The Female Brain, the Sexed Body & Embodied Cognition
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, February 25–March 2, 2024
Thought-Provoking Content
What’s a Population Trap and How Do You Get Out of It? by Denise Paglinawan in Financial Post:
Canada’s population increased by more than 1.2 million people or 3.2 per cent in 2023, five times higher than the average for nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The economists [at the National Bank of Canada] said this population growth is extreme relative to the absorptive capacity of the economy, given that the workforce is not aging faster than the OECD average. This absorption challenge is most evident in Canada’s housing market, where the supply deficit reached a new record of only one housing start for every 4.2 people entering the working-age population, compared to the historical average of 1.8 ratio, they said.
There are so many new people, that all our investment capacity is getting used up incorporating them into the economy and getting them up to speed—there is nothing left over to actually increase the overall standard of living.
The Last Wild Harvest by Rory Groves in Front Porch Republic:
Using a mess of tubes and fittings and pumps on a scale that can only compared to dystopian science fiction, the future of maple syruping may now entail cutting the crowns off of healthy maples, affixing spigots, and forcibly sucking sap directly from the remaining stump.
Kim Jong Un Has Broken With Decades of North Korean Policy—Does It Mean He’s Planning for War? by Simone McCarthy at CNN:
The leader has brushed aside decades of his country’s policy toward South Korea—now proclaiming that North Korea would no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with the South and calling for it to be classified as their “permanent enemy.”
The sweeping policy shift in the nuclear-capable country has come alongside a volley of weapons tests, the shelling of a maritime buffer zone, and calls from Kim for North Korea to accelerate war preparations in response to “confrontation moves” by the US.
Who’s Afraid of the Female Brain by Kathleen Stock in UnHerd:
Neurobiologists there have discovered that a specially designed “deep neural network”—that is, an AI presumably devoid of the misogynist prejudices of ordinary mortals—can reliably sort brains into male and female categories based on the detection of “hotspot” activity patterns. It seems that the AI can also use these differences to reliably predict different cognitive performances in men and women on certain tasks, suggesting that functional brain variations have behavioural implications.
Doubt Is a Ladder, Not a Home by Brad East in Christianity Today:
For too many Christians raised in the church, faith means mental and emotional certainty, and so the Christian life is defined as believing as hard as you can in difficult things. In this model, when a feral question nudges its nose into the tent, you’re left with only two options: Kick it out by somehow believing harder or accept that your faith is fraudulent and give it up.
The State of the Culture, 2024 by Ted Gioia in The Honest Broker:
Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.
The Rise of the Non-Christian Evangelical by Ryan Burge in Graphs About Religion:
For Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, a Republican respondent is more likely to say that they are born-again compared to a Democrat.
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller in The New York Times:
What often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Account owners who report explicit images or potential predators to Instagram are typically met with silence or indifference, and those who block many abusers have seen their own accounts’ ability to use certain features limited, according to the interviews and documents.
Gender Difference Is Real, but Too Complex to Spell Out All the Specifics by Branson Parler in Christianity Today:
Gender is the love of certain goods, including social goods, by which the sexed body is socially manifested.
This complex reality is neither merely biological (per some essentialists) nor strictly cultural (per constructivists). Rather, gender is one way inherently cultural beings make sense of the givenness of the world, including the maleness and femaleness of bodies.
How Do Our Bodies Think? Embodied Cognition and Ritual by Tobias Tanton in The Biblical Mind:
On a purely symbolic view, kneeling and doing a handstand would be equally apt prayer postures since a convention could attach the same meaning to either. However, if there is something particular about kneeling (e.g., that it lowers the body, that it makes one less mobile), then the embodied meaning plays a role, perhaps alongside other symbolic meanings.
Music
Day by day, and with each passing moment,
Strength I find to meet my trials here;
Trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment,
I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.
And be with thee in thy coming in and going out
In thy labor and in thy leisure,
And be with thee in thy joy
And be with thee in thy sorrow
Until the day when there shall be no sunset and no dawning
Fragments
On Godhead and Trinity
The words “Godhead” and “Trinity” are not synonyms.
“Godhead” comes from the Middle English “Godhede” meaning God-hood, that is, Divinity or the divine nature.
It does not mean that the God is a unity of three metaphorical ‘heads’—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I don't know why Adventists are susceptible to this malapropism, but I see it too often in our discussions of the Trinity. The short Wikipedia entry about the concept clarifies that the word “is unrelated to the modern word ‘head,’” which suggests that it may be a relatively common contemporary misunderstanding. However, from what I have read, Ellen White always used “Godhead” precisely.
Trinitarians believe that the Godhead (Divinity or the Divine Being) is a unity of three distinct persons and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have the fullness of the Godhead (divinity or the divine nature), not that the Godhead and Trinity are the same concept. There are attributes of the Godhead (e.g. omnipotence) other than those that define the oneness of God in relation to the three divine persons.
On the Three Phases of Atonement
According to Leviticus 10:17, atonement is how God handles human iniquity (also translated “guilt”) via the sacrificial-sanctuary-priestly ritual system. Iniquity, in the Bible, means the liability to punishment that people accrue before God due to their sin (see, for example, Gen 15:16).
There are three types of rituals that Leviticus 16 says atone for the iniquity of congregation/people's sins on the Day of Atonement (note that the instructions in Lev 16 are given in light of what happened in ch. 10). They correlate topologically to three phases of Christ's ministry by which he keeps us from being punished for our sin.
1. The sacrificial rituals conducted on the altar. The sin offering of one of the two male goats (vv. 5, 9) and of the ram (v. 24)—pointing to Christ's sacrifice on the cross where he suffered the punishment for our sins (Heb 7:27).
2. The blood ritual conducted in the Most Holy Place (vv. 15–17). The sprinkling of the blood of the sin offering goat on the east side of the Mercy Seat (lit. "Atonement Instrument"), the same side but also beyond where the iniquities had been accruing throughout the year in the Holy Place (16:16, compare 10:18)—pointing to the second phase of Christ's heavenly intercession (Heb 7:25), the investigative judgment where he shows that we will never need to be punished for our sins (I've written more on that here).
3. The scapegoat ritual conducted at the door of the tent of meeting (16:7, 10, 20–22). The confession of the iniquities of the people with hands laid on the other male goat and removal of that goat to the wilderness domain of God's opponent "Azazel" along with the iniquities so confessed—pointing to the final punishment at the end of the millennium when Christ will execute judgment on Satan and his angels and spare his people from destruction (Rev 20:13–15).
In summary, the three phases of atonement are when our liability to punishment for sin is (1) absorbed by Jesus on the cross, (2) shown to no longer be necessary for us by Jesus in Heaven's court, and (3) meted out on the Devil in the lake of fire that consumes and is prepared for him and his angels (Matt 25:41).
On Expressive Individualism and Current Trends in the Adventist Church
A significant background condition for our North American Adventist denominational woes is the breakdown of what the first philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun called "asabiyyah," meaning group consciousness or social solidarity. Both internal and external factors are contributing to a breakdown of cohesion in our civil society, which means society's members are less and less willing to make sacrifices for each other. This breakdown is the root cause of the economic/personnel/membership crises among American denominations, from which, as we have lately seen, the Adventist Church is not immune (the overall thesis of this essay is based on The End of Theological Education by Ted A. Smith).
Externally, our denomination is now experiencing the forces that have already destroyed what bound us together in American civil society. Historically, Americans were bound together by voluntary associations—social clubs, fraternal and service organizations, mutual aid societies, unions, and churches. They built up these institutions with the sacrifice of their time and talent on the understanding they were helping others and that others would help them in their time of need. The short story is that these institutions were inadequate to the crises of the Great Depression and were augmented and gradually replaced by big government social programs. Then the big government programs were hollowed out, leaving my generation and those that follow with a society that is one big competition.
There is also a feedback loop between expressive individualism, on the one hand, and big-business/government/philanthropy, on the other, that is almost totalizing. In other words, people increasingly don't want anything to do with small, volunteer-run associations because they are not prominent venues for self-expression and don't provide consumer goods for self-expression. This, on the other hand, leaves them completely on their own, with nothing between them and the power of massive institutions to whom they are not names, but numbers.
Therefore, we have no loyalty to institutions because in our experience they have no loyalty to us. We understand that we are financially on our own, that if something should happen to us there is no help coming to keep us in the middle class, and we only give when we can make absolutely sure that it is going to something worthy of disadvantaging ourselves for. If neither the church nor the government are going to take care of you in the end, how can you justify the financial loss to your family? This explains why people no longer give of their time (as volunteers), talents (as denominational employees), and treasure (tithes and offerings) to denominational institutions as in previous generations.
One of the drums I beat in this secular age is that sacrifice is precisely how we get fuller meaning to life. But that has to be balanced against the observation that cults abuse their followers precisely because they offer fuller meaning through sacrifice. In Adventism, we presumably believe in a ministry of healing and education that promises a flourishing life on all levels. If too many of our pastors don't experience that flourishing, then we have to start asking why. And I propose that the dissolution of American civil society not only explains why we are having trouble recruiting/retaining pastors, but also why people are checking out of denominational affiliation on a number of levels. I don't think we can address these problems in isolation from each other.
What I see happening is that having broken one pastoral workforce, conferences are importing a new one for whom jobs in the NAD hold economic opportunity. This is no different than what is happening to other low-prestige workforces in wealthy, secure, and highly educated countries.
The good news for the denomination is that we are growing most rapidly in those countries that have the highest birth rates and will supply the world's labor force in the coming century. The bad news is that Adventism in the NAD will increasingly become identified with traditional and survival values and continue to struggle to reach the cultural majority and loose our educated children as they are socialized into the even more secular-rational and self-expression values of the upper-middle class (see the Ingelhart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World from the World Values Survey).
The only realistic way out of this that I can see from my Canadian context is to train our immigrant communities to become missionaries who engage those with a different worldview instead of merely reproducing what worked in their countries of origin and attracts fellow immigrants in their receiving countries. It's a long shot, but it's better than having a denomination that only grows by attracting newcomers and struggles to retain its children.
And on the point of clashing global values, the culture war being waged by our church leaders over the meaning of family via the question of women's ordination has confirmed North Americans' intuitions that they are not only on their own in society but on their own in their world church because they see an asymmetry of sacrifices being called for. We send our scarce resources to the General Conference and what we get in return is domineering inflexibility on an issue that is not a question of fellowship.
So, do we steer our movement into the turn toward social radical individualism and away from voluntary association, civil society, and denominational institutionalism in order to meet our young people where they are? Or do we try to show them a better way, assuming we believe it is a better way, by trying to somehow recover what was good about the values of previous generations? Because obviously, there is no going back to precisely what we had before because those social conditions are gone and there is no plan to revive them.
It seems to me that there are two possible ways forward:
1. Lean into the every person/family/congregation-for-themselves ethos of our society by making churches platforms for displays of individual authenticity in order to win the social-media competition for attention and capture followers/resources for God.
2. Double-down on the communitarian ethos best exemplified by the (little "c") communism of the Jerusalem church and by inspiring believers to sacrifice for God and one another as partners in a church fellowship that matters more than any individual.
One last point: religious liberty. Civil society was, in theory, what made religious liberty conceivable because it provided a way of binding society together across a range of ultimate values that validated sacrifice for others but that were not inculcated by the state. Now that participation in civil society is effectively an exercise in consumer preference, it no longer effects solidarity and people are increasingly demanding that the government reflect their specific visions of the ultimate good, which those who disagree with them rightly see as an imposition. So far, our legal traditions have held the line against these sorts of demands, but for how long?