Ordered Milk Braised Pork Shoulder with Mashed Potatoes and an ’08 Gran Sasso “Terre Di Chieti” wine from Tuscany. All at 10:30 PM at The Purple Pig in Chicago. Convenient Haute Cuisine, of sorts.

From Ballston, Northern Virginia, I biked to Thompson’s Boat Center (TBC), then back to the Clarendon Apple Store, and then looped around until I spied Northside Social Coffee & Wine where Murky Coffee used to live at 3211 Wilson Blvd.

There will be about 250 participants at TWTRCON DC on 10/22.  Below is a partial list of registered attendees who have given us permission to list their information on our web site; this list was last updated on Sunday, October 18th.  To add your name to the list, register today!

One thing that I am not is touchy about the fact that I love what I love. And I love Moleskine notebooks.  And I love manual typewriters, especially the Hermes 3000, and I love quite a lot of other like-minded stuff.  Well, Moleskine notebooks are #122 in the list of Stuff While People Like. Sad but true.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days.  Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community.   In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked:  typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Let’s see what else I like that white people like — the bold ones I feel especially strong about:

• #122 Moleskine Notebooks
• #120 Taking a Year Off
• #119 Sea Salt
• #115 Promising to Learn a New Language
• #108 Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music
• #107 Self Aware Hip Hop References
• #106 Facebook
• #99 Grammar
• #98 The Ivy League
• #92 Book Deals
• #90 Dinner Parties
• #88 Having Gay Friends
• #81 Graduate School
  
• #80 The Idea of Soccer
• #79 Modern Furniture
• #78 Multilingual Children
• #77 Musical Comedy
• #73 Gentrification
• #72 Study Abroad
• #70 Difficult Breakups
• #61 Bicycles
• #58 Japan
• #57 Juno
• #56 Lawyers
• #55 Apologies
• #54 Kitchen Gadgets
• #53 Dogs
• #52 Sarah Silverman
• #51 Living by the Water
• #50 Irony
• #49 Vintage
• #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
• #47 Arts Degrees
• #46 The Sunday New York Times
• #45 Asian Fusion Food
• #44 Public Radio
• #43 Plays
• #42 Sushi
• #39 Netflix
• #38 Arrested Development
• #37 Renovations
• #36 Breakfast Places
• #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
• #34 Architecture
• #25 David Sedaris
• #24 Wine
• #23 Microbreweries
• #21 Writers Workshops
• #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
• #19 Traveling
• #18 Awareness
• #16 Gifted Children
• #14 Having Black Friends
• #13 Tea
• #8 Barack Obama
• #7 Diversity
• #6 Organic Food
• #5 Farmer’s Markets
• #3 Film Festivals
• #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
• #1 Coffee

Holy fuck, I am pretty darn white!

 I was amazed and impressed by Reverend Joseph Lowery’s Inauguration Benediction from yesterday, the2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, so I asked the Twitterverse for a link to a transcript of the speech and@raygunner came back with a link to the Chicago Sun-Times with the goods. Thanks, man!

Reverend Joseph Lowery Inauguration Benediction Transcript

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen –

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: — and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)

END.

Last week Thursday morning, I participated as a social media PR expert and panelist in a very cool Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference entitled Beyond Twitter PR. Here’s some information on the call-in audio conference:

8/28/08 – Beyond Twitter PR: The New Rules of Crafting a Powerful, Cost-Effective Social Media Strategy

New media communications, social media optimization, Web 2.0 marketing, Facebook publicity, even Twitter PR. No matter how you tag the movement—it’s clear today’s engagement media and online channels from blogs to online video to social networks and even virtual worlds are bonafide communication tools. Practitioners who can master these mediums and create PR-driven social media strategies that generate real results for clients and companies alike—are sure to rule the integrated and digital marketing mix (and budget). Join Bulldog Reporter’s exclusive panel of the nation’s foremost experts successfully practicing in the nexus between PR and exciting new technologies to learn how you can beat the competition and successfully incorporate Web 2.0 tools into traditional PR programs. If you’re new to the social media revolution and its impact on communications, this is one call that will bring your work (and career trajectory!) up to speed. If you’re already incorporating social media and Web 2.0 techniques into your PR programs, this 90-minute, intensive call is a sure way to take your online efforts to the next level and position your team, client or company well ahead of the competition, while engaging consumers, customers and public in exciting, productive and profitable new ways.

It was a very amazing speaker panel:

Kate Laufer, Senior Public Relations Manager, North America, Beam Global
Spirits & Wine
Paula Berg, Manager, Emerging Media, Southwest Airlines
Doug Hay, CEO, Co-Founder, Expansion Plus
Susan Getgood, Principal, GetGood Strategic Marketing
Chris Abraham, President/COO, Abraham Harrison

If you like what you read, you are welcome to listen to the event by either ordering the conference CD or by requesting it on demand.

According to an online quiz on Details, “Are Your That Guy,” I am totally that guy: a total douchebag, apparently.

1 You initiate fist bumps.
Yes
No

Someone told me that high-fives are passe so I have replaced them with bumps and regular, manly, handshakes.

2 You order foreign dishes in an accent.
Yes
No

I ask for foreign dishes, yes, properly. If the dish is French then I order it in French and if it is Mexican, I pronounce it in Spanish. And in Germany, I sort of need to order it in German. If you do it right, you don’t really draw much attention to yourself.

3 You shave your head at the first sign of balding.
Yes
No

I would totally either shave my head or crop it close if I started balding.

4 You use any word Stephen Colbert invented.
Yes
No

I use as many words as I can remember if they were coined by Stephen Colbert.

5 You have an elaborate bedtime ritual on planes—with neck pillow, sleep mask, and noise-canceling headphones.
Yes
No

People with sleeping rituals of any kind need to lose their guy card immediately.

6 You have a downloaded ring tone.
Yes
No

I am quite amused with classic, normal, default ringtones; however, I really enjoyed sporting the “bring out your dead” skit from Monty Python.

7 You wave someone along even though they have the right of way.
Yes
No

I think I have forgotten who actually does have right-of-way at 4-way intersections, so if I feel like I arrived a millisecond later than another, I will wave and wave.

8 You say the name of the town where your Ivy League alma mater is located instead of the name of the school.
Yes
No

If I had actually gone to an Ivy League school, I would totally say New Haven or Boston or wherever.

9 You own a Manchester United jersey.
Yes
No

No, I am afraid not. I almost bought a Norwich Canaries jersey but decided not to.

10 You quote Borat, Zoolander, or Anchorman, or reference “TPS reports” and “pieces of flair.”
Yes
No

I don’t have the best memory for these things but I made a Zoolander reference just the other day — a Blue Steel reference.

11 You put your BlackBerry on the table when you sit down at a restaurant.
Yes
No

Yes.  In fact, all of my friends deBerry and dePhone the moment we sit down for food — not to show off but because I always have too much shit in my pockets.

12 You talk baby talk to your girlfriend on your office phone.
Yes
No

I don’t have a girlfriend presently but all indicators point to “yes.”

13 You offer to buy a cigarette from people outside bars.
Yes
No

No, I have too much of a problem with entitlement — I would never offer to buy.

14 You order “off-menu.”
Yes
No

Food isn’t really my bag and restaurant-going isn’t my bag, and I am pretty much omnivorous, so, like a diesel, I can run on anything.

15 You own a reptile.
Yes
No

Spike, God rest your little soul

16 You say “My bad.”
Yes
No

I hate that I say this. My bad.

17 You describe your relationship status by saying “It’s complicated.”
Yes
No

With me, it always is.

18 You say “We’re pregnant.”
Yes
No

I would love to say this — I will totally be that guy, if that guy says, “we’re pregnant.”

19 You have destination-related car stickers like MV, NTK, PVT, HMP, or NPT.
Yes
No

I might actually get myself a vanity plate. I never have, yet, but I aspire to.

20 You make a show out of tasting wine.
Yes
No

I tried to make a point of being fussy over coffee and cheese, but what’s the use.

21 You preface statements with “spoiler alert.”
Yes
No

I am Mr. Online and have been beaten down by spoiling, so I have learned my lesson.

22 You don’t wash last night’s admission stamp off your hand.
Yes
No

I am not likely to scrub off the thing.  Does that mean I am preserve it or am I just dirty?

23 You use abbreviations like TBD, ASAP, and BFD in conversation and sign off e-mails with “thx” or “cheers.”
Yes
No

I have been signing emails with “Cheers, Chris” forever.

24 You wear flip-flops, Croakies, Crocs, or board shorts in the city.
Yes
No

My only excuse here is that I grew up in Hawaii and I never used to wear flip-flops (rubber slippers) in the city until it because ubiquitous.

25 You have a nighttime wardrobe that includes a going-out shirt, concert merchandise, or limited-edition sneakers you bought in Tokyo.
Yes
No

I pretty much wear a uniform, no matter what the situation. I have “dressed up” and “dressed down” and “dressed up with jacked.”

26 You say “I need my Starbucks.”
Yes
No

It might sound a little prissy until I tell you that most of the coffee you drink, especially from Dunkin’ Donuts, is really a lot lot worse than Starbucks. You may think Starbuck’s coffee is “burnt” but the truth is, you just have poor taste in coffee. You’re decidedly “truck stop” class.

27 You refer to the woman you’re casually hooking up with as a “friend with benefits.”
Yes
No

28 You pretend not to know who Spencer Pratt is.
Yes
No

I actually don’t know who Spencer Pratt. How do I answer? Yes or no?

29 You offer advice to women on their “form” at the gym.
Yes
No

30 You call friends and colleagues by their last names.
Yes
No

I call David Gelles “Gelles” — but one is enough. I should start colling Andrew Curry, “Curry,” but I don’t.

31 You refer to a date/girlfriend’s having done some “print work.”
Yes
No

I am not much of a modelizer.

32 You describe anything good as “sick.”
Yes
No

I have referred to things as “sweet,” — where does that fall?

33 You refer to your wife as “the ol’ ball and chain” and say “I’ll take the request to management.”
Yes
No

I might never refer to my wife as my wife.  She is “Stephanie” or “Michelle.”

34 You refer to a trip to the gym as a “legs day.”
Yes
No

35 You go to a show to see the opening band.
Yes
No

If I like the opening band, I go to a show for the opening band.

36 You think Hayden Panettiere is hot.
Yes
No

As a huge Heroes fan, who in the hell wouldn’t think that  Hayden Panettiere is hot?

37 You put your kid in a Che Guevara T-shirt.
Yes
No

I love Che.

38 You include the names of your kids and pets in your home outgoing message.
Yes
No

I would, the moment I can find a woman who might be willing to breed with me.

39 You refer to money as “Benjamins,” “dead presidents,” “ducats,” or “coin.”
Yes
No

I like to be as colloquial as possible when it comes to coin.

40 You bitch about your contractor at parties.
Yes
No

I totally bitch about my contractors, who are actually employees!  Not a lot of bitch about these days — they’re a well-oiled machine, yo.

41 You talk about a record “dropping.”
Yes
No

I am actually old enough to remember when you would stack records on a record player and they would drop down, get played, and then another would drop, and it would be played, too.  The “record” version of a multi-CD player.

42 You half-tuck your shirt.
Yes
No

I think the half-tucked shirts look cool but I am not cool enough to pull it off.

43 You have a goatee.
Yes
No

I am either clean-shaven or I have a beard — sometimes, just scruff.  Never a goatee. Back in the day, though, my girlfriend Michelle demanded her beoyfriends have goatees (what’s up with that) and I complied.

44 You refer to anything as “small-batch” or “artisanal.”
Yes
No

Like I mentioned before, I was well into cheeses and into hams and into other foodie things and I was very much into getting as many whole milk cheeses as possible. And, when you want to get whole milk goat cheese of and elite quality, you need to go “artisanal.”

45 You refer to any last-stop bar as “the 19th hole.”
Yes
No

I refer to as many things as possible as “the 19th hole.”

46 You’re a Caucasian with a tattoo in Asian lettering.
Yes
No

Tatoos appal me.

47 You Evite.
Yes
No

I have Evited people for years and year by now. I love it.

48 You own a wine Rabbit.
Yes
No

I am a huge fan of the very basic “Waiter’s Friend” or the Laguiole knife/wine opener.

49 You proselytize about carbon footprints.
Yes
No

I am very anti-climate change hypocrisy.

50 You name your kid after a character in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Yes
No

My son or daughter will surely be named after some character or actor. I am a huge film-lover and also have a degree in American Literature with a minor in creative writing. It is bound to happen.

51 You use the phrase flyover states.
Yes
No

52 You use the word bicoastal.
Yes
No

Yes, but when I use the term bicoastal, I mean American and Europe; Washington, DC, and Berlin, Germany.  Bicontinental, I guess.

53 You pretend to like country music.
Yes
No

I actually do love country music, especially bluegrass.

54 You wear DJ headphones.
Yes
No

Nope. Just simple buds.

55 You use a Bluetooth headset.
Yes
No

I drive in Washington, DC, and do most of my conference calls enroute. I own two bluetooth headsets: a Motorola and a Jawbone.

56 You call muscle groups by shortened versions of their technical names, like “lats,” “traps,” and “pecs.”
Yes
No

I used to be a wrestler and also a college rower, so you sort of just do call them traps, quads, lats, pec, etc.

Zach Goldfarb wrote a great post over at the Washington Post and popped me an email to see if I had any comment on it. I did! The article was posted on Friday last and is called TechPost: Washington’s Twin Tech Towns. My comment starts right below the following video:

I attended the Spank party for Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk because I wanted to hang out with Robert and Gary.

I really must remind the reader that this is what the gathering was, a small get-together that mushroomed into a big event.

Unlike the Pulver Breakfasts or PodCamps, this gathering started as the ultimate cult-of-personality fest — even I popped there to meet THE Robert Scoble — and to meet folks I have known online, on Twitter, on Facebook, and in the blogosphere, for almost ten years!

Then it became an amazing schmooze-fest! I not only got to meet the Scobleizer and Mr. Wine Library TV but I met a dozen people I had only known virtually online!

I am very pleased to see things like this happen spontaneously in DC. It was fun, playful, generous, and I got to connect to people I had met a couple weeks prior at Geoff Livingston’s BlogPotomac such as the amazing and enthusiastic Shana Glickfield.

I must rush to mention that there were very few PR and marketing folks. There was the lovely Rachelle Lacroix from Fleishman-Hillard and a couple others — this was a group of people who were hard core geeks and nerds and programmers and developers and all the most choice horse meat in the world of entrepreneurs and programmers.

I may have read the crowd wrong, but we were all there for an audience with A-list blogger Robert Scoble and A-list video blogger, Gary Vaynerchuk.

I am still giddy that Gary Vaynerchuk recognized me from across the room and that Robert Scoble bragged to his friends that we had finally met after knowing each other online for close to 8 years.

I hope there are more of these!

Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison
http://www.chrisabraham.com

George Carlin was my first adult comedian. My dad — my parents — loved him. He was a true disruptor and free thinker, using comedy as his platform. Please check out George Carlin’s Wikipedia entry and the lovely obituary from the New York Times.

George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” died in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He was 71.The cause of death was heart failure. Mr. Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, went into the hospital on Sunday afternoon after complaining of heart trouble. The comedian had worked last weekend at The Orleans in Las Vegas.

Recently, Mr. Carlin was named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was to receive the award at the Kennedy Center in November. “In his lengthy career as a comedian, writer, and actor, George Carlin has not only made us laugh, but he makes us think,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Kennedy Center chairman. “His influence on the next generation of comics has been far-reaching.”

Mr. Carlin began his standup comedy act in the late 1950s and made his first television solo guest appearance on “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1965. At that time, he was primarily known for his clever wordplay and reminiscences of his Irish working-class upbringing in New York.

But from the outset there were indications of an anti-establishment edge to his comedy. Initially, it surfaced in the witty patter of a host of offbeat characters like the wacky sportscaster Biff Barf and the hippy-dippy weatherman Al Sleet. “The weather was dominated by a large Canadian low, which is not to be confused with a Mexican high. Tonight’s forecast . . . dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.”

Mr. Carlin released his first comedy album, “Take-Offs and Put-Ons,” to rave reviews in 1967. He also dabbled in acting, winning a recurring part as Marlo Thomas’ theatrical agent in the sitcom “That Girl” (1966-67) and a supporting role in the movie “With Six You Get Egg-Roll,” released in 1968.

By the end of the decade, he was one of America’s best known comedians. He made more than 80 major television appearances during that time, including the Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show; he was also regularly featured at major nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas.

That early success and celebrity, however, was as dinky and hollow as a gratuitous pratfall to Mr. Carlin. “I was entertaining the fathers and the mothers of the people I sympathized with, and in some cases associated with, and whose point of view I shared,” he recalled later, as quoted in the book “Going Too Far” by Tony Hendra, which was published in 1987. “I was a traitor, in so many words. I was living a lie.”

In 1970, Mr. Carlin discarded his suit, tie, and clean-cut image as well as the relatively conventional material that had catapulted him to the top. Mr. Carlin reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine that, according to one critic, was steeped in “drugs and bawdy language.” There was an immediate backlash. The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas terminated his three-year contract, and, months later, he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned the nightclub circuit and began appearing at coffee houses, folk clubs and colleges where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.

By 1972, when he released his second album, “FM & AM,” his star was again on the rise. The album, which won a Grammy Award as best comedy recording, combined older material on the “AM” side with bolder, more acerbic routines on the “FM” side. Among the more controversial cuts was a routine euphemistically entitled “Shoot,” in which Mr. Carlin explored the etymology and common usage of the popular idiom for excrement. The bit was part of the comic’s longer routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which appeared on his third album “Class Clown,” also released in 1972.

“There are some words you can say part of the time. Most of the time ‘ass’ is all right on television,” Mr. Carlin noted in his introduction to the then controversial monologue. “You can say, well, ‘You’ve made a perfect ass of yourself tonight.’ You can use ass in a religious sense, if you happen to be the redeemer riding into town on one — perfectly all right.”

The material seems innocuous by today’s standards, but it caused an uproar when broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI in the early ’70s. The station was censured and fined by the FCC. And in 1978, their ruling was supported by the Supreme Court, which Time magazine reported, “upheld an FCC ban on ‘offensive material’ during hours when children are in the audience.” Mr. Carlin refused to drop the bit and was arrested several times after reciting it on stage.

By the mid-’70s, like his comic predecessor Lenny Bruce and the fast-rising Richard Pryor, Mr. Carlin had emerged as a cultural renegade. In addition to his irreverent jests about religion and politics, he openly talked about the use of drugs, including acid and peyote, and said that he kicked cocaine not for moral or legal reasons but after he found “far more pain in the deal than pleasure.” But the edgier, more biting comedy he developed during this period, along with his candid admission of drug use, cemented his reputation as the “comic voice of the counterculture.”

Mr. Carlin released a half dozen comedy albums during the ’70s, including the million-record sellers “Class Clown,” “Occupation: Foole” (1973) and “An Evening With Wally Lando” (1975). He was chosen to host the first episode of the late-night comedy show “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. And two years later, he found the perfect platform for his brand of acerbic, cerebral, sometimes off-color standup humor in the fledgling, less restricted world of cable television. By 1977, when his first HBO comedy special, “George Carlin at USC” was aired, he was recognized as one of the era’s most influential comedians. He also become a best-selling author of books that expanded on his comedy routines, including “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?,” which was published by Hyperion in 2004.

Pursuing a Dream

Mr. Carlin was born in New York City in 1937. “I grew up in New York wanting to be like those funny men in the movies and on the radio,” he said. “My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.”

He quit high school to join the Air Force in the mid-’50s and, while stationed in Shreveport, La., worked as a radio disc jockey. Discharged in 1957, he set out to pursue his boyhood dream of becoming an actor and comic. He moved to Boston where he met and teamed up with Jack Burns, a newscaster and comedian. The team worked on radio stations in Boston, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles, and performed in clubs throughout the country during the late ’50s.

After attracting the attention of the comedian Mort Sahl, who dubbed them “a duo of hip wits,” they appeared as guests on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar. Still, the Carlin-Burns team was only moderately successful, and, in 1960, Mr. Carlin struck out on his own.

During a career that spanned five decades, he emerged as one of the most durable, productive and versatile comedians of his era. He evolved from Jerry Seinfeld-like whimsy and a buttoned-down decorum in the ’60s to counterculture icon in the ’70s. By the ’80s, he was known as a scathing social critic who could artfully wring laughs from a list of oxymorons that ranged from “jumbo shrimp” to “military intelligence.” And in the 1990s and into the 21st century the balding but still pony-tailed comic prowled the stage — eyes ablaze and bristling with intensity — as the circuit’s most splenetic curmudgeon.

During his live 1996 HBO special, “Back in Town,” he raged over the shallowness of the ’90s “me first” culture — mocking the infatuation with camcorders, hyphenated names, sneakers with lights on them, and lambasting white guys over 10 years old who wear their baseball hats backwards. Baby boomers, “who went from ‘do your thing’ to ‘just say no’ …from cocaine to Rogaine,” and pro life advocates (“How come when it’s us it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?”), were some of his prime targets. In the years following his 1977 cable debut, Mr. Carlin was nominated for a half dozen Grammy awards and received CableAces awards for best stand-up comedy special for “George Carlin: Doin’ It Again (1990) and “George Carlin: Jammin’ ” (1992). He also won his second Grammy for the album “Jammin” in 1994.

Personal Struggles

During the course of his career, Mr. Carlin overcame numerous personal trials. His early arrests for obscenity (all of which were dismissed) and struggle to overcome his self-described “heavy drug use” were the most publicized. But in the ’80s he also weathered serious tax problems, a heart attack and two open heart surgeries.

In December 2004 he entered a rehabilitation center to address his addictions to Vicodin and red wine. Mr. Carlin had a well-chronicled cocaine problem in his 30s, and though he was able to taper his cocaine use on his own, he said, he continued to abuse alcohol and also became addicted to Vicodin. He entered rehab at the end of that year, then took two months off before continuing his comedy tours.

“Standup is the centerpiece of my life, my business, my art, my survival and my way of being,” Mr. Carlin once told an interviewer. “This is my art, to interpret the world.” But, while it always took center stage in his career, Mr. Carlin did not restrict himself to the comedy stage. He frequently indulged his childhood fantasy of becoming a movie star. Among his later credits were supporting parts in “Car Wash” (1976), “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989), “The Prince of Tides” (1991), and “Dogma” (1999).

His 1997 book, “Brain Droppings,” became an instant best seller. And among several continuing TV roles, he starred in the Fox sitcom “The George Carlin Show,” which aired for one season. “That was an experiment on my part to see if there might be a way I could fit into the corporate entertainment structure,” he said after the show was canceled in 1994. “And I don’t,” he added.

Despite the longevity of his career and his problematic personal life, Mr. Carlin remained one of the most original and productive comedians in show business. “It’s his lifelong affection for language and passion for truth that continue to fuel his performances,” a critic observed of the comedian when he was in his mid-60s. And Chris Albrecht, an HBO executive, said, “He is as prolific a comedian as I have witnessed.”

Mr. Carlin is survived by his wife, Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law, Bob McCall, brother, Patrick Carlin and sister-in-law, Marlene Carlin. His first wife, Brenda Hosbrook, died in 1997.

Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

Still, when pushed to explain the pessimism and overt spleen that had crept into his act, he quickly reaffirmed the zeal that inspired his lists of complaints and grievances. “I don’t have pet peeves,” he said, correcting the interviewer. And with a mischievous glint in his eyes, he added, “I have major, psychotic hatreds.”

In memory of George Carlin, here they are:

• Shit
• Piss
• Fuck
• Cunt
• Cocksucker
• Motherfucker
• Tits

Mark pointed me to this article in the NY Times with this simple comment, “Berlin really is the best city in the world.” Anybody game to checking this place out? I have yet to go out dancing at all in Berlin. For me, it has been 100% dinner parties, lounges, bars, restaurants, and homes. It looks like my first Berlin nightclub experience will surely need to be this democratic, egalitarian, Prenzlauer Berg night spot, Clärchen’s Ballhaus.

There is no door policy at the nearly 100-year-old Clärchen’s Ballhaus, no bored-looking blond Berlin fashion design student dressed like an American Apparel ad surveying the late-night crowd. There is a coat check, run by the same nattily dressed mustached gentleman who’s been running it since the 1960s, when Clärchen’s was a dance hall in Communist East Berlin. His colleague Klaus Schliebs, dressed in a tuxedo every weekend night, takes your ticket after you’ve paid the cover charge of 3 euros, about $5 at $1.60 to the euro.

All come all served.

“As long as you don’t look like you have a seriously high blood-alcohol level, we’ll let you in,” says the owner Christian Schulz.

The democracy at the door is immediately evident inside, where couples of varying ages and sartorial styles dance with abandon to songs from Jimi Hendrix to Abba to the schlager singer Udo Jürgens played by a cover band. Mothers from the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, ignoring the baby sitter’s calls for just a few minutes longer, groove with Italian foreign-exchange students and older men dressed in their Sunday suits. Cellophane streamers contributed by a stage designer from the nearby Volksbühne theater lend the place an “Enchantment Under the Sea” vibe. The atmosphere is flirtatious, uninhibited and eclectic.

“You’re there, and you think, you’re in an Austrian film of the late 1980s,” says Thomas Demand, a Berlin-based photographer and installation artist. Like most Clärchen’s regulars, Mr. Demand is an after-midnight guest, when dinner has been cleared from the white cloths of the restaurant tables, leaving only empty coffee cups and half-full bottles of prosecco.

“People come here with the hope that they will find the love of their life,” said Mr. Schulz, who took over Clärchen’s (Auguststrasse, 24; 49-30-282-92-95; www.ballhaus.de) in 2005 with his partner, David Regehr, and transformed it from a faltering restaurant to a wildly successful dinner and late-night dance club.

A veteran of the theater, Mr. Schulz sees Clärchen’s as the stage on which a night’s adventures are improvised. There are some star players as well: Willem Defoe, Bjork, the artist Matthew Barney, Charlotte Rampling and other names Mr. Schulz is too tired to tick off, have come to Clärchen’s. But they come because they can, unperturbed, perform elegant tangos, grind to James Brown or drink wine upstairs amid the cracked mirrors and haunted atmosphere of the Mirror Salon. No longer the main attractions, they dance on parquet made sticky by spilled alcohol and become bit players in the late-night show.

What an Evening of German Study Looks Like, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

A course book, a workbook, a notebook, and a bottle of wine make for a night of study.

Well, I give up. So many people think I am an evil whale-killer that I will stop fighting. What do you think I am after you read Don’t Save the Whales? Should I be “harpooned and flayed alive?” Well, for those of you who think I kill whales, here are my favorite whale recipes:

Whale Recipe One:

3/4 to 1 kilo whale meat (or beef/horse)
50 g butter, tallow or lard
2-3 onions
Salt and pepper
Laurel leaf (optional)
600-700 ml water
Sauce colouring (caramel)
50 g flour
200 ml milk

Clean the meat: some say it’s enough to slice off about a centimetre off each side of the piece, others recommend soaking in milk overnight. This is only to ensure there will be no oily taste to the meat, but if it has been properly handled in the first place, it will not taste oily. Cut into steaks and beat with a meat mallet.
Slice the onions. Heat the cooking fat in a frying pan, brown the meat on all sides and put in a cooking pot, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Brown the onions in a frying pan and add half to the pot with the meat, along with the laurel leaf, if using. Set half the onions aside. Pour water into the frying pan and deglaze. Pour over the meat and cook for 15 to 30 minutes or until the meat is tender. Arrange the steaks on a serving dish and arrange the browned onions that were set aside on top.
Make a paste with the milk and flour and use it to thicken the cooking liquid left in the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with cooked potatoes and vegetables arranged around the meat and sprinkle parsley or cress over the dish. Serve gravy on the side.

Whale Recipe Two:

3/4 kg whale meat, beef or horse
250 g onions
75 g margarine or butter
2 tbs tomato purée
200 ml water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika

Melt the margarine in a frying pan, slice the onion and brown it. Remove from pan and set aside. Cut the meat into slices, brown in the pan and put in a cooking pot or stew pan with the onions. Boil the water, stir in the tomato purée, salt and paprika and pour over the meat. Cook slowly for 14 to 30 minutes, or until the meat is tender. Serve with potatoes.

Whale Recipe Three:

3/4 kilo whale, beef or horse
50 g margarine
3-4 onions
2-3 tbs water
Salt, pepper, garlic powder

Cut the meat into very thin slices (1/2 cm thick or so). Brown quickly in a dry pan (no oil). Remove meat and melt the margarine and brown the sliced onions in it. Remove from the pan, add the water and cook the meat slices in the water for 2-3 minutes. Flavour with salt and spices. Serve with potatoes and a salad.

Sour Pickled Whale Blubber – Súr Hvalrengi

Chunks of whale blubber are washed under cold running water and cooked until firm, then removed from the cooking liquid, cooled and kept in cold water for 1-2 days, cut into smaller pieces and dropped into strong whey. Ready for eating in 4-6 weeks.

Whale Steak:

4 slices of whalemeat @ 150 – 180 g
Salt and pepper, preferably freshly ground
4 onion rings
2 dessert spoonfulls of finely diced green or red peppers
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced parsley
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced gherkins
Carve the meat into slices of about 1.5 to 2 cm thick, beat them with your hands and press them into shape. Preheat the frying pan and melt some butter in it. Brown the butter before adding the meat. Fry the steaks on both sides. Whale meat should be fried for about 4-5 minutes on each side. The steaks taste best when they are medium rare, but they should be warmed right through and not eaten raw. Serve the steaks on a plate, place an onion ring on each of them and fill it with peppers, parsley and gherkins. Potato scollops taste good together with the steaks. Serve with a bowl of good, crisp lettuce and salad.

Joint of Whale Meat Steeped in Red Wine Marinade:

1 1/4 kilos of whale meat
3 dl red wine
1 dl vegetable oil
3 ground cloves
1/2 teaspoonful of coarsly ground pepper
2 teaspoonfuls of salt
The Marinade – 3/4 litres of juices from the meat Thickening (milk and flour) 4 dessert spoonfuls of sour cream (20% rømme) Sugar colouring Salt

It may be a good idea to bind the joint to help it keep in good shape. Place it in a small oven dish and pour the marinade over. Leave the joint there until the next day, turning it at regular intervals. Remove the joint from the dish, dry it well and rub it with salt. Cook the joint until it turns a pleasant brown colour all over, turn down the heat and add water to reach 2-3 cm up the side of the joint, approx. 3/4 litre. Let the joint simmer for about 20 minutes, turn it over and leave it for another 20 minutes. Measure enough of the juices to make enough marinade, about 3/4 litre. Add the thickening to the marinade, and then the sour cream to taste. Serve with boiled beans or other vegetables, and potatoes – boiled or fried in the pan.

How to Cook a Whale Found Dead

An old Kwakuitl recipe, as narrated in the Kwakuitl language by Elie Hunt and translated into English by her husband, George Hunt, circa 1908.
Courtesy of http://www.hallman.org/~bruce/

Most importantly, you cannot eat it all by yourself! So the first step is to call for a party and invite all your friends, relatives, and local dignitaries.

A special occasion, like the finding of a whale, calls for the use of ceremonial names. Though a hunter, a man, has found the whale, preparing food is women’s work, and therefore the daughter of the hunter has the rights to prepare the whale. She is given the ceremonial name, Place-of-cutting-Blubber. Note that it is the daughter who has the rights, not the wife(s), due to the family rights in a matrilineal society.

Once everybody is ready, you bring tools, and the hunter who found the whale leads everybody in their canoes to the spot where he found it. The father of the hunter has the honor of speaking for the daughter of the hunter to “make a toast” for the occasion. It is customary to first declare how wonderful the whale is, being full of delicious blubber, etc.. Then you should give the choicest piece (the dorsal fin) to the ranking dignitary, who is typically the chief of the village.

Everybody else gets an equal size piece of the whale according to the order of their rank. The first piece starts at the whale neck, and they work from the top down and from the head to the tail. Generally the pieces are cut about a fathom (6 feet) in width. After the ceremonial pieces are given out, the women go to work to gather the remaining fat from the whale. The last step is cut off a piece of the tale of the whale.

When this is done, the pieces are loaded in the canoes, and everybody goes home to do the remainder of the preparation. The hunks of blubber are split into strips four fingers thick (two inches). These pieces are then cut into half inch strips.

A kettle of water is set to boil on the beach, and the strips are boiled to render the oil. The oil is ladled off and stored in watertight storage boxes. Whale oil is best stored in the corner of your house.

Then, you take cedar bark, and split it into long strips. Poke holes in the middle of the boiled pieces of whale blubber, and thread them onto the long strips of bark. When finish these strings of blubber are now called “tied-in-the-middle”.
Dry these strips in the smoky rafters of your house for at least a month. When you want to eat some “tied-in-the-middle” take it down from the rafters, and boil it in a kettle until tender. This takes a lot of boiling. Be sure to eat it hot, because when it is cold, it is really tough. If you boil more than you can eat, you can dry it again, and reheat it later. This dish is called “eating boiled blubber tied in the middle”, a real treat!

Whale Pie

20    oz    Whale meat
One bay leaf
1         Stalk celery
6         Peppercorns
1    tb    Salt
1/2    c    Butter
1/2    c    Flour
1    c    Light cream
1/8    ts    Pepper
1/4    ts    Salt
One 1 pound can pearl onions
1         4 ounce can sliced mushrooms
1    pk    Frozen peas
2    cn    Pimentos, sliced 1
Box pastry mix

Whale meat (minke whale) is unfortunately no longer easy available, but it can still be obtained in some countries.

Whale meat is a very strong tasting, but marinades may be used to help tenderise and add flavour, such as red wine, oil, juniper berries, port, spices, bay leaf and peppercorns.

Normally I use whale meat for steaks or for barbecue, but this is a new recipes, which turned up to be a great success:

Cut the wale meat up, and place in a large kettle and cover with water ( or use crock pot). Add bay leaf, celery, peppercorns and 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to boil, cover and cook over low heat for 2 hours or until the meat is tender.

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir until blended. Add light cream, pepper and salt. Cook stirring, until thickened.

Arrange whale meat pieces, onions, mushrooms, peas and pimentos in 2 quart casserole. Add sauce to within 1 inch of top.

Prepare the pastry mix. Cut pastry circle 1/2 inch larger than casserole and place over the whale-mixture, turning edge of pastry under and pressing to casserole with fork or spoon.

Bake in preheated 450 degree oven 15 min. or until crust is golden brown.

Serves 4 to 6.

Now this is Personal Pan Pizza, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

Due Forni is a real find. Last night, after house-painting and then going to a club to listen to Frank’s production of a radio drama for Deutschlandradio Kultur, we were famished so we dropped by Due Forni at Schönhauser Allee 12 in the super-hip, super-hipster Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. Very fine meal. Yes, those are little water glasses of red wine.

Atame Tapas Bar in Berlin, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

If you want delicious tapas and wine and a warm and inviting experience then you should drop by the Atame Tapas Bar and hunker down for a couple hours, especially after a long day of walking in the cold. Order a bottle of red and then order plate after plate until you’re sated.

Here’s some of what we shared: we started with the “tapas variadas grande” which had most of these guys, calamares fritos, gambas al ajillo, chorizo rosario picante, papas arrugadas con mojo picón, aceitunas y olivas, and my favorite, boquerones en vinagre. I didn’t take note of the wine, but it was lovely and drinkable.

Although I am not certain any of the following actually happened, I am going to regale you with some of the boorish stories I have been sharing with friends for years. They are all St Louis School JROTC Rangers stories. In High School, I was in JROTC and a member of the elite club called the Rangers.  And the JROTC Rangers do exist:

JROTC RANGER TEAM

The JROTC Ranger Team is a six man cadet team that competes in various physical competition with other JROTC units that include: Physical Fitness test, Rappelling, Rope Bridging, Endurance/Obstacle Course, 12 mile Team Run, 1,800 meter swim, First Aid, Terrain/Land Navigation and Tug-o-War.   The team trains daily during Period 9 from 1435 to 1545 hours and selected weekends.

Contact LTC Charles Lee or 1SG Jimmy Akuna

Our public claim-to-fame is that we wore spit-polished-and-bloused jump boots and a black beret with a red and blue, school colors flash. I wore an official yellow-on-black Ranger patch on my shoulder and strutted around school ever Thursday with my chest in the air. We were so proud that we ignored the fact that we were despised by both our fellow JROTC colleagues who were not part of our club and the student body at-large. We considered the former to be jealous and the latter to be ignorant.Our private claim-to-fame was that we disappeared into the subtropical forests of the Northwestern shore of Oahu every weekend, every Spring Break, and during many of the other holidays and long weekends. Disappearing was always very important for us because the simple field trip form that our parents signed for us allowed us to be officially part of the training of weekend warriors during the mid-eighties.

We teens were used as Opposing Forces, known as OpFor, against the gentle field exercises practiced by the U.S. Army Reserves and the National Guard. We were only between two to four fire teams of five young men, but we were very well and insanely motivated. Our call was, “motivated, dedicated, hua! Rangers!” We were afraid of nothing much because we wanted to kill the enemy and because we really thought it was a game. Had no insight into the import of these little war games on old East Range.

On Friday afternoon on Saturday morning, we Rangers would collect upon Kolaipuhaku at the top of the oval driveway, ready with our Alice packs, our field jacket, our BDUs, our ponchos, our web gear, and our two-sided 30-round banana clips filled with 5.56mm blanks and lashed together with olive green duct tape.

As we awaited the white school bus with the dark tinted windows, we stood there in rank. Oftentimes, since we would deploy immediately upon arriving at the base, we would stand in-line and jump up and down. Our team leaders and our officers would weave between us, checking us for noises. We got taped-down and cinched up. We lost the loose change, and we stowed our house keys. We stowed our precious black berets and donned our floppy-brimmed boonie hats and pale green caps, the ones with the cats eyes sewn into the back.

When the bus arrived, we filtered in and some of us would crash and other would flip through their team movement and tactic manuals, memorizing L ambush techniques and the best use of cover fire, as one does. Since I never did the whole camp thing, I am feeling that this is about as close to that as I ever got. For sure, I wished I could have trained for this all summer. During the summer we did train, but it was much more casual an involved parties and the beach and girls and Boone’s Farm apple wine and Mickey’s big mouth and peppermint schnapps. But that’s another story.

So, depending on with whom we were training and where, we would either drive for an hour out to Schofield Barracks and East Range or for a stopover in Waikiki in about fifteen minutes.

From there, we would get briefed by a lieutenant who I am sure considered his career over as we fell into his lap, and then we would be shipped out, never to sleep again until Sunday night. In a nutshell, these weekends went like this:

We were dropped off at East Range, received our maps and a briefing, and then we split up into our five-man fire teams. I was the only pigman, or machine gunner, of the entire Saint Louis Rangers, but I have played the part of radio operator with my Prick 77 (PRC-77), of point man, and of pigman. As pigman, I got stuck with the 23-pound machine gun of Rambo fame. And I loved it. As the pigman, I got to have an assistant gunner, who carried extra belts of ammo and an extra barrel. Unlike the M-16, the M-60 runs a bigger caliber ammunition and runs much hotter, especially blocked as it was with a blank adapter. Nothing is better than being on your belly at the elbow of an L ambush in the middle of the night, your pig resting on its bipod and pointing downrange at the headlights of a 3AM caravan of deuce-and-a-half’s, awaiting your commander’s orders to open fire. But that’s another story.

It was very cool for sure, and felt very real. I will make a point of telling as many of the stories as I can remember.

I spontaneously sped towards Pittsburgh, PA, last Saturday afternoon. Hurtling Northwest on Interstate 70. Moving and passing right at 80-85. Sweet Suzi by my Side. Towards what I thought was an heroic act of being a Gentleman for Miss Sarah Connerley.

Alas, she had virtually nothing packed by the time I arrived, in less than 4 hours. Upon landing, we went to it. And although Sarah had to try to avoid a nervous breakdown, she did swimmingly and we returned last Sunday night with two SUVs and a U-HAUL hitch trailer in tow and that’s all she wrote.

Along the way, I got to meet Sarah’s posse who is an amazing mix of Gorgeous Baristas and MFA Poets and Classic Motorcycle hooligans (classic as in Triumphs and old R65s, not classic hooligans). We feasted.

Flank steak. Grilled salmon. Hot dogs. And, of course, Polish Sausages. And loads of Yuengling and wine.

Fancy pretty slumming hooligans right out of Wallpaper*. Very bright, charming, cool, and I hope they all come to the Grotto.

Anyway, all I got to see, really, is Squirrel Hill, but its charming and affluent and cafe-cool.

So, once I buy my bike and have it under hand and I get used to her, then I will buzz up there with Sarah on my back, buzz buzz buzzing off to Pittsburgh for a true visit.

So, unlike Baltimore, I have nothing but kudos to offer to sweet lovely Pittsburgh. Maybe I should apply to grad school or law school at CMU.

Posted Jul 16, 2002 – 02:37 PM

I got to spend some time hanging out with Martin Marty at Renaissance Weekend a couple years ago. All I knew about him was gleaned from lunches, dinners, and panels together. During last night’s run, my friend Marty Marty started speaking into my iPod earbuds in the form of an interview on Speaking of Faith, America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty Download MP3, Listen, Podcast, and uncut interview with Martin Marty (1:38). God bless Martin Marty and thank you, Krista Tippett.

Transcript of America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty

Billboard:

Krista Tippett, host: I’m Krista Tippett, today a conversation about religion in America, with one of the great public theologians of our time, Martin Marty. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are now the stuff of daily headlines: the rise of religious fundamentalism across the world, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the vigor of evangelical Christianity in American life. Marty offers historical and personal perspective.

Mr. Martin Marty: I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts, and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both.

Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty on America’s changing religious landscape. This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are the stuff of daily headlines and partisan rhetoric: the vigor of evangelical Christianity in politics, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. Today we’ll probe the historical perspective of this leading scholar of religion. We’ll discuss what’s really new in religion as a force in American culture, politics, and daily life.

From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”

Martin Marty has been called the foremost interpreter of religion in America today. The National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are just a few of the honors he has amassed. He’s served on U.S. presidential commissions and directed a visionary research project on religious fundamentalism. The University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years, has created the Martin Marty Center to continue his work on public religion.

But for all his celebrity and scholarship, Martin Marty draws crucial insight from his own personal grounding in the mainstream religious life of American culture. He began his working life not as a scholar but as a pastor. He was born into a Lutheran family in 1928, in the Nebraska of Dust Bowl and Depression, where his father was a teacher and a church organist.

Mr. Marty: We were a churched family, of course, it was my father’s profession, and I’ve reminisced with some folks about how I got babysat next to the organ bench and had to sit through long funerals as a child, and somehow it didn’t turn me off from it all. I have a brother and a sister, and the three of us were well-schooled in literature and music and art, and also a very close basic sense of the faith of ordinary people, and I’ve tried to keep some sense of that in my lifework.

Ms. Tippett: Much of Martin Marty’s investigation into American religious life has centered on the dominant majority religion at the heart of our culture, the many denominations of mainline Protestant Christianity. But in our time, surveys show that majority is disappearing even as many Americans perceive the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity to be growing. In his 2004 book, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, Marty describes the centuries from 1607 to 1955 as an era in American history in which “Protestants ran the show.” That began to change and take on new dimensions in the 1960s, an era vivid in the American popular imagination for political movements and the Vietnam War. For Martin Marty, it was also a decade of astonishing religious turning points whose significance went unnoticed. I asked him to walk me through the religious watersheds of the 1960s that began to erode the dominance of mainline Protestantism.

Mr. Marty: The biggest single event that hit this country happened in Rome, and that’s the Second Vatican Council. That is, Protestantism always knew what it was because it knew what Catholicism was, and it was over against that. Suddenly, Catholicism is friendly. It moves out into the public sector. The GI Bill puts Catholic young people into universities. They soon became the most educated group in the country, and Protestants were thrown off balance by that.

Secondly, it’s the beginning of the surge of evangelicalism within Protestantism, which — in those days, I imagine a lot of the Protestant leaders kind of sneered at Billy Graham and looked down their nose at tent revivals and so on and didn’t pay much attention to see how it was coming. And suddenly in the ’60s, I visited Berkeley, you had the Jesus People, little girls getting baptized in their bikinis, and change of worship from a certain kind of formality. The rock bands were coming in. And another huge infusion was an awareness of the religions of the East. You might keep going to your Presbyterian church, but you start doing yoga and you start doing Buddhist disciplines, etc. And you didn’t stop being Presbyterian, but you were of a different sort. You didn’t take it all for granted.

Ms. Tippett: I also think that something we’ve lost a memory of is how much tension there was between Catholics and Protestants, right, in this country, between different kinds of Christians, in a way that is absolutely unimaginable now. And I mean, personally for you, was that shift surprising?

Mr. Marty: I, in 1956, was invited to join the staff of The Christian Century, which was the towering Protestant voice. Today it still is, if not towering, a strong voice, but it’s ecumenical. It has a lot of Catholic writers; it has a lot of evangelical writers. But at that time, it was Protestant, and it was anti-Catholic. In 1950, on the cover of The Christian Century, there was an article, “Pluralism, A National Menace.” Pluralism was they’re worried about Catholicism. When I joined the staff five years later, pluralism was the best game in town. My first visits to campus, you always had one priest, one minister, one rabbi; that was called pluralism back then. But through that all, the Protestant still was in a privileged position. It simply was a kind of a reflex: ‘We’re the largest. We’re the ones who left our stamp on America’s literature, its poetry, its statecraft, etc.’

I’m going to say something in case I’m sounding critical.

Ms. Tippett: You can sound critical if you’d like to.

Mr. Marty: I’d be happy to be critical, but I don’t want to be distorting what I want to be. And that is to say, for all of that reflexive sense of establishment, I think I’m being a neutral, value-free historian when I say I don’t know any time in human history that somebody that powerful yielded that gracefully. In the previous century, Protestantism was often used — white Protestantism — to enslave, and it was used to justify the reservating of the Indians. But in the 20th century, Protestants have sort of said, ‘All right, you’re making your case. We’ll make room for you.’ They weren’t doing that much before the mid-’50s, but from then on in, they have done it even at the expense to their own identity.

Ms. Tippett: And I’m sure you’ve read these statistics that are now coming out, that perhaps today or tomorrow or six months from now, there will no longer be a Protestant majority in this country. And it depends on how people measure these things but, still, it seems significant when what is replacing the number of people who say that they’re Protestant are more people who say that they have no religion at all. In fact, it’s very high among people who were born in 1980 or later. And then there’s a category that’s doubled, of people who call themselves just Christian, right, who don’t identify with a specific tradition. How do you explain these statistics?

Mr. Marty: First of all, I think that Protestantism and Catholicism have very common fates here. They both have had trouble holding their younger generation. In some respects, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the northern part of the United States share a lot with Canada, which is far less involved with church, or Western Europe, which is far, far less involved. Incidentally, that little section, I call it the spiritual ice belt: Western Europe, the British Isles, Canada and the northern U.S. We are really exceptions in the world, and we are really having a hard time catching up with understanding the rest of the world.

Protestantism is not in trouble around the world. I am a Lutheran, and we’ve had 300 years to get about eight million people. In 15 years from now, the African Lutheran churches will have added as many people as it took us 300 years to get. And that’s true of many other Protestantisms and Pentecostalisms. Every day there are 23,000 new Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, and half of them would be called Protestant, if often in the Pentecostal version. So around the world, it’s not a losing force. No longer, however, does it make the reference it once did to Western Europe and its daughter, the United States.

What will that mean for the United States? I don’t think we’re going to wake up some day and see total change. There’s a strange thing that hundreds of years after the vital life of a religion is past, there’s still a strong influence. We’re still living off some of the Greek religious influences. We’re living off a lot of medieval Catholicism. Our very universities are inventions of that. Our hospitals are inventions of that. So in a sense, meanings, ideas — in this case, ideas of liberty, freedom — that came very often from Protestants will live on even if not everybody goes to church. Still, the churches have been the places where these stories get renewed regularly.

Ms. Tippett: OK. I mean, I just wonder, personally, is this something that troubles you?

Mr. Marty: I don’t think I wake up in the morning having great worries about that. You can tell from what I’ve said I have a global view of humanity and of religion, and it moves around a lot. In the 1930s a great Catholic, Hilaire Belloc, said, “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” Well, that was true then. Now the cathedrals are empty, but their granddaughters are full in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I certainly think that some things borne by the Protestant message would be a great loss. One of its gifts to America was its sense that we’re scripted. It’s a scriptural faith, it’s a Christ-centered faith, but it doesn’t mean that all virtue and all morality goes with you. And I think that’s been a nice irritating voice in classic Protestantism, which is, no matter how far along you’d come, God was holding you to a higher standard.

Ms. Tippett: Religious historian and author Martin Marty. One of the most popular of his over 50 books is Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in American. He is considered by some to be a bridge between the devotional and scholarly worlds of liberal mainline Protestantism and evangelical Christianity.

Ms. Tippett: Let’s talk about evangelical Christianity, which at the same time that there are some statistics of people becoming less religious, there’s certainly a sense that religion in some ways is more of a force now. I mean, I think there would be people who would take your phrase, “When Protestants ran the show,” and say that a certain kind of Christianity is becoming almost a controlling force or, you know, we have an evangelical Christian in the White House. I mean, how are you observing what’s happening now, with your broad view of things and of history?

Mr. Marty: I think those of us who write this kind of history are a little puzzled by the naiveté of the — well, people in journalism, in the media, in the general public, who think all this just got invented in the last four years and couple months. It has very deep roots. I trace it not to the ’20s. Nobody cared about the religion of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. And Roosevelt was a mainline Protestant, Episcopalian, and he could draw upon these themes very much. Harry Truman was a salty Baptist. Truman and Carter and Clinton, the three Baptist presidents of the century, know the Bible best. They can just recite reams of it at any moment. Eisenhower started having Billy Graham come by. When we say “evangelical” today, it’s almost a long shadow originally of Graham. Today, evangelicalism is multi-headed. It’s all over the place. You can’t really generalize about it much anymore, but in its purer form, it came up in that way.

And, yes, in ’64, they really galvanized around Barry Goldwater and the kind of conservatism. And they didn’t get very far because he didn’t get very far, but they got angry about being dismissed and so on. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter ran, he’s the first one who would say, ‘I’m born again,’ first one to say, ‘I had a personal experience with Jesus,’ but they soon dropped him because they didn’t like him politically. Ronald Reagan was not born again, but he was friendly to them. But you could see this long trend coming.

Robert Handy, one of our major historians, once wrote a little book on The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935, because the mainline churches were already beginning to lose some of their membership, their status. They were depressed. But Joel Carpenter, another historian, has since pointed out, through it all the fundamentalists who’d been disgraced in the 1920s started organizing. They bought radio stations. They started Bible colleges. They had magazines. And they were building a world inside the world. And suddenly along come people like Billy Graham and presidents who favor it, and you have a very different kind of pattern, so that by the time — I would say by the time of Ronald Reagan, it became so vivid that the normal clergy in the White House would be evangelists, usually, until recently, of a rather moderate sort.

Ms. Tippett: It also seems to me, though, that a mistake is made in media in lumping together — as you said, evangelicalism is a — there’s a multiplicity of evangelicalism, and evangelicalism has a very different history and theology in some cases from Pentecostals and certainly from fundamentalists, although there is some overlap. How would you explain the distinctions?

Mr. Marty: All right. To the sociologists, the slightly more than one-fourth of America that would be called evangelical includes fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and conservative Protestant denominations. And they really have tremendous differences except when they converge on highly focal and, let’s say, useful political points: gay marriage or something of that sort. But for the most part, they’re much more diverse.

Until around the turn of the last century, all Protestants were called evangelicals; all evangelicals were called Protestant. During the century, though, you started having the liberal churches accenting more the Biblical story applied to social life, economic life, cultural life, whereas those who were evangelical started dealing with private life, personal life. That still goes down in our own time.

Ms. Tippett: Why did that happen? How did that happen?

Mr. Marty: Well, I think the Protestants who ran the show had the sense that you can pass a law and get rid of slavery, you can join secular people to get antitrust laws, you could have child labor laws. All the while then, the revivalists, Billy Graham’s ancestors — the greatest being Dwight Moody, a Chicago evangelist — looked out at the world and saw it in trouble, and he said, ‘The world is a flood, and God gave me a lifeboat and said, “Moody, rescue all you can.”‘ And I think they concentrated on heaven, on saving souls. And then on moral issues, they chose those over which an individual could have control: You shouldn’t gamble. You shouldn’t swear. You shouldn’t drink.

Now what’s so interesting today is, what have come to be called social issues in recent campaigns are not social, they’re personal enlarged. In other words, the evangelicals and the fundamentalists and the Catholic conservatives concentrate on what goes on in the bedroom, and they don’t talk much the way classic Protestants did about should the government be involved with poverty, with waging peace, all of those kinds of things. It’s been their genius to organize that in our own time so they have great political power. The Republican Party in particular has seen that that can be amassed and help get votes for things outside of the bedroom.

Ms. Tippett: Although there certainly are Catholics and evangelicals who are mobilized around poverty and those more classic kinds of social justice issues.

Mr. Marty: Oh, my, yes. Catholics are very much upfront. And some of the strongest social involvements of today are among evangelical Protestants. But that kind of Catholic and that kind of evangelical and that kind of Protestant are themselves in a kind of a loose coalition today. Not as powerful as the personal morality people, but there’s a lot of power there. A lot of witness goes on.

Ms. Tippett: Religious scholar and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today we’re exploring Martin Marty’s historical and personal perspective on the changing religious dynamics in American culture. For a half-century, he has studied the effect of increasing pluralism on American Christianity. He’s also been a visionary scholar of religious fundamentalist movements around the world.

Ms. Tippett: I want to talk about the Fundamentalism Project that you did but, I mean, before we actually talk about fundamentalism, I’d like to note something that I thought was very interesting. I was reading your address that you gave at the conclusion of that project to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You titled it, “Too Bad We’re So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project Projected.”

I’ll just read this quote: “The Fundamentalism Project scholars have found that fundamentalists tend to turn intimate and private issues into public affairs. Concern for the zones of life closest to the self — world view, identity, sexuality, gender differentiation, family, education, communication — tend to take priority over macroeconomic concerns.”

So my question to you is, is there something at the origins of fundamentalism that is also moving our culture as a whole right now?

Mr. Marty: OK. One quick word about fundamentalism. The fundamentalism we studied, to which you’re referring, is not your friendly neighborhood fundamentalist down the block. Our assignment was to study the militancies. When we started this, a historian friend said, ‘When you’re studying American fundamentalism, Marty, remember there are no machine guns in the basement of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.’ We were really studying a different kind of thing there, and yet there are certain things everybody had in common.

In the roots of fundamentalism in our culture, it started, of course, anti-evolution, anti-biblical criticism, and then it started taking a moral cast. But its moral cast, again, was the things that you should take control of. Virtue, advice were their big terms, not social justice and social change. Take what is a virtuous person; pass laws to promote that virtue. And I certainly am leaving a wrong impression if I’m suggesting that bedroom and clinical issues don’t have social consequences. They have huge social consequences. If divorce becomes more easy and grows and families disintegrate and children don’t have models in the parental world and they’re not educable, it’s a huge difference in the culture. So they don’t have a monopoly on it either in its invention or its present carrying out, but I think more of them restrict their energies to that and, again, it’s a very politically popular thing to do.

Ms. Tippett: But here’s my question: This description that you gave of fundamentalism, that people turn to intimate and private issues and that these take priority over macroeconomic concerns, could actually, I think, describe maybe a majority of Americans this year. So what I’m wondering is if there’s something that you see that gives rise to that tendency within fundamentalism that is actually alive in our culture as a whole right now.

Mr. Marty: I think two things are going on. On one level, around the world people are having trouble with their identity, their belief — whom do I trust, who trusts me? And so a phrase we used in The Fundamentalism Project, around the world, there is a massive, convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over-againstnesses, to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing the same thing. Now, look at American life. We don’t do it the way they do it in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. We don’t veil women or anything like that, but we’re clustering more tightly. ‘We’re the virtuous, and they’re the vicious. We’re the good, they’re the evil.’

Ms. Tippett: I guess I’m still wondering how you understand the human and spiritual–maybe not theological, but the spiritual roots of this focus that seems to have become so definitive in our public life, on private issues of morality as the issues of morality.

Mr. Marty: I think that all through Christian history, anything related to sexuality was troubling and exciting. Clerical celibacy for 1700 years in Catholicism shows this, how much of an upheaval was caused when Martin Luther got married and when the Protestant clergy married. Every change in sexual mores is troubling because that’s so close to the roots of creation and transmission of life. Now what’s happened in our own time, I argue, every church body from the Mennonites to the evangelicals to the Roman Catholic Church are torn up over two words: sex and authority. By sex, I mean everything in the biological cycle, from in vitro fertilization or stem cell research, abortion, birth control, cohabitation outside of marriage. All these things are troubling all the churches, some of them sweeping…

Ms. Tippett: And dividing people in them.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes. Some people sweep these things under the rug or close their eyes to it or whatever. But I think it’s very hard to get to the root of your part of the question as to why this longtime concern for personal morality, sexual morality, suddenly became so politically powerful. On one level, let’s be honest, it’s very exploitable. Everything else I’ve talked about — caring for peace, caring for justice, caring for feeding — these are all relative things. How much foreign aid budget you’re going to put into it, how much energy you’re going to put into it. With abortion, you either have an abortion or you don’t. You either perform gay right marriage or not. So it can be a big matter of identity and boundary, and I think that’s very popular in a time when people lose their identity and their boundary. I always say that the laws on gay rights and the practices toward them will be changed when every tenth evangelical minister’s daughter comes out. That is, when it gets close to you, you see these differently.

Ms. Tippett: So liberal — let’s say, Democrats and even liberal religious people who also have been struggling to find a voice in this last period will often hearken back to the days when it was the social justice issues that mobilized people and that had political force. Did those issues somehow achieve that force in the ’60s because they became more personal for people and, I mean, could you imagine that happening again?

Mr. Marty: Oh, I think so. The personalization of civil rights, you suddenly had a face: Martin Luther King. You suddenly had causes: the four little Birmingham girls who were bombed. These are very, very vivid things so that the president of the United States had to get on television one night, and after you’d seen the pictures of the dogs attacking children and police attempts to put down blacks in the South, suddenly it did become personal.

I should also say in fairness — I’m really trying to be as accurate as I can — these involvements of white Protestants in peace movements and civil rights movements that was never massive. That was often leadership. Some people would call them generals without armies. And there’s where I think we historians have kept saying a lot of evangelicals were up close, they were getting their hands dirty. The Salvation Army, for example, is an evangelical movement, one of the oldest. So we don’t have any absolute lines here at all. I just think that the sudden choice to organize on the virtue-vice line, the ‘we’re entirely right and they’re entirely wrong’ line, was very exploitable in politics, and in many, many states that has come to prevail as the main political agency. Nobody would have dreamed of that 20 years ago.

Ms. Tippett: Historian and author Martin Marty. This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, more of his reflections on the nature of fundamentalism, separation of church and state, and the future of religion in America.

Mr. Marty: I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody.

Ms. Tippett: Visit our Web site, speakingoffaith.org. Subscribe to our free weekly podcast so you can listen to this and other archived programs again. Listen when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.

I’m Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I’m Krista Tippett, today exploring America’s contemporary religious landscape with Martin Marty.

Martin Marty is a celebrated historian and interpreter of American religious life. This hour he’s been reflecting on the religious dynamics of contemporary America from his perspective of half a century of scholarship. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the present, he’s been involved in many large-scale analyses of American Protestantism in particular, including its cultural influence and its pluralistic impulses.

And from 1987 to 1993, well before religious fundamentalism had become a feature of daily news headlines, Marty directed a global fundamentalism project that was commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That project studied militant religious fundamentalist cultures around the world, and resulted in a five-volume publication. I asked Martin Marty what he learned that surprised him and what shapes his reaction to fundamentalism now.

Mr. Marty: The first thing we learned was that it is religious. That is, we didn’t let the psychologists in the first couple of years. This was a six-year study. We wanted to make sure that we caught the religious dimension and were convinced of that. And therefore fundamentalists, by and large, saw us as being fair. Our main instrument was the tape recorder. We sent out a couple hundred scholars around the world and they would ask, ‘Why are you this?’ and ‘Why do you raise your family that way?’ We studied it in 23 religions, by the way, Jains and Sikhs and everybody; it wasn’t just Christians and Muslims and Jews.

What else did we learn? Number one, fundamentalism is not the old-time religion. Fundamentalism is a very modern packaging. That is, it’s born when there’s an assault on values that you have and are uncertain about. There has to be a threat to you as a group identity or to you as an individual. So the most important word in fundamentalism is you react. Very few fundamentalists are concerned about things that traditionalists and regular conservatives and orthodox are. You can’t get a phone booth full of an argument on the most important Christian doctrines like the divine trinity and the two natures of Christ and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. They care about evolution. They care about being left behind as the world ends. But there’s a very selective agenda. The whole left-behind theology is not the old-time religion. It was invented in the 1840s, which is really the modern world.

Ms. Tippett: For someone like you.

Mr. Marty: That’s right. I move glacially, not with a hurricane. And many other features were modern. Everywhere we studied them, they were better at the use of mass media than modernists were.

Ms. Tippett: Now, that’s interesting.

Mr. Marty: Yes. I once spoke in a church in — I think it was Dallas, and the pulpit looked like a 747 panel. A red light would go on, a baby’s crying in nursery 23C, and another blue light and that means a Jaguar’s lights were left on in parking lot D, and I could raise the temperature and the volume and everything else. And the minister in his sermon later on blasted technology, which he was using. In other words, he blasted the energy put into it, I suppose you’d say.

Well, I can go to a liberal Methodist church and I’m pretty sure the microphone won’t work. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution was done through tape recordings from France. Al-Qaeda is very much at home with the Internet.

Ms. Tippett: Very savvy, yeah.

Mr. Marty: Mass media helped produce fundamentalism because — first stage was born in the early radio; the second stage, Billy Graham, early television; the third stage now, Internet. What do you do? It comes at you with full force. You might try laws against obscenity and pornography. You might try to boycott Disney World. That doesn’t do much. You’re better off starting your own television networks. ‘Mass media are what messed up the intimacy of my family life; I’ll turn it right back upon itself.’

Ms. Tippett: So as late as on September 11th, 2001, the word “fundamentalism” became a part of our public vocabulary. And I’m curious, as you watched that happen and have watched all the discussion since then, having spent this good block of time studying fundamentalism a decade earlier, what have you found to be missing in our analysis of fundamentalism recently?

Mr. Marty: I think, unfortunately, the word is used to clump everybody together. The overuse of the word “fundamentalism” — I should be claiming a patent on it because we did those five big fat books on it. But one of the themes of those five books was there are an awful lot of things out there and there’s a lot of internal diversity. We would remind people — for example, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had 450,000 members in Indiana, in the North, and every meeting had a Protestant minister, it had a cross, it had the open Bible, it had prayer, and the rest of Protestantism and the rest of Christianity would say, ‘That’s not a bit representative of the one billion of us out there.’ So I think when al-Qaeda came on the scene that was our first message: Show the diversities. Make it easier for moderates to be moderate. Don’t demonize the enemy. Do all that you can to show their varieties and to make it easy for them to be diverse.

Ms. Tippett: Esteemed religious historian and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”

Ms. Tippett: You’ve lived a good long time as a public theologian and a religious thinker, and you quote a lot of great thinkers in all your works. I wonder, if I asked you who you think of as the most formative and influential religious figures in American life in the 20th century, who would you want to describe?

Mr. Marty: Among the well-known people, I would have to say the two Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, who towered at Union Seminary and Yale when Protestantism was strong. They both were strong for the prophetic principle. They weren’t good at leading you into worship, though they did write prayers. But they were up close. They were in the thick of things.

Reinhold was a “cold warrior.” He was a consultant in the Truman era to the Dean Achesons and then the John Foster Dulleses. He’s there. But his interpretation of human nature — on one level, there was a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, but he once said, ‘You’ll never understand me if you don’t know that I believe in Christ crucified.’ He always went back to his roots in the gospel, but they also appreciated his analysis of human nature was so realistic, and his interpretation of history and the place nations played.

Ms. Tippett: Here’s a favorite quotation of the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with which Martin Marty ended an address at the White House in 1998.

Reader: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Ms. Tippett: From Reinhold Niebuhr.

My guest, Martin Marty, is describing some of the most interesting and influential religious forces in his lifetime.

Mr. Marty: I certainly would have to put Billy Graham in the front rank. And I may not have always been in the same camp, we’ve exchanged a few nice letters and have never had a sour word in 30, 40 years, but there’s no doubt about it that I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both. But he’s not a mean. And I think you’d have to say that’s just been an enormous influence on many people.

Paul Tillich, of German import, was highly influential theologically. But I really think that people whose names you’ll never know were influential.

Ms. Tippett: Right. And who are some of those that are important to you?

Mr. Marty: Well, a custodian at a high school I went to. You’d come there in the morning and, as busy as he might be pushing a broom, he read your face better than the counselors did as to what your trouble was.

I personally have a lot of interest in the arts and I have hung out with people who are in music. Recently I was at the dedication of a new organ in honor of Paul Manz, a great, great organist who brought back something as corny-sounding as hymn singing into the great cathedrals. He and I have been on a couple of CDs together. I assure anybody listening that I don’t sing, I narrate. But certainly Paul Manz would be in my front rank of people who shaped me.

A theologian named Joe Sittler, not among the best-known theologians in America, blind in the last years of his life, nearly deaf, had a way with words and a way of discernment and a good-humored understanding of ethics that made the world richer for me.

Reader: A reading from Joseph Sittler in the 1986 book Gravity and Grace:

“St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: ‘Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’ Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.

“We are formed for God. …Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.

“…This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.”

Theologian Joseph Sittler, from the book Gravity and Grace.

Ms. Tippett: You often mention a Dutch philosopher.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.

Ms. Tippett: How do you say his name?

Mr. Marty: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was a Swiss-German Jew and Christian. He’s one of those geniuses that you can quote 20 pages of and then the 21st page is so nutty you’re not sure you can use it. But I’ll give a quick illustration of what I get from him. For example, he says — and this is extremely important in my life. He says you can write the history of learning in the western world in three Latin phrases.

The first is, in Latin, Credo ut intelligum — “I believe in order that I may understand.” It’s the birth of the universities in Europe, Bologna, Paris, Oxford. You believe to apprehend the universe; truth is divinely revealed and can be appropriated. And that’s the charter that believers should never be afraid of learning.

Secondly, modern learning, without which we couldn’t do, is Descartes. René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.” Modern university is born on skepticism and doubt and inquiry and criticism, and you want that. I don’t want a med school in which they’re just taking things on faith. I want them to be extremely critical. But he said, ‘That, too, gets sterile.’ And so he says, in the 20th century, that we also have to learn that truth has a social character. I’m learning from this conversation with you. We learn from conversing with someone else, we learn from the meaning of “I” and “thou.”

And his third motto was Respondeo etsi mutabor — “I respond although I will be changed.” I’m not changed when I argue with somebody because I know an answer and I got to defeat them. I’m always changed in a conversation because they’re going to surprise me. It’s kind of a game, it’s kind of play. And I think that that’s the kind of learning we need more in the churches, in theology, in politics, and in personal life.

Ms. Tippett: You’ve done a lot of projecting in your life. I mean, I found one book written in 1971 where you were projecting the church in that century, and there was projecting in The Fundamentalism Project. I wonder what you have been wrong about, as you look back, and also I wonder, as you look forward, where you are finding your hope and nurture.

Mr. Marty: Well, looking ahead, it’s a very foolish thing for a historian to do because we have nothing to say until something’s happened. I mean, our specialty is the past. But when you’re involved in the worlds in which I’m involved, you do hang out with the people who do projecting and you go along with them. My biggest misses were I didn’t foresee three huge things: One, the explosion of evangelicalisms; number two, the highly individualized spirituality of which you spoke earlier, the people who are on a spiritual search but they’re doing it at the coffee shop, at the mega bookstore, or they’re doing it in a little chanting group, and they’re not doing it in the churches. That’s certainly a force I hadn’t foreseen. And then I think the vitality that has come with the new pluralism, and that’s because I did a lot of writing before 1965 when the immigration laws changed.

Ms. Tippett: That’s another one of those points in the ’60s that you say how important that was for our religious life, that we never talk about as a turning point in the ’60s.

Mr. Marty: Well, it’s huge. It was the year of the Selma March. It was the year of the engagement in Vietnam. It was the year of all the LBJ Great Society legislation, and Congress made a little change in the immigration laws, after 41 years. And it was just in time for all the boat people. It’s just in time for people from Africa to come direct, and so on. And it was just a huge change…

Ms. Tippett: Because it gave rise to a pluralism and a multiculturalism in a new way.

Mr. Marty: Yes. It makes new demands on hospitality, etc. Lewiston, Maine, suddenly has people from Somalia. I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. And when you go to a hospital today, your doctor’s probably Pakistani and your nurse is Filipino, and your clinician is Jewish, etc. That’s our future. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody, but it does mean that your interpreting is being done on a larger scale.

And, again, the two biggest of those — and I guess you could say I probably didn’t foresee that either, since we’re talking about what I didn’t foresee — is that half of everything we’re talking about today is done by women. And that was not true in the ’50s. When I was writing the third volume of my three-volume work on American religion, I said to my class, half of whom were women, ‘Help me out. I need women who are big in religion in the ’50s. I can’t have an index of all men.’ And they couldn’t find hardly anybody. And then one of them said, ‘I’ll bet they were seething.’ And I said, ‘OK, Julie, you’re going to right a history of seething women of the ’50s,’ and she found interesting stuff. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Catherine Marshall, all these people whose husbands are up front, and they’re seething. They’re all ready to change along the way. So I didn’t foresee how sudden and total that is.

It’s hard to think your way back to when very few women added work outside the home if they had children at home. And I think the…

Ms. Tippett: That’s a piece of pluralism we don’t really think about, in terms of how people are active in our public life. Women are more of a force in that way.

Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.

Ms. Tippett: Religious historian Martin Marty. We’re exploring how his historical and personal insights shed light on the religious dynamics of contemporary America.

Ms. Tippett: I think that there is a real sense among many people in our time that the whole relationship between church and state–as we define that, it’s not really just church and state anymore, right, it’s mosque, synagogue, church, and state, and many other variations of religious expression, but that that is shifting profoundly. But I wonder, with your perspective as a historian, you know, how new, how profound is this shift and how do you view this?

Mr. Marty: On one level, the image of the wall of separation never worked. We did never have a wall. For example, tax exemption of churches probably pays more to the churches in America than being established governmental churches in Europe ever did. I like James Madison’s word, there’s a “line of distinction,” a line of separation between religion and civil authorities.

I think of it more, too, as zones. Most people know when you’ve really overstepped. Most people don’t want religion utterly in a box. When the astronauts looked at the Earth on Christmas Eve, they read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” I think Madalyn Murray O’Hair and one or two other people protested, but most people thought, ‘That’s great.’ And when you have the space shuttle disasters, the president gets up and is at his most eloquent invoking religious language. Well, if you read real separation of religion and the state, you wouldn’t do that.

It gets more complex in some other areas. There is much more eroding of that line than there had been. I think, though, again, many of us who are nervous about crossing the line are also interested in religion in public life. I’m all for the teaching about religion in public schools. I think you should know that Martin Luther King was a black Baptist and what that did for him. You should know why the Puritans came. You should know why your Hindu neighbor does something different. But a lot of people want to convert that and say, ‘But we should teach the majority religion as the truth about life, and we should worship in that tradition.’ And that’s where we get nervous, and yet there’s a strong popular appeal. ‘If only we had prayer amendments. If only we had stipulated prayer.’ And here’s where a Protestant of the old school or a real Protestant would say, ‘Watch out. Give religion privilege and it gets corrupt. And look at Europe if you want a sample of that.’ So in my view, religion has its place all over the public sphere as long as it is persuasive and voluntary. And the minute it gets to be coerced and privileged and assumed, somebody’s going to run it at the expense of others or it’ll get fat and corrupt.

Ms. Tippett: Where do you look for nourishment and hope? Where do you look around and say, ‘This is exciting. I’m happy for my grandchildren to be living in this time’?

Mr. Marty: The most important thing in my world, when I mention public life I don’t mean only politics. A lot of people equate the two. Politics is one branch of it. Public life is town meeting, it’s the mall, it’s the supermarket, it’s the college, it’s all those things. And I’m greatly cheered by artists, by musicians, by people who live out their vocation. It’s almost a hobby for me to pursue people who just never get their name in print and do heroic things.

I’m cheered by — I never know how to speak without proper nouns. I like a group called Opportunity International, which is one of a number of microeconomic ventures around the world that lends money, put 140,000 people around the world to permanent work last year. Now, they’re religiously motivated people and they give me tremendous hope, as do the people on the other end, 92 percent of whom pay their loans back in two years, which inspires me. That kind of thing.

In the city where I live, Chicago, there are all kinds of groups that provide leadership in the inner city without condescension, without imposing on them. There are others that train people. In one of these groups, the Christian Industrial League, trains people, mainly Mexican men, to start their landscaping companies and women to start their homemaking companies — not just to do the work, but to start companies. And they plant the flowers that we see in the city of Chicago. Come see them.

And family is very important. I draw nurture from the family. We love friends. I can’t say enough — I once wrote a book about friendship. In a cold, brutal world, you can’t do much better for somebody else than to stimulate friendship. And the model there again is God. As distant as God’s supposed to be, God also condescends and is our 3:00-in-the-morning friend. So I’m nurtured by all those kinds of things.

Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Martin Marty Center has been founded there to promote public religion endeavors. He’s the author of more than 50 books, including, recently, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, When Faiths Collide, and the Penguin Lives volume on Martin Luther.

Contact us at speakingoffaith.org and read listeners’ reflections on this conversation. Also, sign up for the free Speaking of Faith podcast. You’ll never have to miss another program again. Listen on demand, when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.

The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Jody Abramson and editor Ken Hom. Our Web producer is Trent Gilliss, with assistance from Jennifer Krause. Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith, the executive editor is Bill Buzenberg, and I’m Krista Tippett.

From Motorcycle Daily:

The all-new BMW R1200S is packed full of torquey Boxer power. The boxer’s surge of torque is obvious from the moment you click the bike into first gear and accelerate away from a stop. First gear is slightly higher than I would have preferred, meaning that a mild dose of RPM is necessary to pull out from the lights.

At 7000 rpm the R1200S surges forward with a kick worthy of a sportsbike. 122 horsepower in an air-cooled twin is a BMW revolution, and the fact is that the new BMW is more powerful than most liquid-cooled, V-twin sports tourers. But the new R1200S is not designed to be a tourer, a fact made clear by BMW’s choice of venues for the bike world press introduction – we sampled the new BMW sports bike on South African mountain roads and on the Killarney race track, just outside Cape Town. I started the day in the misty mountains in the wine districts north of Cape Town. Because of the excellent roads and the mountainous terrain, the place had a European feel to it.

The R1200S is a much lighter motorcycle than the old R1100S. The Boxer engine will gives the R1200S a heavy look, but fact is that the dry weight has now been reduced to 195kg. This makes the R1200S the lightest road boxer ever. Only the HP2 Enduro is lighter, and that can hardly be called a roadbike. Still, the R1200S is a big motorcycle, and a mammoth compared to, say, a Ducati 999 or 1000SS. With 85cc more displacement, 24 extra ponies and 13kg less weight, the R1200S is a huge improvement on the old R1100S.

At a stop, the R1200S has the feel of a big motorcycle; however, it possesses the handling of a much smaller machine. On the mountain roads it felt like the easiest thing in the world to flick the big sportsbike from ear to ear. The new BMW will be delivered with several tire options. Our test bikes were fitted with Michelin Pilot Powers. These tires were not so confidence inspiring in the early morning on the slippery mountain roads, but as soon as it had dried and I had some heat in the tires they suited the Beemer very well. On the twisty mountain roads, both tyres and suspension contributed to a neutral and stable feel.

The front Telelever is now stiffer, and on the racetrack I could easily change my line mid-turn. The Paralever EVO swingarm has been lightened and a glittery Ohlins shock is attached to it. When I first mounted the bike, the suspension felt soft with quite a bit of sag, but once on the move it seemed to work well at the stock settings.

On the road there is no doubt the R1200S can still be used as an alternative sports-tourer. The seat is comfortable enough, and the riding position does not put too much weight on the wrists.

The R1200S features a new ABS system that can be turned off. The system is not linked and there is no servo (to save weight). It is remarkable how good the front brake is, and when the ABS kicks in there is hardly any pulse action at all. I have never ridden any other bike with such a good unlinked ABS system. It was so good that I forgot to turn it off at the racetrack!

After spending the morning on mountain roads I traveled out to a sun drenched racetrack to put down as many laps as possible before the photographers arrived. Killarney is a short and easy racetrack with one sweeping left hander, two straights and several right-handers – perfectly suited for the R1200S. The corner speed can be adjusted up quickly as the R1200S is so stable both when turning in and when accelerating out of the bends. The only place I experienced instability on standard suspension set up was out of a big on-camber right hander that lead out onto the paddock straight. I chose second gear here to ride the torque and then full power up to third and then fourth. Over some uneven surface on full throttle at high rpm in third, the handle bars moved from side to side a little. I short shifted to fourth a couple of times, which calmed the chassis down a bit. However it was a great feeling to have a lively BMW under me so I stuck to third again later.

The BMW R1200S has got a steering dampe,r which probably is a bit unnecessary, however that slight headshake would have been amplified without the steering damper. I spoke to a couple of journalists that had not noticed the headshake I described, but they had all made adjustments to the rebound damping. For track use, there is plenty of adjustability built into the suspension – including rear ride height. I preferred to circulate on standard suspension settings, as I was racing no one but myself. Although that might not be entirely true, as I rode my fastest laps at the end of the day (after the photography was out of the way) and no one passed me on my bike with standard settings.

Even with ABS on, I could brake almost as hard as I wanted into the turns. It’s easy enough to explore the full handling potential of the R1200S, as it turns and steers beautifully. The Michelin Pilot Powers (120/70-ZR17 and 190/50-ZR17) provided perfect grip on the warm surface and really absorbed the bumps brilliantly. The tyres were helped by very good suspension, and also the fairly high weight that gives a stable feel over the bumps.

On the main straight it was possible to either max out in fifth gear or short shift to sixth before braking for the fast left hander that followed. I saw around 230km/h on the speedometer a couple of times, so I would guess that 250 could be easily achieved on a longer straight.

Because of the peculiarities of a flat-twin engine, the whole motorcycle wants to stand up on the suspension when the torque curve hits its sweet spot. But less so on the R1200S than other Boxer BMW’s.

The dog-shift six-speed gear box gave me no problems at the track. The only problem I noticed was that the box doesn’t quite like to be upshifted without the clutch, perhaps due to the unique torque pulses of the boxer motor. Whatever the cause, the R1200S sort of surges or jumps forward when you upshift without the use of the clutch. Other than that the ratios seem to work well, particularly the spacing between 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gears.

To sum up the track test, it is remarkable how fast something as peculiar and clumsy looking as the R1200S can be around a racetrack. Even though you start out with the feeling that R1200S is too big to be a sportsbike, its as satisfying as anything to ride through corners.

The new 1170cc engine descends from the big R1200GS update. The R1100S never got the 1150 engine, and for this reason the R1200S is miles better than the old R1100S. The new horsepower has been achieved by extensive modifications, to the cylinder heads in particular. The R1200S also features new high strength conrods, redesigned camshafts, stiffer valve springs, and new pistons. Compression ratio is increased to a staggering 12.5:1, and this increase is mainly responsible for the torqey feel of the high revving (8,800rpm) air/oil-cooled engine. Maximum torque is now 112Nm @ 6.800rpm.

An engine like this can probably be tuned to around 135-140 bhp in race trim, so the 122bhp in the standard bike with air/oil cooling is pretty good. It feels good too, especially at full throttle, where the engine pulls like an ox from 7.000 rpm on. It is evident that BMW has increased the rev ceiling as part of making the new R1200S as sporty as a Boxer can be. BMW has followed the US army motto; “Be all you can be” – and the R1200S is.

I am glad to see the new R1200S. It is more evidence that BMW is continuing to dedicate huge effort towards the sports market. The R1200S is still a gentle giant compared to the K series 1200 engine, but for most people that can be a good thing. If you own an R1100S, and have resisted the temptation to purchase something more powerful, now is the time to upgrade. The R1200S is a huge update compared to the old R1100S. It still takes most of the design cues, but the rear end in particular now looks more modern with the two pipes stacked under the passenger seat. But don’t expect your passenger to appreciate the new R1200S, as the passenger position is higher than before (due to the new underseat exhaust). The ABS brakes are great, and as with any BMW you get great second-hand value and no worries about maintenance. You just have to ask yourself this question; is it a better deal than a cheaper and more powerful Japanese sportsbike?