment of the evacuation of the camp, which spared him the death marches. Thus, he deliberately chose to write If This Is a Man by adopting the calm and sober language of the witness, not the complaining voice of the victim, nor the angered tone of revenge.

Levi refused to judge and played his role as a witness with great humility: The history of the Nazi camps has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralyzed by suffering and incomprehension. The survivors could witness their experience, a fragment of the historical event in which they had been involved, but their testimony did not reveal any transcendent truth. In other words, the drowned (sommersi) who had been swallowed up by the gas chambers could not come back to bear witness. They, rather than the survivors, were the complete witnesses.

In The Drowned and the Saved, he wrote that the survivors were not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority; they were those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but theyre the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.

When Levi wrote about the ethical and political duty of witnessing carried out by the Holocaust survivors, this formula had not yet become a rhetorical ploy of the dominant discourse on memory. He stressed that the survivors not only could not, but would not forget, and wanted the world not to forget, because they felt forgetting to be the most dangerous threat. Overcoming the past (die Bewltigung der Vergangenheit): this catchword, Levi observed, is a stereotype, a euphemism of todays Germany, where it is universally understood as redemption from Nazism.

When he wrote these words, in the middle of the 1960s, a Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin was simply unthinkable. In Levis writings, memory never appears as a Hegelian overcoming of the contradictions of history; its function is cognitive, not allowing repair or reconciliation. We can learn from history, but the past cannot be redeemed. At best, recollections could fulfill a therapeutic function, as for writing If This Is a Man, an act he experienced as the equivalent of Freuds divan. In short, Levis claim of the duty of memory has been consecrated in our age of obsession for the past, but it was conceived of in a time of collective amnesia. The duty of memory is not a timeless and universal principle; it needs to be understood historically.

Memory of the offense means facing some fundamental ethical issues, notably that of guilt both individual and collective and pardon. In the 1960s, historicizing National Socialism meant first of all turning the page or, according to the conventional formula, Bewltigung der Vergangenheit (coming to terms with the past). Amry sarcastically evoked this formula in the subtitle of his essay, Bewltigungsversuche eines berwltigten (Overcoming attempts by an overwhelmed). Reconciliation was an empty word if it did not mean the resentment of the victims on the one hand and, on the other hand, the self-mistrust (Selbstmisstrauen) of the offenders. Such a recognition of historical responsibility, inescapable even for the generation that came after the war, was the only premise for remaking history that is, metaphorically turning back time and moralizing it (Moralisierung der Geschichte).

Levi did not express a similar resentment. His obstinate trust in the virtues of human reason was the deepest source of his anthropological optimism. To my short and tragic experience of being deported, he wrote in 1976, another one, more complex and longer, was superposed, that of writer and witness. The result was clearly positive, because such a past enriched and consolidated me. . . . Living, writing and meditating on my experience I have learnt a lot about men and their world. Amry did not share this view and accused Levi of being a forgiver (Vergeber). Levi denied the allegation, but at the same time confessed that he could not share the Austrian-Belgian writers resentment.

In the last pages of The Truce, Levi described the Germans he saw in Munich in October 1945 as a mass of insolvent debtors, and in his correspondence with Dr Ferdinand Meyer, one of the German chemists at the I. G. Farben laboratory of Buna-Monowitz in Auschwitz, he refused to pardon him: I would like to help you come to terms with your past, he wrote, but I doubt that I am able. Nevertheless, he accepted the principle of forgiveness.

To forgive and even love ones enemies is possible, he wrote, but only when they show unequivocal signs of repentance, in other words when they cease to be enemies. Curiously, Levi did not quote the best-known and most controversial book on this subject, Die Schuldfrage, by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had tried to distinguish different aspects of German guilt (penal, political, personal, and metaphysical guilt). Like the German philosopher, however, he raised the problem of our historical responsibility for the past.

In short, Levi could not forgive his persecutors but did not share Amrys resentment. Both of them recognized that they had been incapable of expressing joy when they were liberated from Auschwitz. But after this common admission, their paths diverged. According to Amry, Auschwitzs violence had broken human beings faculty to communicate, making them strangers to the world. Levi, on the contrary, could still see, among the skeletal figures of the death camps, a remote possibility of good.

These debates of the postwar years on guilt and victimhood belong to a finished time, when the past legacy heavily burdened the present. Today, the civil religion of the Holocaust tends to depoliticize memory, focusing on innocent victims as objects of compassion. It has emerged from a radical break with anti-fascist memory, which focused on the celebration of fallen fighters rather than victims. Nor is it by accident that the rise of the Holocaust memory has corresponded with the decline of anti-fascist memory. In many of his writings, Levi distinguished between Jewish and political deportation. In his eyes, this difference should not be hidden or diminished, but neither should it be stressed as a dividing line. He had been deported as a Jew, but had been arrested as a partisan, and when he wrote If This Is a Manafter coming back to Turin, he decided to publish some chapters in a small magazine of Piedmontese Resistance: LAmico del popolo. In his view, Jewish and anti-fascist memories could only exist together, as twin memories.

In 1978, Levi wrote a short text for the Italian pavilion of the Auschwitz Museum, which is a strong defense of anti-fascism. In the last decades, this pavilion, commissioned by the National Association of Ex-Deportees and realized by a team of committed authors the architect Ludovico di Belgiojoso, the composer Luigi Nono, and the painter Mario Samon had become a realm of memory of Italian anti-fascism. But it no longer fit the current standards of public memory and was finally closed.

Anti-fascism a particular form of anti-fascism, made of a fusion of the critical Enlightenment and left-wing republicanism was the political background of Primo Levi, but he never claimed the anti-fascist rhetoric of postwar Italy. His books share little with the epic and heroic tales of a resistance struggle for national liberation. In The Drowned and the Saved, he described himself as the worst of the partisans, lacking physical courage, experience, and political education, and he emphasized that his career as a partisan had been very brief, painful, stupid and tragic: I had taken a role that was not mine.

The tragic legacy of his experience as a partisan is summarized in a handful of passages in The Periodic Table. Levi referred to an ugly secret: the execution of two of his comrades accused of betrayal something quite common in partisan warfare that burdened his consciousness and destroyed him psychologically, depriving him of the necessary resources for carrying on the struggle.

In the last years of his life, which were punctuated by repeated and deepening depressions, Levi grew obsessed with the gray zone, the area of indistinctness where the boundaries between persecutors and victims, good and evil, were blurred; an ambiguous space whose incredibly complicated internal structure hindered the faculty of judgment. It was in this period that he depicted the Muselmann the dehumanized inmate, the embodiment of another intermediate area suspended between life and death as the complete witness of the Nazi camps. Survivors were simply vicarious representatives of these complete witnesses, who could not speak.

Levi remained a melancholic enlightener, but his optimism had disappeared. He bore testimony without considering himself a true witness, and defended anti-fascism in spite of portraying himself as a pitiful partisan. In short, he believed in the necessary search for truth, but he never preached truths; he rather tried to excavate them, to problematize them, by both recognizing their contradictions and exploring their darkest shadows.

This critical skepticism did not spare his Jewish identity and his role as a witness. In 1967, he took a position in defense of Israel, which he felt was threatened with destruction, defining it, in several interviews, as his second homeland. In 1982, at the moment of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, he denounced this aggression and warned against the birth of a paradoxical form of Israeli fascism embodied by leaders such as Menachem Begin, whom he stigmatized as a disciple of Zeev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. He knew that many of the founders of Israel had been people who, like him, had survived the Holocaust, but could not come back to their homes. This was a matter of fact, but it did not immunize them nor Israel against fascism. This was another dimension of the gray zone.

In an interview in 1983, Primo Levi admitted his exhaustion. He no longer wished to meet pupils and students who repeated the same questions, but he also added that he was not satisfied by his own answers. He described having been deeply unsettled by a question asked by two adolescents in a school: Why do you still come to tell us your story, forty years later, after Vietnam, the Stalin camps and Cambodia, after all this Why? He remained in front of them, voiceless, mouth agape, as a witness retreating back into himself. His convictions, his pedagogical talents and rhetorical skills, his long career of witnessing suddenly seemed useless in front of this simple question. He felt overwhelmed by shame, the human shame he had discovered in Auschwitz and which he met again translating Franz Kafkas The Trial. The past is an inexhaustible receptacle of materials for literary creation, but, unfortunately, history is not a magistra vitae.

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