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What does it mean to advance humanism in healthcare? According to Arnold P. Gold Foundation advancing humanism in healthcare is characterized as, a respectful and compassionate relationship between physicians, members of the healthcare team and their patients. A recent article published January 26, 2019 in Modern Healthcare talks about the importance of having all members of the healthcare team constantly educated regarding how to utilize patient-communication-best-practices to ensure the best outcomes. This title says it all, Physician empathy a key driver of patient satisfaction. This article was published by Science Daily and points out that sixty-five percent of patient satisfaction was attributed to physician empathy.Additional Gold Foundation studies have also recognized the impact empathy has on improving health outcomes and its significance in patient care.

Empathy is defined as, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is the capacity to put ones self in anothers shoes and feel what that person is going through and share their emotions and feelings. It is the recognition and validation of a patients fear, anxiety, pain, and worry. It is the ability to understand patients feelings and facilitate a more accurate diagnoses and more caring treatment. Expressing patient empathy indeed advances humanism in healthcare as a matter of fact expressing empathy in healthcare is THE KEY INGREDIENT to enhancing the patient experience and patient encounter.

Both empathy and compassion in healthcare play vital roles in thepatient experienceand are key components of the physician-patient relationship. When a patient arrives to see their healthcare provider, the patients medical condition whether it is a severe illness or injury, a chronic condition, or simply a routine check-up will often manifest emotions such as anxiety, fear, and apprehension. Patients want to know they are receiving the very best care, and that is conveyed when their care team is empathetic and compassionate.

Empathy extends far beyond a patients medical history, signs, and symptoms. It is more than a clinical diagnosis and treatment. Empathy encompasses a connection and an understanding that includes the mind, body, and soul. Expressing empathy is highly effective and powerful, which builds patient trust, calms anxiety, and improves health outcomes.Research has shownempathy and compassion to be associated with better adherence to medications, decreased malpractice cases, fewer mistakes, and increased patient satisfaction. Expressing empathy, one patient at a time, advances humanism in healthcare.

When I first watched the video below, I was reminded, and blown-away, by the notion that the smallest expressions of empathy make huge lasting impressions. Checkout the Cleveland Clinics, Delos Toby Cosgrove, MD, President and CEO, as he and his team demonstrate some special moments that exemplifies the power of empathy in healthcare. The video has become a viral sensation, with 4,437,714 views on YouTube, as of this writing. It may be viewed below:

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The Importance of Empathy in Healthcare: Advancing Humanism

The question which strikes you every time you watch a body horror movie is, What are the limitations of the moniker of body horror? Is it only restricted to simple gore and bloodshed as mutilations are inflicted on the body? At what point does body horror evolve from gore to something far more sensual and potent? The near future of David Cronenbergs Crimes Of The Future is a terrifying dystopia.

Mature-Content Warning

The world is affected by pollution and climate change with disastrous results, causing unforeseen changes to the human body. To counter that, significant biotechnological advances have been made, including the invention of machines that interface with the human body and control bodily functions. However, unlike most sci-fi dealing with post-humanism (for example, the Deus-Ex games), the visual aesthetic of said interfaces is less machine-like and more human-like. Even the pieces of machinery are covered with viscera and slime; the electronics used to conduct surgery are shaped more like bones than electronic appendages. But perhaps due to the cause of such environmental changes, the human body itself has evolved such that the threshold of pain and the presence of infectious diseases has decreased. Thus, in typical Cronenbergian fashion, the pain has replaced pleasure, and as a character calls it, Surgery is the new sex.

However, evolution has resulted in mutations as well. For an eight-year-old child named Brecken, that translates to an ability to eat plastic, which causes him to be murdered by his mother because of the exhibition of such inhuman characteristics. For Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), this has caused his body to develop new vestigial organs. While this causes Tenser excruciating pain and has rendered him dependent on machinery linked to his endocrine system to maintain optimum stability, Tenser uses this ability to elevate himself as a famous performance artist, with his assistant Caprice performing surgery on him in front of a live audience and extracting the new vestigial organ. In a world as potently unique as this one, the physical body is a form of identity. Marking and tattooing of organs is a deliberate method of ownership and also registration of different organs.

The world and environment in the movie are interesting, and Cronenberg ensures you remember them. That comprises letting the environment speak for it, but for the majority of its runtime, Crimes Of The Future (2022) is a victim of clunky exposition delivered through clumsily simplistic written dialogues which sound more forced than natural. The use of a minimum score in the movie adds to the very unsettling flair of the storytelling. That feeling of unsettlement is compounded by the eagerness of characters to undergo surgery, where Cronenberg satirizes the use of plastic surgery to increase the number of scars and mutilations and exhibits them as a badge of honor and performance art. To some extent, that is a political statement; the ownership of ones body just extends to the interior organs, if we take the concept of tattooing to its literal extreme.

The issue with Crimes Of The Future is its introduction of different curveballs, which take time to develop, but the resultant payoff feels surprisingly low. It is very much a result of the movie being dramatically inert. The emotional utterances and moments of tearful poignancy feel blatantly artificial or over the top compared to the cold, haunting, pause-filled conversations between the characters. The gore scenes are scored to classical music, and the editing and staging of these sequences of surgery and gore feel cool, almost mechanical in their approach, even though seeing images like a zipper connecting two halves of the stomach and Lea Seydouxs character Caprice opening said zipper and delivering oral should be a cause for grimace or puking. Instead, it brought about a minor sense of curiosity.

Because that is what Crimes Of The Future is. An exercise in the development of ideas about human evolution and the evolution of the environment, remotely different from most visually spectacled sci-fi. The different political factions of performance artists, the commercial sniveling bureaucracy of The National Organ Registry, and the mutated plastic-eating members of society are thickly veiled satires of the difference between art and commerce and how Tenser, through his performance art, is trying to straddle that line. Maybe, in the end, even he succumbs to the temptation of art. This exercise in ideas is suitably carried by Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux, who are acting at the perfect wavelength which Cronenberg desires. Kristen Stewart, however, plays the manic version of Princess Diana in Spencer, and it is extremely distracting, while Scott Speedman shows sparks of passion and insanity not unfamiliar with the world Cronenberg has crafted. It is a fascinating movie, which will satisfy the Cronenberg diehards. I only wish it had more visceral energy and the sticky bloody warmth you would expect from a film where surgery is the new form of pleasure.

See More: Crimes Of The Future Ending, Explained: What Happens At The Live Autopsy Performance? Is Saul Dead Or Alive?

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'Crimes Of The Future' Review: David Cronenberg's Experiment In World-Building And Idea Generation | DMT - DMT

There are several Hindu principles which the world has adopted from Hinduism and there are many which the world needs to adopt so as to make it a better place to live

Celebrating Hindu way of life.

Hinduism is the oldest existing civilisation in the world. The interesting thing is that besides being the oldest, it is a resilient and ever flourishing civilisation, too. Have you ever wondered why this civilisation has survived and is still blooming? The answer lies in its civilisational ethos. Hinduism is not a religion; it is a way of life. With the march of civilisation, the Hindu-intellect evolved certain values, principles, creeds and beliefs. This Hindu way of living is based on these core values and fundamentals which make it ever growing and sustaining. There is a basic underlying value-system which has enabled this civilisation to survive for over 5,000 years. Interestingly, these values have been assimilated in our culture in such a way that they have become part of our daily lives. These ways of life are termedSanatani(beginning-less) since they are beyond time and space and are universal in their applicability.

There are many Hindu principles which the world has adopted from Hinduism and there are many which the world needs to adopt so as to make it a better place to live. The following are a few of them:

Extended family as a life value

National Geographic researcher and Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner discovered that communities with most centenarians have one thing in common: Making family members and other loved ones among the daily priorities. As per this research, time spent with family is a wise investment which can add up to six years to your life expectancy! Living in an extended family is one of the important values of Hinduism.

The Hindu concept of life is not a life based on individualism per se, but a life which is based on family-ism. It is not the individual but individual in family who is the basic unit of Hindu identity. Family is a pivot on which the whole Hindu way of life revolves. It is in the family that a Hindu-individual is born, groomed and gets his value system. Living in a family makes your life stress-free and gives psychological support to excel.

Hindu parents are duty bound to raise their children and take care of ageing parents. This unit of family is generally an extended family in which though all the members may not be living under the same roof but enjoy very close emotional bonds. You cannot conceive of any Hindu family without family as the basic unit.

Respecting parents and elders

A child is groomed to respect, care and obey his parents and grandparents. Lord Ram gave up his kingdom for the sake of his fathers vow. Parents for any Hindu child are living Gods. Indian legends have the example of Shravan Kumar who shouldered his blind parents to all the holy cities. Out of father and mother, mother is given more respect since she is the birth-giver.

Unlike many Western cultures where parents are disobeyed, it is hard to think of any Hindu child disobeying his parents. The other social value is respecting elders. The elders may include uncles, aunts (both paternal and maternal), other elders of the family, and elders in general. The teacher is worshiped as a guru and is given equal respect as parents. A guru is a mentor, friend, philosopher and guide for his students and is revered as such.

Respecting guests

You will not find such a welcoming attitude towards guests in any culture where the latter are hailed as gods. The underlying thought of Hindu-philosophy isAtithi Devo Bhav(Guests are Gods). The visiting guest is given utmost respect and care. This value is imbibed right in the family culture and has been ritualised as a tradition. This is one of the reasons why the Hindu civilisation has been so receptive to all the incoming cultures and giving space to accommodate them all. India is home to all the major six religions of the world and people from other religions have settled here because of the accommodative ethos of Hinduism.

Co-existence with other beings

Going to temple and reciting prayers is a daily ritual for many Hindus. The most interesting part is the recitation of the prayers ending with two axioms Parniyon Mein Sadbhavna Ho (let all living beings live in peace with each other) and Vishva Ka Kalyan Ho (Let the whole world prosper). The Hindu is not concerned about me, myself or fellow human beings only.Praniyonmeans all living creatures, including birds, animals, plants, trees, etc. Even the Panch-Tatva which are five basic elements of life water, air, earth, space and fire are considered living entities and are hailed and worshiped as such. A Hindu worships rivers, mountains, fire, forests, sky, et al. As for Vishva Ka kalyanHo, it means that a Hindu is not only concerned with fellow countrymen, but prays for the well-being and welfare of the whole universal; this is true humanism and universalism.

The world needs to learn these cultural values which are the core ethics of Hinduism.

The writer is an independent columnist. Views expressed are personal.

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Five Hindu ways of life world needs to learn for peace, prosperity and happiness - Firstpost

With an increasing glut of water-themed exhibitions, the artworld is taking a compelling, aquatic turn

The ocean provides a model to accommodate change and unpredictability, to sway back and forth between, and ultimately to transcend, numerous disciplines, writes curator Stefanie Hessler in her essay Tidalectic Curating (2020). Proffering a radical premise for an alternative artistic practice, one that looks towards an aquatic, rather than telluric, form of posthumanism, Hessler invokes a term first coined by Barbadian writer and poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe a singular ontology linked to the oceans tidal movements in his words, the ripple and the two tide movement, which leads, above all, to a rejection of the notion of dialectic (and its three-part structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis). More importantly, Brathwaites thinking allows for a construction of identity that moves away from traditional anchors in time and place, to propose a new, fluid form that crossed oceans and continents. Its this thesis that thinkers and curators like Hessler gravitate towards. As she says, by following the thought of Brathwaite one may find oneself immersed in a hybrid worldview from the oceans, with their surfaces as much as in their depths.

Hesslers exploration of what has become more generally termed critical ocean studies or blue humanities, by scholars such as Elizabeth Deloughrey (who, along with Hessler, spoke at the Oceanic Imaginaries conference held in March at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) and Philip E. Steinberg, signals a compelling, aquatic turn in posthumanist critique of the last decade, and one that had been absent throughout large swathes of twentieth-century theory outside the narrow purview of the environmental activist movement. But the current exothermic transformations to the worlds hydrosphere have drastically rewritten the material imaginary of water and its relation to the terrestrial bios. Such changes are clearly visible in the aquatic-themed works of contemporary multimedia artists such as Superflex (Flooded McDonalds, 2009, and Dive-In, 2019), David Gumbs (Water & Dreams, 2014), Julien Creuzet (mon corps carcasse, 2019) and Elise Rasmussen (The Year Without a Summer, 2020).

Critical ocean studies water-borne imaginaries, however, have ventricles that stretch back far beyond a twenty-first-century eco-poetics. In fact, much of the current artistic fascination with these imaginaries is indebted to a premodern worldview, in which climate was often associated with a sublime, and leaky, volatility. In Gumbss experimental film, for example, a fluid collage of vivid, computer-generated colours and effects overlaid on video of tide pools and slow-motion droplets of liquid produces a sensation of immersive virtuality what might be called the image of digital wetness. Yet Gumbss techno-uterine fantasy is largely indebted to Gaston Bachelards 1942 text of the same name, in which the mercurial French philosopher conceives of a water mind-set that distinguishes between an ancient Heraclitean flux, and the Socratic metaphysics that dominated Western thought for centuries. [Water] is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth, he writes. [It is an] element more feminine and more uniform than fire, a more constant one which symbolizes human powers that are more hidden, simple and simplifying. For Gumbs, as for Bachelard, the water mindset is closely linked with an atavistic and maternal reverie, an experience that precedes the moderns emphasis on conscious thought and contemplation.

Despite its reputation as an urtext on water (Bachelards Water and Dreams is the second in a four-part collection he published on the elements), the philosophers work is not ahistorical; rather, it is rooted in a Romantic tradition of climatology and hydrophilia, which often employed the theme of water to blur the edges between artistic innovation and private fantasy. This lineage includes the Surrealist-inspired, painterly films of Jean Painlev, Jean Vigo and Jean Epstein; the proto-Oulipo novels of Raymond Roussel; the nautical, poetic-prose of Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Michelet; as well as the musical impressionism of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Lili Boulanger. They helped to prologue what Deloughrey (2020) would describe as critical ocean studies rich maritime grammar of swirling interdisciplinarity.

Rasmussens film The Year Without a Summer is similarly rooted in a Romantic-era history of water and climate, drawing comparisons between the global crisis of the Anthropocene and the colonial-era crisis instigated by Mount Tamboras 1815 eruption on the island of Sumbawa. The subsequent anomalies in aerosols, cold temperatures and rain lingered over Earth for years, with food shortages reaching as far afield as Ireland and Switzerland, while inadvertently helping to inspire the late-Gothic tradition in literature and painting. The emergence of murky seascapes and cloudscapes, like Caspar David Friedrichs Two Men by the Sea (1817) and J.M.W. Turners 181618 sketches (later published as The Skies Sketchbook), created at the height of Tamboras atmospheric fallout, show how the centurys increasing fascination with a water mindset was softening boundaries between traditional landscape and colour field, figuration and abstraction. This would reach its culmination in the liquiform abstractions of James McNeill Whistlers Thames nocturnes and the lacustrine impressionism of Claude Monet.

[Maritime mythologies] show us that the 19th century was an epoch of great speculations about the elements, German theorist Peter Sloterdijk writes in Neither Sun nor Death (2011). He points to the expansion of colonialism and the technologisation of shipbuilding for the eras changing relationships to the sea, in which the sublime was remodeled into the Titanesque [A]n ocean appears as a giant matrix, an immense test tube, as an immeasurable incubator. It is this contest between Titanic mastery and dissolution that characterised a Romantic poetics of water, or what cultural historian Howard Isham (2004) calls oceanic consciousness. As the paradigm of that mastery, the ship appeared not only as an image of colonial-era technology but also that of safe enclosure, a finite habitat against the vast, liquid unknown, according to Roland Barthes (1957), for whom Vernes Nautilus submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is mans ideal, seaward living room.

In this sense, the iconography of the ship continues to appear in contemporary works like Superflexs mesmerising Flooded McDonalds, a film in which a fast-food restaurants self-contained interior is slowly submerged in water, sending all of its trademark scenography, food and plastic wrappings into a swirling vortex. As a miniature parable of a cataclysmic weather event, it also evokes the Romantic fantasy of the sinking ship on turbulent seas, a particularly popular Dutch subgenre of painting further dramatised by both Turner (The Wreck of a Transport Ship, 1810) and Friedrich (The Sea of Ice, 182324). Or in the followup, Dive-In, the group erects a coral reef-like megalith in the water-parched Coachella Valley and projects underwater images taken from onboard Dardanella (the research ship of TBA21-Academy, founded by art collector and activist Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, and of which Hessler was a curator, 201619), thus creating a cinematic aquarium on the desert floor. While the project suggests both the deep history of the valleys Lake Cahuilla and the future ruins of an apocalyptic sea-rise, it also recalls eighteenth- and late-nineteenth-century panoramic devices like the Eidophusikon (which often exhibited seascapes) or Hugo dAlesis Marorama. DAlesis protocinematic tourist attraction was erected for the 1900 Paris Exposition and allowed visitors to sit in a lifesize cruise ship, where they could view a hydraulic backdrop of the Mediterranean shore scrolling across the deck accompanied by artificial fragrances and mechanical soundscapes of sea travel. Like Vernes vision of the Nautilus, dAlesi aspired to craft a floating living room for the Romantics oceanic consciousness.

Vernes descriptions aboard the Nautilus also hinted at the nineteenth-centurys orientalised visions of Eastern waters. In the second section of Twenty Thousand Leagues he writes of the Indian Oceans surface as largely uninhabited by ships or sailors except for a floating graveyard of bodies that flows from the Ganges. Despite this, the sea itself is filled with plentiful treasures waiting to be discovered; and sharks, from which Captain Nemo saves a helpless Indian oyster diver, declaring him an oppressed compatriot. This depiction by Verne was based upon a prevalent, Eurocentric travel narrative that reduced the Afro-Asian worlds cultural and commercial infrastructures to an undifferentiated tribal paradise ripe for harvesting. In fact, the Indian Oceans trade winds and early shipping technologies had created a littoral network that contested European imperial power in both size and innovation, and contained its own oceanic imaginaries. It was only by the nineteenth century that European traders, buttressed by vast militaries and indentured labour, were able to gain control of South Asian shipping routes and attain global dominance of the oceans. Not coincidentally, the nineteenth century also saw the invention of the historical category of the Indian Ocean by Europeans, according to Indian Ocean studies scholar Rila Mukherjee (2013). It is along these same lines that creative mapmaking works like Yonatan Cohen and Rafi Segals Territorial Map of the World (2013) and Izabela Plutas Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) reimagine the apparatus of Western cartography in stratifying the borders between land and ocean, home and antipodes, West and East.

The European ship was also deeply implicated in the abhorrent activity of the Atlantic slave trade, which reached its zenith at the end of the eighteenth century but contributed to much of the wealth, technology and ideology of the nineteenth-century nation-state and those banana republics of the Caribbean archipelago that served as colonial fiefdoms. The Romantics oceanic consciousness contained the repressed memory of African bondage. This is examined in French- Caribbean artist Julien Creuzets video mon corps carcasse, which uses digital animation to simulate the ongoing poisoning of Martiniques tropical landscape through the contemporary plantation system, imaging the fluid absorption of toxins through the populations bloodstream. Here, the microscopic liquidity of the black colonial body draws an explicit link between what Hessler, citing both British theorist Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and queer studies scholar Macarena Gmez- Barriss The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), describes as the Wests extractive capitalism and the historical dispossession of the Middle Passage, in which millions of Africans were forced across the Atlantic as chattel slaves. In Creuzets film, as in the work of fellow French-Caribbean poet and critic douard Glissant, the Romantic water mindset must shed its Western fantasies of fixity and power, and embrace an archipelagic ethics of creolisation if it is to become truly tidalectic.

Critical ocean studies absorbs all of these rivulets of water-based imaginaries in an effort to reconsider their place in the contemporary, terrestrial world. With the increasing glut of water-themed exhibitions and scholarship, it appears the nineteenth-century oceanic consciousness has reemerged as a twenty-first-century water mindset. But the formers fantasies of immersion and abstraction have also prefigured the impending climatological crisis and a new, drowning mindset in which the human ship floats precariously on a rising sea.

Elise Rasmussens The Year Without a Summer (2020), Izabela Plutas Oceanic Atlas (vanishing) (2020) and Superflexs Dive-In (2019) are on show in Oceanic Thinking, at the University of Queensland Museum, through 25 June

Erik Morse is a writer based in Texas

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Why Artists Are Returning to 'Oceanic Thinking' - ArtReview

In a previous post, I wrote that the Evangelical mind was being split apart. This was in virtue of living amidst two competing camps of philosophical method. Here I address a different yet related issue. It is one causing not so much a bifurcation of the Christian mind, but a devastating fragmentation of it. The source of this fragmentation is the technology available to us, combined with our undisciplined use of it.

The framing question is this: is our technology, and our use of it, overwhelming our mental capacities in such a way that we are suffering emotionally and spiritually? I think this may be the case. If so, we must reconsider this dynamic relationship between human person and human product.

Mind and body have only been strongly delineated since Rene Descartes gave birth to modern philosophy in the 17th century. With Descartes, the infamous mind-body problem emerges on the philosophical scene (well, sort of). Ancient views of the human person could speak both of body and mind, or soul, but not in such compartmentalized terms (with the exception of the Gnostics perhaps, who misunderstood and misapplied Plato). Paulssarx is far more than just the physical body, it has a mental and spiritual component as well.

Thus, the biblical view of the human person speaks about the spirit or soul of man along withthe body. The two are united in an organic synthesis. The God of the Bible made and united body and soul as a means for us to bear His divine image. Just as the physical macrocosmos expresses the majesty of the Creator (Psalm 19:1-6), so to the physical microcosmos that is every human person (Psalm 8:4-8).

Hence the vital importance of Jesus incarnation and His bodily resurrection, as well as the bodily resurrection of all souls at the end of timesome to judgment, some to eternal glory. Gods paradigm creation, the human person, was meant to be eternally physical as well as spiritual. I do not claim that Gods power was limited in such a way as to necessitate bodily existence. God could have made world consisting only of immaterial minds. But Gods freedom in His choice of creation, which is intimately interwoven with His goodness, must be respected.

And so what we do with our bodies matters greatly to the vitality of our soul (or mind). This is a basic truth that every food scientist and dietician knows quite well. Conversely, what we put into our mind affects the health and wellbeing of our bodies. Bad ideas can corrupt our bodies just as immoral bodily acts corrupt our inner self.It is for this reason that Paul, on the one hand, can commend the church in Philippi to do the following:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phil 4:8

and then turn around and say this on the other:

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in mepractice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Phil 4:9

When piety of thought and physical practice fit together, there is harmony of action, and, for the Christian, God is with us in that action. This is what it means to be moral.

Any athlete who habitually practices thinking about his movements on the playing field knows that this envisioning of what one is about to do physically increases the likelihood of actually doing it. Similarly, envisioning wicked things or entertaining evil thoughts will increase the likelihood of actually doing them. This is how the human person is constructed. This is not to say we will necessarily do all that we think (and thank God for that!). It is however to say that to habitually entertain or imagine something in the mind will facilitate acting it out in the body. Something that is rarely or hardly ever contemplated will rarely if ever be actualized.

We can only begin to imagine how powerful and how good this mind-body dynamic will be when fully redeemed in Christ. Is it too much to think we might be able to create wonderful realities simply by thinking about them, apart from the manipulation of other materials? Only an eternal time in heaven will tell. Of course the corollary to this is what an embodied soul that thinks only evil thoughts will be like given an eternal timescale. I have written about this elsewhere, but it is a consideration that may make the Christian doctrine of hell more comprehensible, especially if we were to take our inner most thoughts, feelings and desires both seriously and at face value.

It is for these reasons, therefore, that we must think hard about technology and how its use can affect our inner lives. As our parents (or grandparents) rightly taught us: garbage in, garbage out. Although it is not only garbage that we must be aware of. The devil is more subtle than that. Not all information we take in is intrinsically bad.

Information can often be good. At least we tend to see the status of being informed as a generally good thing. However, the mind (and body) cannot sustain receiving a constant flow of information without some negative effects. We were not designed to be information processing machines only, although in one sense we are like that. And so we must learn to manage and regulate the amount of information we take in. Otherwise we might find ourselves overwhelmed, perhaps to the point of being incapacitated or, as I said, fragmented. It seems we really can overdose on information. This is something that theologian Robin Phillips has appropriately called Information Fatigue.

I can think of four ways that too much information might negatively affect us (although certainly there are more). If we are not careful, this information overflow can have serious ramifications for our well being. And so we must be sensitive to taking in too much of the following:

Each of these types of information, if not managed well, might facilitate serious mental and emotional illness. Each area of information can affect us negatively in its own way.

Daily we are met with information about the following: wars overseas, mass shootings, domestic violence, racial tension, potential financial collapse, rising costs, growing inflation, global pandemics and devastation due to earthquake, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves and forest fires. The first set of issues relates to what moral philosophers and theologians would call human or moral evil. The latter are usually categorized as natural evil or suffering. The first have to do with what cognizant, personal agents do to each other. The latter have to do with what impersonal nature can do to us. There is a third type of evil, demonic evil, which I will not address here (in spite of the fact that it underlies much of the other two kinds).

In addition to seeing all the general evil and suffering of the world, in both religious and non-religious contexts, Christians in particular are constantly reminded of various and sundry moral failures of high-ranking or prominent spokesmenfor the Church. The Church, which is supposed to be the safe-haven from the world, often appears no different than it or even much worse. Thus we are overwhelmed daily with this kind of information. Not only by the numerous atrocities of mankind or the volatility of nature in general, but about evil and suffering within our own Christian context.This can be too much for the mind to process. Moreover, in light of point 4 below, we can feel helpless to do anything about this level or degree of evil.

Of course the problem is not that there is moral evil and natural suffering in the world. The Church has always provided answers to the Problem of Evil in rich and robust ways throughout its history. While that answer may not be adequate for some skeptics, the Christian message of hope and redemption in Christ, in spite of evil and suffering, is still the best solution to the problem the world has yet received.

The problem, therefore, is not evil and suffering per se. Rather it isthe access we have to information about evil and suffering. The amount of evil in the world is likely, although this seems impossible to quantify, no more or less today (adjusted for population size of course) than in the past. In fact, we might assume there is far less suffering today than in the past. As C.S. Lewis was keen to point out: one of the only real differences between us and pre-modern men has been the invention of chloroform (i.e., painkillers). Yet our ancestors physical suffering drove them toward God, while our physical comfort drives us away.

But here is perhaps one other major difference between us and our fore-forefathers: our technology exposes us to a much greater volume and variety of grief. But this is not just grief in generalwhich we always knew existed but grief in particular. We become aware of too many individual stories of tragedy. We know of too many personal examples of real people in real places who suffer real sufferings or commit real evils. For every school shooting in America, there is the story of the numerous victims as well as the story of the shooter himself. Prior generations would only have known about the tragedies in their immediate, localized area of knowledge (e.g., in their villages, townships andmaybe cities).

True, all this global information might motivate us to moral action. But so could seeing the same thing locally motivate us to act. In fact, it is possible that knowing too much information about evil and suffering at a distance might actually hinder us from acting locally. Perhaps we miss what is going on right in front of us, specifically because we are busy reading about or watching horrors from around the world. This dynamic would be inverse, the further back in time one goes and the simpler the technology of the day.

There is one more important point to make about this unparalleled access to information regarding human evil and suffering. That is this: reporting about human wickedness and natural disasters will always outweigh reporting about human goodness and the regular, and very beneficial, operations of natural processes. Rarely will the media report about someone being terribly kind or extraordinarily gracious; or that two individuals or groups treated each other with unusual generosity. Even more rarely will you hear anyone report, at least in spectacular fashion, about how the water cycle yet again functioned in accordance with natural laws today; or how the suns rays once more reliably contributed to photosynthesis, growing the worlds crops; or how there was not an earthquake in this part of the world or a tornado in that part of the country yesterday or last week.

One of the reasons the medieval Roman Catholic church retained Latin as the language of the Church was so that thorny doctrinal issues could be debated behind the scenes, sparing the common man from the intense battle of ideas and terms often required to hash out critical theological judgements. The common man and woman could have their simple religion without being exposed to the long, arduous debates over which doctrines should actually be taught or preached. They could simply benefit from the results of those debates.

Of course the Reformers position was that in spite of the chaos it might cause for a vernacular Bible to be in the hand of every ploughboy and shoemaker, it was nevertheless worth the risk. For the common man to have the Word of God available to him for his daily bread was too great a reward, one that offset the price paid of large-scale theological turmoil. Nevertheless, the Reformation did open the pandoras box of public theological debate, debates that eventually lead to open war. That open war eventually lead to the Enlightenments understandable, albeit unjustified, rejection of revelation and the teaching authority of the Church.

Today, however, we have a very different problem than just vying theological interpretations among denominations or ecumenical traditions. With the rise of the modern research university in the 19th century, the fragmentation of academic disciplines, the abandonment of public Christian education in favor of secular humanism and the dawn of the internet and social media, it is not only debates about Christian doctrines that are public and seemingly endless. It is endless debates about reality itself that now overwhelm us. Having no public authority or consensus view, or even consensus method about how to grasp truth, the contemporary mind is literally fragmented in ways never before in human history.

Even if algorithms are set up to keep us in a particular kind of ideological echo chamber, a problem in itself, the inevitable wave of seeing or hearing point and counterpoint and counter-counter point to every thing we believe in, from the nature of certain human products, like vaccines, to human nature itself can be truly distressing and depressing. Mental health experts, whoever they may be (another problem), have only begun to scratch the surface of this new epistemic situation, one that could only be called chaotic if not outright nihilistic. Too many worldview options may very well just end in the void of never landing anywhere. This post-modern malaise, once contained in the confines of the brick and mortar academy, now spills out into the virtual streets via the internet.

For Christians, this raises numerous question of how to approach information in our continuous search for deeper levels of truth, given the bounds of the biblical revelation. Which studies or news sources do we access for reliable information? Which studies do we go on to cite as either accurately supporting, or genuinely challenging, our prior theological commitments? Which studies or news stories do we allow to shape our worldview? I could go on. Robin Phillips has again done an excellent job addressing this epistemic crisis we now face. Nevertheless that this problem of too much competing information about reality is itself a daunting reality cannot be overstated.

In contrast to number 1, this problem relates to our endless access to mindless, trivial and foolish information. This takes many forms: late-night talk shows, late-late night talk shows and even later night talk shows than those. Then there is the endless stream of sports; of movies (bad ones, usually about comic book or video game characters); of supposedly sophisticated British TV Series, of incoherent, egoistical reality TV shows (The Masked Singer American Idol, The Housewives of Upper Siberia, etc., etc.); of shows that get too particular about incredibly mundane things (baking shows dedicated solely to cupcakes); and so on and so forth.

This list could grow exponentially if we include Youtube channels, Tik Tok, etc. I hesitate to think about how many hours of how many lives have been wasted watching stupid animal videos or just stupid human videos. As I mentioned, this problem is the converse of the first two. It is not the overwhelming of the mind with the serious, the weighty and the significant. It is the spoiling of the mind with the inane a distracting of the soul from all matters of real import. C.S. Lewis summed up this tactic of the devil in his classicThe Screwtape Letters,where the pursuit of nothing of particular importance leads gradually to eternal separation from God:

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a mans best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual onethe gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Seinfeld, one of the most acclaimed TV-series of the 1990s, was self-referentially a show about nothing. Indeed our technology has allowed us to become a culture that is very much about the sameabout nothing.

Finally, all of these have to do in some way or another with a broader category of information. What I mean is that these other sources of information overflow all exist as a subset of a larger domain. That domain could be described as: information about things we cannot really affect or actualize given our circumstance or capacities. In other words, technology opens us up to a world of concrete, particular events and people that seem near to us but actually are at quite a distance.

The conflict in Ukraine might be one example of this. Many can, and have, donated money to the cause of Ukraine on account of technology itself. However, at the same time, there are simply too many aspects of the war that most of us cannot conceivably affect. As I pointed out above, this concern over things we cannot affect might even deter us from focusing on, or even being aware of, some local issue that we can affect (like things going on in our own home or on our block).

But there are also things constantly presented to us that are not just at a physical distance. Instead they exist at a kind of metaphysical distance. For example, I can take in enormous amounts of information about all kinds of potential life opportunities or pathways. This could be information related to exotic travel destination or to exciting career opportunities; or about people who have done extraordinary things (Stephan Curry perhaps) usually on account of their extraordinary abilities. I can consume information about things that I, in reality, could never actualize.

In taking in so much information of this sort, I can be lured into a kind of dream state. It is a state that could fool me into believing I can not only do one of these things but perhaps all of them. I can have a life full of adventurous travel given a career as a black-ops, special forces soldier who also has a lovely home with a faithful wife and five happy, healthy children and, of course, a dog. One can see the problem of having access to information about so many various lifestyle opportunities. It can tempt us to form a composite image of a life that is utterly unrealizable or unactualizable. Moreover, it would be impossible not just for me, but really for anyone.

This sets us up for a very hard fall. Especially if we actually try to pursue one or more of these goals. Moreover, for Christians, it can cause us to lose sight of where God has placed us, what God has given us (ability-wise) and what He has actually called us to be and do. Too much information of this last type can hinder our ability to discern Gods actual call on our life by overwhelming us with the wide array of possible life callings.

In sum, the human person is a holistic creature: body and soul in a unified synthesis. What comes into our minds will have affects on the body. What we do with our bodies will either degrade or elevate our minds. Todays technology is overwhelming us in various ways and our minds were not meant for this abundance of information.

If we do not discipline our use of technology, information of four types can begin to harm us. They can harm not only our individual soul, but the life and well-being of our immediate community. This community starts with our families, then our neighborhoods and our local institutions, to include the local church. I do not have a perfect solution to this very modern problem. Still I am fairly certain we need a better approach to information and we need it soon. If not we may find ourselves on a very gradual slope to a very infernal place.

Originally posted here:

The Overwhelming Of The Evangelical Mind: Information and The Soul's Limits - Patheos

When Egyptian football legend Mohammed Aboutreika came out swinging against homosexuality in late 2021, he touched a raw nerve across the Muslim world.

The tit-for-tat between Mr. Aboutreika and supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights laid bare a yawning gap.

For Mr. Aboutreika and many in the Muslim world, the issue is adhering to their values and rejecting attempts to impose the values of others.

For supporters of LGBT rights and LGBT soccer fans, at stake most immediately is LGBT peoples right to attend the 2022 Qatar World Cup without fear of discrimination or legal entanglement because of their sexuality.

Longer-term, its about ensuring recognition of LGBT rights, including social acceptability, inclusivity, and non-discrimination.

Solving the immediate problem may be the lower hanging fruit. However, it may also open a pathway to what is realistically achievable in the middle term.

The reality is that what may be realistically possible is at best akin to US President Bill Clintons application to gays in the US military of the dont ask, dont tell rule or Indonesias de facto live and let live principle.

That may not be satisfactory, but it may be the only thing that, for now, is possible without putting LGBT communities at risk by provoking public hostility and backlash.

To be sure, autocratic Middle Eastern regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt often target LGBT communities for domestic political gain. In addition, the United Arab Emirates, perhaps the Middle Easts socially most liberal society, recently backtracked on LGBT-related issues.

The trick in campaigning for LGBT rights is avoiding playing into the hands of autocrats while maintaining the pressure.

Simply attempting to impose recognition is unlikely to produce results. Instead, a more realistic strategy is to devise ways to stimulate debate in Muslim-majority countries and encourage social change bottom-up to ensure public buy-in.

That worked to a degree as human rights groups, and trade unions used the World Cup to pressure Qatar to make changes to its labour regime. LGBT rights are in a different category and relate more directly, rightly or wrongly, to perceived religious precepts.

As such, what worked with labour rights, even if human rights groups would like to see more far-reaching reforms, is unlikely to produce similar results when it comes to LGBT rights.

Lobbying on behalf of a vast migrant labour force, which has historically been subjected to brutally exploitative practices, has yielded tangible results But there is a long way to go before the rights of a mainly South Asian workforce, from some of the worlds poorest countries, are properly safeguarded, The Guardian noted.

The paper backed proposals by human rights groups and British trade unions for the establishment in Qatar of migrant workers centres, which would offer advice, support and representation in lieu of a trade union, and compensation for relatives of labourers who died while employed in World Cup-related public works projects.

Going to extremes, Saudi Arabia, amid a push to encourage tourism, launched rainbow raids this month on shops selling childrens toys and accessories.

Authorities targeted clothing and toys, including hair clips, pop-its, t-shirts, bows, skirts, hats, and colouring pencils that contradict the Islamic faith and public morals and promote homosexual colours that target the younger generation, said a commerce ministry official.

Earlier, the kingdom, like the UAE, banned Lightyear, a Disney and Pixar animated production, because of a same-sex kiss scene, and Disneys Doctor Strange in the Universe of Madness, in which one character refers to her two mums.

The UAE ban appeared to contradict the governments announcement in late 2021 that it would end the censorship of films. The countrys Media Regulatory Office said it would introduce a 21+ age viewer classification policy instead. However, that wasnt evident when the office tweeted an image of Lightyear, crossed out with a red line.

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly charged that Egyptian police and National Security Agency officers arbitrarily arrest LGBT people and detain them in inhuman conditions, systematically subject them to ill-treatment including torture, and often incite fellow inmates to abuse them.

With the World Cup only months away, Qatar is caught in a Catch-22. In a country where the few gays willing to speak out describe an environment of social and legal discrimination, Qatari authorities would like to see the World Cup finals as an interlude of live and let live.

Qatari officials have insisted in recent years that LGBT fans would be welcome during the World Cup but would be expected to respect norms that frown on public expressions of affection irrespective of sexual orientation.

Paul Amann, the founder of Liverpool FCs LGBT supporters club Kop Outs, met in 2019 with Qatari World Cup organizers before traveling to Doha with his husband to evaluate the situation.

Im very satisfied that their approach is to provide an everyone is welcome ethos that does include respect, albeit through privacy. Im not sure if rainbow flags generally will ever be accepted in-country, but maybe in stadia, Mr. Amann said upon his return.

Mr. Aboutreika put Qatar on the spot when he asserted in November 2021 that our role is to stand up to this phenomenon, homosexuality, because its a dangerous ideology and its becoming nasty, and people are not ashamed of it anymore. They (the Premier League) will tell you that homosexuality is human rights. No, it is not human rights; in fact, its against humanity.

The Qatari parliament and state-aligned media, imams in Saudi mosques, Saudi diplomats, and Al-Azhar, the citadel of Islamic learning in Cairo, rallied to reiterate Mr. Aboutreika s condemnation despite his allegedly Islamist leanings.

Mr. Aboutreikas remarks were in response to Australian gay footballer Josh Cavallo who revived the sexuality debate when he declared that he would be afraid to play in the Qatar World Cup because of the Gulf states ban on homosexuality and harsh legal penalties ranging from flogging to lengthy prison terms.

One of the few players to discuss his sexuality publicly, Mr. Cavallo expressed his concern a month after coming out as gay. Mr. Cavallo said other footballers had privately expressed similar fears.

What is evident in the sexuality debate is that few people, if any, will be convinced by arguments raised by the opposing side in what amounts to a dialogue of the deaf. Both sides of the divide feel deeply about their positions.

For proponents of LGBT rights, the challenge is to develop strategies that may contribute to change rather than insisting on a path that is more likely to deepen the trench lines than produce results for the people it is really about: the LGBT community.

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