The ordinary Bell pepper: 0.

A lowly pimento: 100 – 500.

Tabasco sauce: 2,500 – 5,000.

Jalapeno peppers: 2,500 – 8,000.

Cayenne pepper: 30,000 – 50,000.

Turns out there is a pepper, called the Bhut jolokia, which leaves all these in the dust, clocking in at, I’m not making this up, at 855,000 – 1,050,000 Scoville units.

The bhut jolokia is grown in northeastern India and Bangladesh, and actually eaten there, my newspaper reports, “for its taste, as a cure for stomach troubles and a way to fight the crippling summer heat.” The first reason I understand. The second also makes sense since I assume that having the lining of one’s stomach cauterized would indeed cure most common stomach ailments. The third one, well, I live in the north so will not speculate.

Anyway, the Indian military has announced they are using the bhut jolokia “to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects.” Thinking about that made me realize that if they use a gourd as the casing and fertilizer as the explosive, this could be the first fully natural, organic, locally grown weapon.

One more good part of God’s Creation sadly perverted by the fall. Better than using a bullet, I realize, but still.

A dear friend recently was in London and sent this photo of a dessert she had at a café called @venue. It was a good trip, the proof being, she said, that this wasn’t even the highlight of the trip.

 

“Ice cream on dried cowpat,” my wife Margie, responded. “How have I lived without it?”

“Ah,” our friend said, “but only made to LOOK LIKE dried cow pat. And that, my friend, is Art.”

“As Kevin Vanhoozer warns, the best description of much contemporary evangelicalism is not ‘always reforming’ but ‘always reacting’.”

            [Anvil 26:1 (2009), as noted in Select Items # 265 by Jim Pakala, Covenant Seminary.]

I have always believed that it’s good to listen to critics, to give them a fair hearing. The reason is that they just might be onto something. Since I’m already convinced—and my wife confirms—that I fail to get everything right, a critic might spot something I should change, or rethink, or redo, or apologize for. Now, I don’t like the process involved, and usually feel rather annoyed when they get some criticism of me correct. Even if they in the process remind me how annoying other people can be. Sorry, I mean even if also they remind me how easily I can be annoyed.

Anyway. I believe the same thing about my faith. The best test, it seems to me, is not whether I feel confident in what I believe, but whether I can face the best challenges of the most thoughtful unbelievers and not only believe but with sufficiently good reasons.

Sometimes I am surprised by the challenges or questions issued by the critics of my faith. They hold a position I have not fully appreciated, or are bothered by something I had not considered all that important. Listening to the critics of the faith, in other words, has benefits.

I wish I could recommend A Muslim View of Christianity to everyone, but it is a scholarly book, produced by an Islamic academic for fellow scholars who are engaged in Muslim-Christian dialogue. Although well written and thoughtfully developed, Mahmoud Ayoub’s collection of essays tends to be academically demanding in the best sense of the term.

When I began A Muslim View of Christianity, I expected to find (among other things) thoughtful arguments about both the similarities and differences between Islam and Christianity, serious questions about the veracity of Scripture and the historicity of Christ’s death and resurrection, and reflections on the conflicts between the two from the pages of history. Ayoub provided all that and more.

What I was surprised to find was a plea for pluralism. Not pluralism in the sense that differing religions live side by side in tolerance, but pluralism in the philosophical sense, that in a pluralistic world no ultimate truth claims can be made. Three quotes among many, taken at random:

“We now know that no religion can claim an exclusive monopoly on salvation and truth. We must accept the fact that our forebears knew far less about world religions than we know. Hence, we must see our faith in global perspective as one among many, each having its own spiritual heritage and civilization. In light of this, no religious” community or religio-ethnic group can claim a special and exclusive mission to mankind.” [60]

“The Qur’an, far more than Muslims have ever done, accepts the pluralism of religions and affirms the unity of faith. The only common elements it insists on are sincere faith in God and works of righteousness.” [21]

“True dialogue is conversation among persons and not a confrontation between ideas. If Muslim-Christian dialogue is to be at all meaningful, it must go beyond the letter of scriptures, creed, and tradition. Men and women of faith in both communities must learn to listen to the divine voice speaking through revelation and history, and together seek to understand what God is saying to Muslims through Christianity and to Christians through Islam. In more practical terms, this means that Christians and Muslims must go beyond the history of a reified religion and try instead to share in the commonality of faith. Then it will, we hope, be realized that although Christians and Muslims have followed different roads toward the goal of human fulfillment in God, the goal is one and the roads meet at many points.” [229]

One more thing: Although I am not at liberty to name my sources, I have it on good authority that more and more Islamic clerics are arguing for religious pluralism, especially among Shi’a scholars in Qum, the holy city in Iran.

I am reading Netherland with some friends. A novel set in post 9/11 New York by Joseph O’Neill, it is a meditation on being lost. Hans van den Broek, a successful financial analyst who is working in the American branch of a European bank, is a man caught in the postmodern dilemma: how is it possible to have so much in such a driven, technologically advanced world and yet find so little meaning in any of it. His wife, a successful attorney, has returned to London with their son to live with her parents. They have not divorced, but a subtle distancing haunts their relationship.

Hans discovers that those he should have most in common with—the analysts and planners in the rarefied world of high finance—have little time for real relationships and little patience for unhurried conversation. He discovers that unknown to most New Yorkers, a parallel world exists where immigrants gather in clubs to play cricket in city parks. The players come from all over the globe: Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Hans and Chuck Ramkissoon, who he first meets as an umpire at a match, become friends. Netherland is essentially their story.

Netherland is also about cricket, a sport I have never understood, and still don’t. In the novel it functions less as a sport we must understand or like than a metaphor for something greater. In this it is like the baseball in The Brothers K, an essential part of the story yet bigger than what can be seen on ESBN.

Mostly though, Netherland is about living in our postmodern world. About being lost in a cosmos that is home but yet isn’t, where homesickness isn’t so much a disease or a failing as a way of life. About life in a universe where we sense that we belong here but don’t quite fit. That something deep is somehow out of joint, but all the yearning seems to end in more yearning.

Hans relates at one point how he arrives to meet Chuck:

I can see him now, waiting for me on the wooden steps of his porch. He is wearing a cap from his collection of caps, and shorts from his collection of shiny athletic shorts, and a T-shirt from his collection of T-shirts. Chuck covered up his extreme industry with a wardrobe suggestive of extreme leisure.

“So,” he says, “what’s the story?”

“There’s no story,” I say, sitting next to him.

He looks at me with a cocked head, as if I’ve thrown down a challenge. “There’s always a story,” he says. Whereupon he feels for the buzzing phone at his breast.