Issue 19
September 2003
Published by Theodore Plantinga
In this issue ....
If there were a "theory of everything," what would it emphasize? Ken Wilber says he knows. The worldview discussion begun in the previous two issues in connection with David Naugle continues. Click here to read "Ken Wilber and the Quest for a Theory of Everything."
Do all Christians go through a conscious conversion process of which they retain a memory? And is a lukewarm Christian no Christian at all? Click here to read "Half-Hearted Thanksgiving."
Don't take the term literally. I don't plan to turn pages for you. What I mean to do in this space is comment on materials in the world of the printed page -- brief book notes, observations about periodicals, and perhaps a comment on an event.
Fenced out. During my youth in western Canada, a song many of us liked included the memorable theme "Don't fence me in." The ethos of the west was connected with wide-open spaces. Well, times have changed. Today we worried out being "fenced out." Naomi Klein develops this theme very capably in a collection of short pieces entitled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002). This stimulating book is intended as a follow-up to her stirring assault on globalization capitalism in No Logo, on which Myodicy has already commented.
Klein writes: "... twelve years after the celebrated collapse of the Berlin Wall, we are surrounded by fences yet again, cut off -- from one another, from the earth and from our own ability to imagine that change is possible. The economic process that goes by the benign euphemism `globalization' now reaches into every aspect of life, transforming every activity and natural resource into a measured and owned commodity." [p. xx]
She explains further: "... on the other side of all these virtual fences are real people, shut out of schools, hospitals, workplaces, their own farms, homes and communities. Mass privatization and deregulation have bred armies of locked-out people, whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as `backward,' whose basic needs go unmet. These fences of social exclusion can discard an entire industry, and they can also write off an entire country, as has happened to Argentina. In the case of Africa, essentially an entire continent can find itself exiled to the global shadow world, off the map and off the news, appearing only during wartime when its citizens are looked on with suspicion as potential militia members, would-be terrorists or anti-American fanatics." [p. xxi]
This electronic journal is my way of keeping in touch with friends, colleagues, former students, and so forth. It does not have a regular publication schedule. Feel free to download it and pass it around. You may even wish to send me a comment; I do not guarantee a response to each communication. If you wish to repost anything in this journal, please let me know. If you care to print something in paper form, this can also be arranged, provided that I retain the copyright so that I will remain free in my use of the material. Please regard the materials in Myodicy as copyrighted by me, except in the case of articles written by someone else. What is written in Myodicy should not be regarded as reflecting any official position or policy of Redeemer University College.
Theodore Plantinga
E-mail: [email protected]