So I caught wind today that Beliefnet.com has put forward a list of 10 people for recognition as the Most Inspiring Person of 2007. And it happens that one of the ten, and currently the public’s choice for most inspirational, is Liviu Librescu, a Virginia Tech engineering professor killed in the shooting at my school last April. In the aftermath, I was assigned to write a memorial piece on this man who I didn’t know existed until April 16 but whom I have come to respect and honor deeply.

He was a committed family man who always chatted with department members about their children. He was a quiet, reassured friend who was demanding as a professor but open with his heart and liberal with his time when student’s would poke their heads inside his office door. I was constantly reminded that the somewhat dour photograph of him that is popular online doesn’t do justice to the light in this man’s heart.

I began to understand what this man did when I spoke to an elderly colleague of his. I asked him whether Librescu was a hero. The answer was, without hesitation, no.

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I tend towards the scroogier end of things in terms of the Christmas season. When Christmas shopping ads interrupt my Thanksgiving football, I glower. By the time Dec. 24 comes around, I feel like strangling Rudolph, tackling Frosty and not leaving a bite to eat for old Saint Nick. I swear, every year it starts well. I’m ready for the nip in the air, watching the Christmas lights go up, egg nog, the whole bit. But I can’t maintain.

I treat the Christmas religious celebration with a general ennui earned through many, many holiday seasons of being swamped with Christmas, American celebration of consumer culture. The former is a struggling second to the latter when I think about the end of the year.

So it was much to my surprise that I was belting out Christmas carols in the back of a bus bound for Cairo this weekend, tra-la-la-ing without a care. Maybe it’s American holiday withdrawal from having spent my Thanksgiving weekend, literally, in the middle of the desert. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Maybe I was really, really bored.

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Unlike my esteemed colleague Chase, I myself nurture a two-tumbler-a-day coffee addiction and am steeped in the Starbucks lingo. As a Jew, however, I too am under some fairly strict dietary obligations that make a good amount of nutritional sense.

Tonight I went to the first of a three-session course at BU Hillel about keeping a kosher kitchen. The rabbi’s wife talked about shopping for food, telling some particularly harrowing stories about bugs in produce (kosher fruits and vegetables are meticulously checked to be free of any bugs). We are also commanded not to eat pork, shellfish, horses, and other animals that don’t fall in line with specific standards recorded in the biblical book of Leviticus. Kosher animals have to be slaughtered without the knife snagging on the animal’s skin in order to be suitable to eat, a precaution that ensures that the animal is killed more quickly and humanely. Milk and meat have to be eaten separately and most foods have to have a special symbol, a hechsher, indicating that their production was overseen by a knowledgeable Jew.

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From the AP Stylebook:

“Use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.”

In class, our editing professor affirmed his belief that the use of ‘anti-abortion’ and ‘abortion rights’ is unbiased.

When a classmate raised objections to the Associated Press' 'neutral' words on abortion, she was literally laughed at. Where is academic freedom when you need it?

Why did the AP decide to define the 'anti-abortion' group negatively? Why not make it fair across the board and use 'rights-based' terms? Pro-lifers believe in a 'right' to life.

In light of the recent statement on faithful citizenship statement by the U.S. Bishops, I am increasingly unsure that the Stylebook got it correct.

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Even a fair-trade hippie like me will go to Starbucks if a cute girl invites me. I’m not a fan of coffee. In my experience, I have a cup, and I feel invincible for about twenty minutes, and then I crash hardcore, barely able to watch Golden Girls let alone do anything productive. But of course, “cutegirl” insisted that I try some Pumpkin mocha-fropa-frapacuinno-costa-rican-machiato-latte-cream-sugar-espresso drink. Obviously, my LDS heritage didn’t educate me well on the coffee lingo. I felt terrible after finishing the beverage. No, the Lord didn’t appear to me in a vision, scolding me for breaking the all too sacred Mormon Word of Wisdom. I felt guilty because it tasted terrible and I paid about twelve dollars for both drinks.

Getting to the point, being an LDS member I steer clear of coffee, alcohol, and smoking because of the Word of Wisdom revealed to Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants Section 89. I feel that the Word of Wisdom was intended as a guide of moderation. It also suggests not splurging on meat and only eating fruit during the season it grows in. In the 1800s, this made a lot of sense. Don’t eat bad meat and rotten fruit. Don’t drink alcohol because it makes you act like an idiot. Don’t smoke tobacco because it’s bad for your lungs. I think the Word of Wisdom is a divine FYI about staying healthy.

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Eight floors, one enormous tent, millions of campaign leaflets and 3,500 or so journalists and their supporters (sometimes even their children) may not sound like your type of party. But it was mine this past Saturday, as the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate threw its biennial elections.

You couldn’t go two feet without a flier and a “fadl,” (more-or-less “please”) stuck in your grill by an earnest reporter hoping you would vote (one of your 12 votes for the Syndicates 12 council seats or your one vote for the presidency) on his or her candidate. Television cameras abounded – reporting on reporters!

What was born out on this day and in my subsequent interviews was the sheer energy of the young corps of Egyptian journalists. In interviews with those who the young hot-shots call “the old generation,” there is an expression of excitement and wonder at the intensity and gusto with which these new professionals have taken to their calling.

In the vein of humanizing the Muslim world, let me point out three things. First, the absolute obsession of the Syndicate with holding fair elections. Second, it is people like the following three young journalists who are pushing the regime across a variety of areas. Third, while each of my new friends are Muslims, each of them makes it clear, in a variety of ways, that its their human identity they values the most.

The “Crazy Journalist”: Hossam, my perpetual fixer, translator and big dreamer is responsible for me being in the thick of things last weekend. He’s been in the business for seven years having gone on several “adventures,” my favorite being his 24-hour stint as a Cairo shoe-shine man.

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I recently wrote about Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, which I read for a class. After I wrote that post, we were discussing the book in class, and the professor asked us what might be the American or secular version of the Sabbath, or Shabbat. Suddenly it hit me: Thanksgiving!

Yes, Thanksgiving is the annual American Shabbat. I say this having lived for three months in Jerusalem, where for Shabbat everything shuts down, no one works, and everyone spends time with their family eating and napping. Sound familiar?

Just like many religious Jews on Shabbat, we Americans don’t even consider not celebrating Thanksgiving; it’s just what we do. It’s a holiday for all Americans, remembering the founding of our country, as Shabbat is for all Jews, commemorating the creation of the world. Both holidays channel this people-wide celebration through the family.

Although Thanksgiving comes just once a year, it has the same power that Shabbat has to help us contemplate and take a break from our lives to give thanks for what we have and spend time with those we love.

The root “Shabbat” in Hebrew literally means “stop.” So Shabbat Shalom, a peaceful stop to everyone. Happy Thanksgiving!

At an opening lecture when journalism school began, one of our professors gave us this bit of wisdom:

“Being a journalist isn’t safe,” he said. “If you’re going into journalism thinking that you can avoid danger, you’re going to be a bad journalist. When everybody else is running away from a situation, your job is to run towards it.”

I think that example is perhaps more in line with the job description of policemen, firefighters and soldiers, especially after William Quinn’s insight into Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees. Look at the example of emergency responders on September 11th. When others fled, they entered.

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William Quinn.

William James Quinn was 24 and a veteran of the Iraq war when he began his freshman year of college. While in Iraq, he worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. He recently penned a Veteran’s Day piece for The Washington Post Outlook Section about his experiences in Iraq and Georgetown. I recently interviewed William on his Roman Catholic religious beliefs and how they interact with his roles as a soldier and student.

William on faith:
"It has not always been very easy for me to believe –either in God or in Catholicism. And there were many times, particularly before I went to Iraq, that I would have said that I pretty much couldn’t feel it at all. And in reality, I even feel that way now. I don’t go to mass and sit there and have this deep sense of warmth and communion with God. If that happens to other people I think that’s amazing but it doesn’t happen to me.

"As far as Catholicism is concerned, it may be true that if I had been born into a family that practices a different religion that I would practice a different religion, but that’s just as good as saying that if I had been born into a family that spoke a different language then I’d speak a different language. English is still the one I have to communicate with so Catholicism is the way that I communicate my religious beliefs."

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In Stephen Hawking's 1998 opinion, "there’s a 50-50 chance that someone will discover the Holy Grail of physics within the next 20 years."

Now hear this:

"Now this naked guy here, just another person wandering around the playa . . . It was a solid game, no obvious blunders, I was simply outplayed. I am quite certain that there is no other place where I could go and be beaten at a game of chess by a nudist playing on a sixteen-foot square board with alien pieces. And bizarre stuff like this was happening all the time."

The preceding is from the Web site of Garrett Lisi, the physics whiz-cum-surfer-cum-world unifier who may have fashioned the “Holy Grail” of physics while crunching numbers in the morning and hanging ten in the afternoon.

But whether Lisi has put theoretical physicists on par with philosophy majors for jobs at McDonald's (as a classmate of mine jokingly put it), the man behind the magic deserves some examination.

While the Telegraph piece above paints him as a sort of idiot savant (“Being poor sucks,” he is quoted as saying), the other interviews that I’ve read draw him out a little further. And while I don’t know his religious leanings, its his type of rethinking and redrawing the Right Way To Do Things that serves as the highest model of what I think a free thinker or humanist could aspire to.

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My governor, Sonny Purdue of Georgia, led a prayer service at the state capital on Tuesday to ask God for rain to relieve the current drought. It sounds like a modern-day rain dance to me. Was it appropriate to pray with three Protestant ministers on the steps of the state capital? Probably not. But will it work? I sure hope so.

Theology overheard while studying:

EE: Hey, {Computer Science roomate}! Guess what? {Mathematics roomate} is in a quantum state! He says he tends towards belief in God.

CS: That's interesting! {Mathematics roomate}, you're in a superposition between belief and disbelief. What are your normalization coefficients? Perhaps 1/root(2).

M: You guys are such nerds.

To be fair, my offhanded comment regarding Mariology started it. If my Game Theory professor reads this blog, he'll now understand why my problem sets are occasionally less than stellar.

From the same ideological tar pit that spawned Islamofascist Awareness Week:

It's not yet clear that we have begun to take seriously -- even literally -- the threats of Al Qaeda… But nut cases can make much havoc and kill many people and undermine many societies. To us what they threaten is murder, mass murder. To them it is the vocation of holiness.

Enough is enough. If the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and a need to “redefine privacy,” don’t seem like we’re taking Al-Qaeda and their fellow goons seriously, what exactly is enough?

No, this author doesn’t take a (direct) shot at Islam. But for all of the author’s concern about what seems to be a pretty settled issue of public consciousness – Al-Qaeda is bad and we should do our best to get rid of them – why belabor the point?

What is this article calling attention to, exactly? That Al-Qaeda hasn’t morphed into a legion of dancing hamsters?

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Fiat Lux and Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale today host a discussion with Professor Anthony Kronman and Rabbi Jim Ponet about the Meaning of Life (which seems to need capitals, somehow).

There was some confusion as to what Meaning of Life would be discussed. As a friend put it, this is an undertaught and underdiscussed topic. But I am confused. Was I meant to do reading before hand? Should I have prepared questions? Do I take notes? If the meaning of life is a teachable topic, do I treat it's teaching like a class? I hope I pass!

If you can get over the thought of Christopher Hitchens receiving a “back, sack, and crack” wax then this is a good example of the West’s flawed concept of girl power.

(Hitchens put himself through American cosmetic dentistry and general bodily beautification to celebrate his recently acquired American citizenship, detailed partially here in Vanity Fair. Pictures 8-10 are especially endearing.)

The article’s rather interesting (initial) thesis: Both Westerners and Muslims “agree that body hair, in its lush, natural form, is gross and repellent, a problem that must be eradicated at all costs.” I didn’t exactly expect to see that as a point of intercultural connection. But there it is.

The author splits this follicle-based aversion in two ways. Westerners shave their nether-regions because they want to look like porn starlets. Muslims do it because, in so many words, they hate secular society.

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‘Book Buyback’ is a magical ordeal where students line up to sell their three-month-old, $75 textbooks back to the bookstore in return for ten bucks and a wallop of intellectual shame. Penniless with just days until Christmas, a few years ago I found myself in that line bearing a somewhat guilty conscience and several heady philosophy books.

That day, a similarly desperate student stood in front of me carrying his own load of academic baggage including one book by Georgetown’s own John F. Haught titled ‘What is God? –How to think about the divine.’ You know the times are tough when you’re selling insight into eternity back to the bookstore.

Intrigued, I asked him if I could look at the book. He handed it over and generously added that I could keep it. A small Christmas miracle.

It is three years since I received that book and I just began reading it. I wasn’t ready for it until now.

Haught on how to get to ‘The Divine’:

“I shall attempt this location of transcendence by asking you to reflect on five ordinary aspects of your own life experience: your experience of depth, future, freedom, beauty and truth.”

I’ve been stuck on the 13-page Depth chapter for three weeks, reading a bit each night and digesting it while I sleep. Does my languor suggest that I’m really deep, or completely superficial?

In that chapter, Haught writes:

“The experience of depth has two faces. It is both abyss and ground. . . . . What would happen, though, if we allowed ourselves, or were forced by ‘circumstances,’ to plunge into the abyss? . . . . The depth will show itself to us not only as an abyss but also as ground. In the final analysis, the depth is ultimate support, absolute security, unrestricted love, eternal care.”

A blog is a strange place to talk about a spiritual 'feeling,' but I’m going to try. . .

I have spent years in the abyss. I know its endless emptiness. But lately another side has shown itself to me.

I have noticed something drawing me in, something strange and ineffable that I hesitate to name or psychoanalyze. It might be the caffeine talking or neurons over- firing or hormones zipping around my body. But it might be God; or as the Jesuits say, an “internal movement” of the soul.

Without my consent, something within me has decided to go through a spiritual transformation and I can feel my old walls being torn down. I am being moved into a place of peace and growth. I feel pulled there, like I am being grasped by the wrists and compelled onward.

I think I’m experiencing depth’s grounding.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius talk about a similar movement:

“It belongs to God our Lord to give consolation to the soul without preceding cause, for it is the property of the Creator to enter, go out and cause movements in the soul, bringing it all into love of His Divine Majesty. I say without cause: without any previous sense or knowledge of any object through which such consolation would come, through one's acts of understanding and will.”

Skeptics might call the interior movements I am experiencing ‘indigestion.’ I am open to that possibility. But indigestion is seldom this joyful.

On a related note:

"If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that's what He's getting." -Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

The TV producers won’t deal with the writers’ guild, and the theater producers won’t deal with the stagehands, so both have struck. No TV, no Broadway. Let me be the first to ask: Does this mean we’ll have to talk to each other now?

Confession: I am a convert.

I’m an embarrassment to my family.

They say I’ve disowned my roots.

I’ve forgotten where I came from.

Family, forgive me, for I have sinned:

This New York born and raised, thoroughbred Yankee loves country music.

Somewhere between listening to Alison Krauss on Wyoming’s wild highways and Tim McGraw on weekends out in Virginia, I realized that doggonit, I like this country stuff! And did I just say doggonit?

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Sometimes school and life and God play tricks on me. Over the weekend for one of my classes I had to read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “The Sabbath”, which gives his philosophy of Judaism as a religion of time and the Sabbath, or Shabbat, as the figurative bride of Israel, connecting Jews to God and freeing us from the chaos of the week. “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living,” Heschel writes in his elegant and beautiful prose. “The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.”

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Due to the lousy male to female ratio at the Naval Academy, every weekend a horde of midshipmen escape from the yard (also known as taking liberty) and close in on Georgetown to talk politics with young, Jesuit-educated female scholars. Or something like that.

We, the ladies of Georgetown, were all too willing to welcome those mids from down Route 50. It was our patriotic duty, a service to our country.

They also looked quite handsome in their uniforms.

I would like to introduce you to two couples. Both of the women are Hoyas, both of the men are Naval Academy grads.

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As we slog through midterms, canceling club meetings left and right, it’s hard to remember why this whole college thing is better than what we want to do, whether we want to debate politics or to learn Judaism. At these times especially, I remind myself that this whole college thing is Judaism. Virgil’s Aeneid seems to me similar to the Bible; it always has, as EconoPundit kindly points out. But the point here is larger than reading Aeneas as a Moses-character.

Most traditions allow for some creative reading of the Bible, and Jews especially trade midrashim. For those of us whose families do not claim that the rabbinic interpretations are the only possible readings of the Bible, who think we can learn from Jewish tradition and from scholarly biblical criticism and from non-Jewish interpretations, it is hard to understand where we draw the line. And I am not sure we have to draw a line. Certainly, at some point we say that a book, if still worth reading, is less worth reading than others, but why shouldn’t we study Rousseau along with our Rashi? And if we don’t hold Rashi as binding (as most of us don’t, even if we should), then why shouldn’t we think both of them equally, and deeply, important? So remember: that test is Torah.