Guestview: “Trifecta” of bad news launched Catholics4Change blog
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Elizabeth E. Evans is a freelance writer, columnist and priest-in-charge at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Honey Brook, Pennsylvania.
By Elizabeth E. Evans
Three seemingly unrelated events – and Susan Matthews found herself at a crossroads.
Reading a letter to the editor assailing the “apathy” of local Catholics… Recollecting an essay she had written when the first grand jury report dealt her family a personal blow… Overhearing a conversation between two older women critical of the victims of an accused priest.
It was, as Matthews wryly recalls now, this ‘trifecta” that impelled her to act. Outraged at the predator priest scandal that has overtaken the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Huntingdon Valley resident and mother of two started a blog, Catholics4Change.com.
In February, a grand jury report alleged that as many as 37 local Catholic priests were left in parishes in spite of “credible” abuse allegations. Since then 26 priests have been suspended for allegations or abuse or other boundary violations, two as recently as last week.
In the little more than a month, Catholics4Change (which has close to 25,000 hits within the past two weeks) has become a rallying point for local believers. And Matthews (a former editor of the archdiocesan paper currently a freelance writer and QVC guest host) and another aspiring reformer, Kathy Kane, have become the center of a lively and impassioned debate that goes beyond protecting children but to holding church hierarchs accountable.
U.S. churches could benefit from new community radio law
A tiny nonprofit organization operating a national campaign from the basement of Calvary United Methodist Church in Philadelphia for 12 years to get more non-commercial radio stations approved may soon see its dream come true.
On January 4, the nonprofit Prometheus and other groups seeking to diversify media ownership, scored a victory when President Barack Obama signed into law the Local Community Radio Act. It directs the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the national airwaves, to allow more low-power stations access to the FM radio dial.
Once implemented, the law is expected to result in as many 2,000 new stations, beginning in about 2013. That would more than double the approximately 800 low-power stations currently in operation, compared with around 13,000 commercial stations nationwide. “It makes a lot more room on a medium (FM radio) that a lot of people still use,” said Prometheus founder Pete Tridish.
An increase in community stations could mean more coverage of local issues such as school board meetings, high school football games, health, education, local music, and literacy campaigns. Since about half the existing low-power FM stations are owned by churches, some of the new material is also likely to be religious.
Read the full story by Jon Hurdle here.
U.S. Muslim group calls textbooks discriminatory
U.S. Muslim activists launched a campaign on Wednesday against a series of educational books that they say promote anti-Islamic sentiment among American school children. “The World of Islam,” a 10-book series, encourages young readers to believe Muslims are terrorists and seek to undermine U.S. society, said the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization.
One book contains the passage: “For the first time, Muslims began immigrating to the U.S. in order to transform American society, sometimes through the use of terrorism.”
Moein Khawaja, civil rights director for CAIR in Pennsylvania, said the group has gotten dozens of complaints about the books, which are intended for middle- and high-school students, from Muslim parents around the country.
The books were published in late 2009 by Mason Crest Publishers of Broomall, Pennsylvania, which worked with the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute to ensure their accuracy. Khawaja said at a news conference that the books are “rife with incorrect information and fear-mongering” and called the FPRI a “pro-war think tank that has vigorously advocated for the Iraq war in the past and continues to defend that position.”
The Foreign Policy Research Institute denied the charge.
How God (or more precisely, meditation) changes your brain
Some book titles are too good to pass up. “How God Changes Your Brain” is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg‘s fourth book on “neurotheology,” the study of the relationship between faith and the brain. All are pitched at a popular audience, with snappy titles like “Born to Believe” or “Why God Won’t Go Away.” Anyone reading the latest one, though, might wonder if the title shouldn’t be “How God Meditation Changes Your Brain.” As he explains in an interview with Reuters here, the benefits that Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns derive from meditation and intense prayer are also available to atheists and agnostics. The key lies in the method these high performing believers use, not in the belief itself. But that would have made for a more awkward title.
That’s not to say Newberg doesn’t have some interesting points to make in this book. His brain scans of meditating monks and praying nuns show that the frontal lobe — the area that directs the mind’s focus — is especially active while the amygdala — the area linked to fear reactions — is calmed when they go through their spiritual experiences. His studies show these brain regions can be exercised and strengthened, like building up a muscle through training. And his treatment of a mechanic with a faltering memory showed that a traditional Indian meditation method, even when stripped of its spiritual trappings, could bring about these changes in two months.
The book goes on to ascribe a list of positive results from meditation and offer advice on caring for the brain. Newberg’s “number one best way to exercise your brain” is faith. As he puts it, “faith is equivalent with hope, optimism and the belief that a positive future awaits us. Faith can also be defined as the ability to trust our beliefs, even when we have no proof that such beliefs are accurate or true.” Critics, especially clerics, would probably protest that this is not really theology, but psychology. If we’re talking about God, where’s the religion?
That brings up another interesting aspect. While he is clearly favourable to faith and spirituality, Newberg remains a scientist eager to study the religious feelings he calls “among the most powerful and complex experiences people have.” He studiously avoids promoting any one faith or closing the door to atheists who might be reading the text. The tone is upbeat, the approach inclusive and the conclusion optimistic. There’s a touch of Eastern mysticism, too, with sections on how widely practiced meditation could foster compassion and understanding among people and peoples. Thanks to this open-minded approach towards both religion and science, Newberg teaches radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and speaks frequently to church groups or in religious media.
Newberg gave me a few SPECT brain scan images that illustrate the changes he finds in his subjects’ brains. The image above left shows the brain of a Buddhist monk before and during meditation. The increased yellow in the lower right of the right-hand image shows reduced activity in the parietal lobe, the brain area responsible for orientation in space and time. Below right, the image shows a nun before and during prayer, with increased activity in the frontal lobe, the area for concentration and analytical thinking, and in areas linked to language.
Newberg, a cheerful and optimistic man who was brought up in a Reform Jewish family and says he is still exploring his own beliefs, told me his next book will be an academic work on neurotheology. He stresses that the field is in its infancy and its brain scanning methods are still “incredibly crude. We really don’t know which neurons are firing in that little three-millimeter space” captured in fMRI scans. “If we can ultimately say something epistemologically interesting, then that’s great,” he told me. “But it’s going to take me a long time before I get to saying something like that.”
UPDATE: After some failed attempts at editing this, here is a video clip of Newberg explaining his views during our interview:
It is very obvious that yoga first make impact on your mind in positively, so if you make your mind in right manned so all diseases automatically leave you, because mind it server of your whole body..
Beware brain scientists bearing gifts (gee-whiz journalists too…)
Knowing what not to report is just as important for journalists as knowing what to write. We’re inundated with handouts about some pioneering new scientific research or insightful new book. Should we write about it? It’s refreshing to hear experts who can dazzle you with their work but warn against falling for any hype about it. This “let’s not overdo it” approach has been a recurrent theme in the Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Andrew Newberg‘s “no God spot” message to boot campers has already been noted here on FaithWorld. Other lecturers added similar reality checks to their presentations. Cognitive science has already begun to influence religion studies (as John Teehan explained here) and we’re bound to hear more in the future about what neuroscientific research has to say about faith, morals, altruism and other issues of interest to readers of this blog. Much of this will be fascinating. But before the next “gee-whiz” report comes out, here’s the advice the neuroscientists are giving us about speculative claims based on brain research.
After two days of explaining fMRI brain scanning, the sexiest procedure in current neurological research, Geoff Aguirre poured cold water on some of the exaggerated conclusions that researchers or journalists draw from it. When shown brain scan images, he said, “people immediately start thinking about trying to catch terrorists and being able to screen people as they pass through metal detectors.” This is “science fiction, science fantasy,” he said, but it comes up regularly. Why? Aguirre, who is an M.D and assistant professor of neurology at Penn, listed several reasons:
- scientific awesomeness — “This is an incredible technology. Neuroimaging is not phrenology. It really is a scientific discipline that has reproducible results that makes valuable predictions that explain larges areas of cognition and cognitive neuroscience that previously had been inaccessible.”
- image properties — “There’s definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.”
- thresholding — The brain images leave out data outside the main focus. “This contributes to the overly localised view of brain function. So we say, ‘ah this is the spot for love’ or whatever, because it’s all that we see.”
- overinference — “It’s very easy to believe a lot of things about these images that might not be true… It’s also implied that when you’ve found activisation in a region, you’ve found the region ‘for’ something. But what does that mean?”
- chicken versus egg problem — “Just because you find a difference between groups in some brain imaging measure does not mean that structural difference was genetically determined.” But the brain also develops according to its owner’s environment and experience, so this is too narrow a focus.
- lurking Cartesian dualism — “In the way we think about people’s actions and describe the effect of diseases or drugs, there is frequently a lurking dualism there. We say, ‘oh it wasn’t his fault, his brain did that.’ Well, who else could it have been? Where else could those thoughts and feeling or plans have come from, except in the brain? This idea that the brain and the mind are separate is part of what makes these images so remarkable. Wow look! Here’s a part of the brain that’s more active when you’re feeling romantic love or not! That’s just astounding to folks who would have thought romantic love was outside the brain, in the heart or the soul and far away.” (Photo: Near infrared spectroscopy imaging slide/GK Aguirre)
- illusion of inferential proximity — “It doesn’t automatically follow that a brain imaging technology is going to give you greater inferential leverage on a question than just talking to somebody. There’s an illusion that somehow you’re getting much closer to the behavior you want to measure, just because you’re measuring a brain image. That might not be the case.”
- ease of imaging — Many hospitals have brain scanners and researchers can use them and free imaging software to create impressive images. “If you have an internet connection and a scanner, you can be a cognitive neuroscientist and publish a paper. Lots of the variance in the lousy scientific papers over these years can be explained this way. What will come out will be a well-formed brain image that will give the impression you must be a very good scientist because you created something that looks very polished.”
Aguirre said that brain scans might be able to identify pedophiles by showing they are excited by pictures of children. “Does having that response to seeing kids in underwear lead to an increased risk of you actually going out and molesting kids?” he asked. “It could be the case that this population of people now divides into two subgroups, one that can control that impulse and one that cannot.” It would be hard to base a policy on who to put in jail on the basis of such brain images, he said.
Another example would be a study into people who lose their temper. “So I do a study of people who are enraged and can find that activity within the right insula is associated with a sense of rage. I have explained the sense of rage,” he said. “But since we all strongly suspected that the sense of rage was derived from events taking place in our nervous system, what have we learned?” The study could say what happens in the brain during rage but still not explain why the person flew off the handle.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to say, Pete. HOWEVER! Just because there is increased activity in this or that area of the brain, we still don’t know if that activity is a _cause_ or an _effect_ of the decisions we make. You cannot use these findings to say that people are not responsible for their actions, that their brains _made_ them do things, that our actions are pre-determined and we are just victims of the chemicals in our brains.
That’s lame. We’re just beginning to understand the astonishing magnificence of our brains, and it is simply premature to make leaping conclusions about human morality or psychology or spirituality (for that matter) from watching which areas of the brain light up at certain times.
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
i would like to comment just briefly as there is really much too much to say about this that will eventually come out. the movement that you mention has very few followers. the number of hits is not indicative of support. myself, have looked at least 100 times to just check what people are posting-most of the time it is too specious to comment on. even if there are 25 people like me, that sure isn’t a lot of people if you compare with the number of catholics in philadelphia. there are not many who comment-and it is the same people anyway. a lot of the commenters do not make sense. people are upset, but susan mathews and company are NOT the face of philadelphia catholics. that is a fact.