Rotundus.com

Muslims have complained that the Koran is often displayed on the lower shelves, which is deemed offensive as many believe the holy book should be placed above "commonplace things".

Now library officials in one city have been told to keep all holy books, including the Bible, on the top shelves in the interests of equality.

It has caused concern from Christian charities that this will put the Bible out of the reach and sight of many people.

Source: Telegraph

I actually stumbled across this practice before in discussions of Islam. I found the contrast ironic - Muslims complaining that the Koran was displaying too low (insufficient transcendence) while Christians complain about the Bible being displayed out of the reach of the people. How should you treat a bible? I know that I've got a copy or two that's taken quite a beating over the years.

To put it more bluntly, traditional marriage as a public and cultural institution has not existed in our society for quite some time. What mainstream America, both conservative and liberal, religious and secular, has been and is now calling "marriage" is not really marriage, but a kind of contractually formalized "couplehood." We have maintained the term "marriage" as an esteemed and protected word, but what that word once signified has lost its public existence within our culture.

...

If we are truly to defend marriage in this country, and not the contractual couplehood that has for some time now been disguising itself as "marriage," then it is imperative for us to recover the full meaning of that beautiful covenant whose embodiment is now clandestine and highly countercultural. This will, I think, have to be done from the ground up, and it will take generations to succeed, if in fact it succeeds at all. It will have to be lived out first in small communities that embrace and support the self-giving, procreative, and indissoluble nature of that union, and who do so not as an unjustifiable exclusion, but as a positive commitment to proect such an important, difficult, and beautiful undertaking.

- Christopher Oleson in the Jan / Feb 2009 issue of Touchstone Magazine, p. 32-33, 37

Given that divorce rates fall for those who regularly attend church (as opposed to those who'd label themselves as Christian in a survey), seems like there's some evidence of a Christian counter-culture in action.

This was a somewhat interesting / surprising study that popped up in the news in February. (Can I use this study to justify being cantankerous?)

Contrary to the nurturing images of sisterhood put forth by chick flicks, female friendships can be a ticking time bomb of fickleness and judgment, according to results of a study in the journal Psychological Science.

Traditional views hold that women are more socially co-operative than men, but researchers from the Universite du Quebec at Montreal, Harvard University and Emmanuel College in Boston found female same-sex friendships are significantly less tolerant, more volatile, and likelier to degrade based on a single negative incident than male same-sex friendships.

The study's authors conclude that the deep emotional investment often thought to make women's bonds stronger is often their undoing.

"It's lovely (for women) to think, ‘We care more about relationships, so we hold friends to higher standards,' " says lead author Joyce Benenson, who works in Harvard's department of biological anthropology.

"But the practical ramifications are that we can't do the slightest thing wrong . . . And if we can't care for somebody who screws up, that makes our position on friendship very precarious."

Source: Canwest News

Recently USA Today had a short piece which sounded like a lament on the passing of the recipe from people's hands, or perhaps more accurately the replacement of food in people's lives with sandwiches.

The saying goes "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach". As far as sayings go I'd estimate this is probably one of the more accurate ones out there. (I think that I've fallen in love with cumin by the way). All the more reason thus for stubborn bachelors like I to learn to cook.

I still resort to recipes relatively often, yet I wonder if recipes are more accurately a trap rather than a treasure. Here's what Alton Brown has to say: (He's host of Good Eats - watch an episode if you've never seen the show)

Let's say I invite you to lunch. You've never been to my house so you ask for directions. I fax you a very precise list of instructions designed to get you where you're going. Distances are calculated to the tenth of a mile and landmarks are described in Proustian detail. You arrive without a hitch.

But do you know where you are? If a tree had fallen in the road or a road suddenly closed, would you know what to do? Unless you have a global positioning system in your pocket, I'm eating lunch alone.

If only I'd sent you a map instead.

This is what's wrong with recipes. Sure, they can get us where we're going, but that doesn't mean we know where we are when we get there. And it would be a real shame to make it all the way to a souffle without realizing that scrambled eggs are just over the next hill and meringue's just around the corner.

Do you have to know how to scramble an egg before you can make a souffle or how to sear a steak to make a beef stew? No. A halfway decent recipe can get you to either of those destinations. But unless you understand where you are and how you got there, you're a hostage. And it's hard to have fun when you're a hostage.

- From I'm Just Here for the FOOD, version 2.0, p. 6

It's been interesting doing a little exploring, even if I'm still a bit trapped. It's been interesting digging into related topics such as globalization and food, or now a book that seems to provide a history of nutrition science and food politics.