There was an article in the Herald about typos on Google Maps, one of which rendered Oatley Park’s Jewfish Bay as “Few Fish Bay”.

I imagine it was just misreading on the part of the data enterer, but it reminded me of a friend’s complaint that she was unable to search for “Jew” on Google, but they were okay with returning results for “N-gger” (sensitivty hyphen not included; I just don’t particularly want my blog turning up when people search that). When we tried to replicate this we had no problem, as is the case today, but I wonder if there was some kind of weird squeamishness at one point.

Arjun Ramachandran ‘Australia … according to Google Maps‘, Sydney Morning Herald (4/11/09)

Rabbi Ben Greenberg has collected a number of readings from the Torah – re-tweeted by a selection of Jewish users – into a book available from internet self-publisher Lulu.

Not everyone is pleased with the marriage of religion and social media, however, and Corey Hodges warned against obscuring Christianity beneath layers of entertainment, in his blog for the Salt Lake Tribune. Describing an unnamed church in Houston that encourages parishioners to tweet comments and questions during the sermon that appear on screens behind the pastor who later addresses them. Surely a greater danger is someone deciding to write “this sermon is lame” for all to see.

Social media and religion are not irreconcilable, however, as devotees of this fine blog are no doubt aware. Writing for Arizona State University’s State Press Joseph Hermiz draws the same analogy as A. Prof. Mark Goodacre of Duke, that in the 1st century Paul himself utilised the most advanced social medium of the time, the epistle, to evangelise the Mediterranean.

More traditional folk are still serviced by the digital revolution, however. The 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tanakh has been made into an audio recording, replacing the previous standard audio of the JPS’ 1917 translation. The audio stretches over 60 hours and is published online in weekly podcasts.

Joseph Hermiz ‘“Tweeting” the Torah, bringing religion online‘, State Press (19/10/09)
Corey J. Hodges ‘Tweeting in the pews? Pray it ain’t so‘, Salt Lake Tribune (15/10/09)

Photo credit: Susan NYC

With apologies to Msrs Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe.

The first story concerns the burgeoning scene of Muslim punk, which goes by the name of Taqwacore after the novel by Michael Muhammad Knight. I posted a story about this on my Facebook a few months ago (before I’d resumed blogging), but it’s doing the rounds again for some reason. Not directly relevant to our blog, but bear with me.

I was reminded again of this while reading this article on ‘New Jews’, or “Judaism 2.0″ (more on that last in a sec). This article describes the “New” Jews (primarily Gen X-ers in their 30′s) who are determined to wear their Judaism in a way that suits them. These might include devout punk, Lesbian Jewish weddings, hip magazines or micro-breweries (“HE’BREW”). Sarah Lefton founded G-dcast, a series of weekly, downloadable animated cartoons as a way of making learning about Judaism less stuffy. I’m not sure I’d call this new Judaism “Judaism 2.0″, not only because the whole “x 2.0″ thing is so horribly daggy, but also because that term would surely suit post-Temple, Rabbinic Judaism better.

Next up we have the recent tightening of restrictions on Sabbath use of lifts by observant Jews. As Jews are not allowed to work on the Sabbath, and rabbis decided that pressing a button constitutes work, lifts in buildings used by many Jews were altered to automatically stop on every floor on the Sabbath. A recent ruling by a group of prominent Israeli rabbis, however, could change that, leaving many elderly Jews in high apartment buildings up… -stairs without a lift. The sticking point has always been whether the lift uses a sensor to gauge how many people were inside it, thus turning the lift into one big button. I’m not exactly sure why it would need to do this: surely, if it’s stopping on every floor it doesn’t matter. It couldn’t stop altogether when it’s empty, because then you’d need to press a button to call it. Unless the area outside the lift on each floor had its OWN pressure pad… Rabbis, I don’t envy you.

Lastly, we return to the “.0″s with the recent self-description of many atheists, disenfranchised with the current pack of “New Atheists”, as “Atheism 3.0″. These atheists admit there may be a place for religious belief in the world, and refuse to see it as the single source of the world’s ills. This nomenclature works slightly better than “Judaism 2.0″, although I worry about the lack of any definition of what exactly constitued “Atheism 1.0″. Can’t people think of better names for things?!

Linkography:
Kate Shellnutt ‘Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion‘, Chicago Sun-Times (20/9/09)
Jessica Ravitz ‘“New Jews” stake claim to faith, culture‘, CNN.com (30/10/09)
Paul Vitello ‘Another Landlord Worry: Is the Elevator Kosher?’, New York Times (9/10/09)
Daniel Burke ‘Atheism 3.0 Finds a Little More Room for Belief‘, beliefnet (//09)

A bit of a weird round-up this time, but airport security stories have been turning up on the religion blogs lately.

The first story concerns a Canadian Roman Catholic bishop who was discovered with sexual images of young children on his laptop hard-drive by airport security. Tmatt at GetReligion asked “What made them search a bishop?” and, a week and a bit later, he was able to answer. From a story in Halifax’s Chronicle Herald he found why security staff became suspicious:

Bishop Raymond Lahey avoided eye contact, changed his vocal tone and gave evasive responses when a border agent at Ottawa International Airport questioned him last month about his electronic equipment.

A Canada Border Services agent asked the bishop if he was carrying any electronic media such as cellphones, laptop computers or BlackBerrys when he arrived at the airport at 3:43 p.m. on Sept. 15, says a search warrant application. Bishop Lahey had just arrived from London, England.

The bishop told the border agent he had two cellphones.

The agent then asked the former head of the Diocese of Antigonish if he had a laptop. Bishop Lahey hesitated before saying he did. In all, the bishop was carrying a laptop, two cellphones, four memory sticks, three memory cards and a portable hand-held device.

The agent flagged Bishop Lahey for a secondary inspection because of his behaviour and the fact he was a man traveling alone who had visited countries known to be sources of child pornography, says an Ottawa police officer’s application for the warrant on Sept. 23.

The other story concerns observant Jews being allowed by America’s Transportation Security Administration to carry vegetable material (lulavs, etrogs, etc.) for Sukkot. Those American security guards may be humourless, but at least they’re culturally sensitive.

Newsography:
Tmatt ‘What made them search a bishop?‘, GetReligion.org (1/10/09)
______ ‘This made them search the bishop‘, GetReligion.org (12/10/09)
Dan Arsenault ‘Warrant describes evasive bishop‘, The Chronicle Herald (9/10/09)
Michele Chabin ‘Jewish Holiday Objects Allowed Through U.S. Airport Security‘, Religion News Service (2/10/09)

Image courtesy of:

Photo credit: id-iom

Benjamin Weiner has reviewed Benyamin Cohen’s new book My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith over at ReligionDispatches. He criticises the author, an Orthodox Jew of not challenging himself enough during the year of Sundays he spent attending Christian church services, ostensibly to question his faith but never intending in the least to abandon Judaism.

Weiner was intrigued, however, by Cohen’s description of his own dual identity as an Orthodox Jew in modern-day America.

His discussion of the young Orthodox bourgeoisie—Jews like himself who he terms “metrodox,” raised with the social expectations of their worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.”

Metrosexuality was a buzz-word coined a few years back used to describe heterosexual men who paid a lot of attention to their appearance in a way that mirrored that stereotypically attributed to homosexual men. In this case it is used to describe Orthodox Jews who still pay lip service to the everyday social pressures of modern life. I suppose in the religious worl heterodoxy is not considered the same norm that heterosexuality is, so the terms were reversed.

Benjamin Weiner ‘A Jew in Church? No Big Deal‘, ReligionDispatches (25/9/09)

T’were awful puns, I know.

Twitter user @TheKotel has established a free service whereby prayers tweeted on his profile will be printed and placed in the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is by no means an ‘official’ service, and the associated website’s FAQ attributes it to “a young man from Tel-Aviv”. It should be noted however, that the Israeli Telephone Company already has a similar service that accepts faxes and email. Some of these have been published by Joyce Shira Starr who, as in any book, claims copyright over the contents (I only mention this because of my previous post).

apud Steve Weizman ‘New service lets Jews tweet a prayer to God‘, msnbc.com (23/7/09)

Bibliography
Joyce Shira Starr Faxes and Emails to God: At the Western Wall of Jerusalem, 2nd ed., Writers Club Press, Lincoln NE, 1999 [1st ed. Faxes to God, 1995]

UPDATE: Reuters did a follow-up story, and have revealed the man behind @TheKotel as Alon Nir, a uni student in Tel Aviv.

Lianne Gross ‘Twitter site offers followers line to God‘, msnbc.com (19/8/09)

Orthodox Jews can now click their mouses with relief as new web portal Koogle will filter out taboo sites. The site’s name is not only an amalgamation of kosher and Google, but also the Jewish dessert kugel. The portal features Jewish news and a search engine that automatically filters out objectionable material, such as ‘immodestly dressed’ women and other pornographic content.

Koogle even enforces your Orthodoxy. If you try to purchase something on the Sabbath, it won’t work, and TV sets are always out for devoutly orthodox Jews.

apud Reuters ‘Koogle raises kosher search engine stakes‘, The Australian (15/6/09)

Last week ABC Radio’s ‘Lingua Franca’ programme interviewed Martin Grondin, founder of the LOLcat Bible wiki. Grodin is a software engineer who served more as editor and abritrator than translator on the project. Grodin describes himself as coming from a religious background, although his faith lapsed some time ago. He still balks, however, at the idea of reading the crucifixion narrative in LOLspeak. The word “blasphemy” is bandied around.

It also seems strange that he considers the Bible (in English) to be a fixed work, and his wiki to be part of a new, more open text. Evidently he isn’t aware of there are one or two other English translations of the Bible out there.

The receptionist at a school in Devon may face dismissal for misconduct after she allegedly made claims against the school and its staff. Jennie Cain’s 5-year-old daughter was reprimanded by a teacher after she was overheard discussing Jesus and Heaven with a class-mate. She met her mother in tears after school, who subsequently approached the teacher to discuss it outside school hours, and thus in her capacity as a parent rather than a fellow staff member.

The next day she was called into the principal’s office, ostensibly for another reason but the incident involving her daughter was soon raised. “He started talking about my daughter about how he wasn’t happy about her making statements about her faith”, she said. “At that point I froze, I felt very small and I felt trapped as I was a junior member of staff.”

Feeling intimidated, Mrs Cain sent an email that weekend from her home computer to ten church-going friends, requesting that they pray for her family, the church and the school. A few days later she was summoned again to the principal’s office who, armed with a printed copy of the email, accused her of making allegations against the school and its staff to members of the public. He refused to tell her how he obtained the email and, while not suspending her, initiated an investigation into the matter to be conducted by two of the school’s governors, who would gather statements and contact witnesses. She was informed possible disciplinary action may include dismissal.

Mrs Cain is bewildered by these events, especially as the school celebrates Christmas with carols, and observes the Hindu festival of Divali. She described herself as a “quiet Christian” who would never force her beliefs upon others. Recently a nurse, Caroline Petrie, was suspended for two months after offering to pray for a patient. She was finally allowed back to work last week.

Her case is being supported by the Christian Institute, a spokesman for whom, Mike Judge, views this sort of nonsense as “persecution” of Christians. Perhaps a more pertinent question is how the school was able to obtain a copy of a personal email. The ten recipients were all members of Mrs Cain’s church and, presumably, sympathetic to her cause and thus unlikely to forward it to the principal. This sort of invasion of privacy seems to me much more of a worry than the “public” allegations she stands accused of, which were really just a private concern sent to a few friends in the form of a prayer request.

via Caroline Gammell ‘Primary school receptionist “facing sack” after daughter talks about Jesus to classmate‘, The Daily Telegraph (UK).

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I was going to call it Jews for Jihads, but the whole Jews for Jesus thing is that they’re Christians pretending to be Jews, so I had to get the relationship right.

Dr. Ofer Grosbard, a lecturer in counselling at the University of Haifa has responded to requests from his Bedouin students to contextualise their advice for ‘traditional’ Bedouin clients in terms they will understand. One of his students, Bushra Mazarib, approached him after a lecture and pointed out that “Nothing of what you are teaching me will help when a parent may come to me and say, ‘The devil has gotten into my son.’” She commented further to CNN: “I want to explain something to parents in a language that they will understand. They don’t understand psychology, they only understand the Quran”. Grosbard thus set his students the task of combing the Qur’an for “the most educational and inspirational verses” and briefly explain their practical use.

The results have been compiled on the website Quranet which, curiously, bears the subtitle “a Bridge between Islam and the West”. But does this mean explaining western psychological terms in language traditional Muslims better understand, or explaining Islam to the West? It seems to aim to be a little of both, with one of its purposes cited as that “it both refutes various prejudices against Islam, and provides a resounding response to warped exploitation of the Quran for the justification of terror.”

Dana Rosenblatt, author of the CNN article, claims that “Some Arab media, however, urge Muslims to be wary of an ‘Israeli Web site’ that interprets the Quran to serve the ‘political agenda’ of Israel.” To whom this may refer is unknown, as Rosenblatt quickly changes tack and quotes a generally conciliatory comment from American scholar Professor Akbar Ahmed about positive relations between Islam and the rest of the world.

I was able to find one story on gulfnews.com, by Mariam Al Hakkem reporting from Riyadh. Dr Abdullah Al Mutlaq of the Senior Ulema Board in Saudi Arabia advised caution in accepting Quranic interpretation from an Israeli source: “A Muslim, who wants to abide by Islamic teachings, should not depend on this website for interpretation of the Holy Quran whatever the case”.

Conversely, there are less than conciliatory voices on the other side of the equation. Israpundit refers to the site as the “latest dhimmi excess by Israelis who should know better.”