David Ewart

Children's Spirituality and Happiness

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In case your attention was elsewhere on Good Friday, March 21, 2008, the national edition of the Globe and Mail had an interesting Commentary by Lorna Dueck which was based on an earlier, February 7, UBC Report, "What Makes Kids Happy?"

Turns out a significant factor in kid's happiness is spirituality.

Gender, money, private or public schooling had little to do with whether kids were happy or not; but spirituality played a noticeable role.

The authors of the UBC Report were careful to make an all too common distinction between "religion" and "spirituality." I'm assuming this may have been motivated because of their interest in how public schools might use their findings, and therefore they need to stay away from "religion."

Naturally, I am a little skeptical that a child's in-born spirituality would have much chance of developing apart from being nurtured by participating in healthy, explicitly religious, relationships within their family and religious community of synagogue, mosque, temple, church, etc.

Christopher Hedges, "I Don't Believe in Atheists"

In case your attention was elsewhere on Easter morning, Michael Enright, on CBC’s, “The Sunday Edition,” had a most interesting interview with Christopher Hedges, author of “I Don’t Believe In Atheists.”

Quotes that caught my attention:

• (Richard) Dawkins (author of “The God Delusion”) knows as little about religion as I do about biology. (His book) would be like me deciding to write a book about evolutionary biology after reading Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds In N.A.
• (Christopher) Hitchens speaks in the epistemology of television: invective, character assassination, shouting, interrupting ...
• the (Enlightenment) idea that there is some such thing as a rational human being is an absurdity.
• the lesson of the crucifixion as a metaphor is that if you don’t love, you die; and if you do, they kill you.
• Easter does not mean human evil has gone away or ever will.
• Turning away from God may be harmless, but turning away from the reality of human sin is catastrophic.

Below is the info from The Sunday Edition’s web site. The CBC link will change after March 30, but you can also find the audio file here. Download The Sunday Edition, March 23, 2008, Christopher Hedges Interview. This is a 16MB file and will require MP3 playing software (such as QuickTime or Windows Media Player) to be installed in your web browser. Or you can right-click on the link and choose "Save target ..." to copy the file onto your computer for later listening.

The clip begins with a 4 minute editorial by Peter about Brenda Martin and then a four minute excerpt of a previous interview with Richard Dawkins.

Commitment

Turns out the Mission and Service people (among many) who continuously have to remind us about how low our voluntary givings are are right!

In his Christian Century March 11, 2008, M.E.M.O. column, Martin E. Marty reports on CalTech professor Antonio Rangel's experiment that showed how price activates the brain's pleasure centre.