Salon.com > Michael Joseph Gross

Hard-wired for God?

Thu, 01 Feb 2001 20:32:00 +0000

How do you solve a problem like Maria? (Not the singing, the God thing.) Here's an idea Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't think of: You could wave a hot poker around in her temporal lobe. That, at least, is one inference to be drawn from Matthew Alper's lively manifesto regarding the biological basis of religious experience, "The God Part of the Brain."

As V.S. Ramachandran explained in his 1998 book "Phantoms in the Brain," patients with temporal lobe epilepsy may experience a variety of symptoms that include an obsessive preoccupation with religion and the intensified and narrowed emotional responses that are characteristic of mystical experience. (St. Teresa of Avila, Dostoevski, van Gogh and St. Paul are believed by some historians and scientists to have suffered from the affliction.) Observing these symptoms, scientists have established that some circuits in the temporal lobe are involved in religious experience.

Bradley bores but scores in Boston

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 15:00:00 +0000

Last month this city played host to a conspicuous little foreign-policy blunder by George W. Bush, when he failed local news reporter Andy Hiller's pop-quiz game of "Name That World Leader."

On Monday, Bill Bradley, no doubt intent on parading his much-more-impressive foreign-policy prowess, came to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University for what promised to be an invigorating question-and-answer session with some of this country's smartest foreign-policy students.

The contrast between the candidates would hardly be lost on anyone who was paying attention.

This time, Andy Hiller stayed away -- even his cameraman claimed to not know where he was -- and, boy, was he missed! Petty as it may have been, Hiller's gambit had added a snappy surprise to an otherwise boring news day when Bush visited.

Bradley's appearance had no such snap.

The Democratic candidate for president delivered a 21-minute speech, punctuated by bullet points describing lessons learned from his foreign-relations work in the Senate. "Define the problem right ... Seek bipartisan support ... No appeasement," and so forth.

Best American Spiritual Writing 1998

Tue, 08 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

"The Best Spiritual Writing 1998" makes you want to take a shower. The
essays and poems in this first volume of an annual series (modeled after
Houghton Mifflin's "The Best American Short Stories") describe ways of
living that make you long for greater cleanliness and simplicity of life.
They are also the products of a somewhat grubby business -- the booming
niche market of spiritual publishing. Encountering "The Best Spiritual
Writing," readers face a familiar dilemma. Believers, like the
contributors to this anthology, are, by and large, inspiring, radiant
people -- they live big, lovingly, truthfully, openly. Yet their
collective presence (in churches, synagogues, yoga classes and
anthologies) often conveys a stifling orthodoxy, which can impart a
big-time case of the creeps.

IMAX mates with T. Rex

Fri, 04 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

To the IMAX Corporation -- purveyors of large-screen, high-resolution, high-tech cinema experiences -- size really does matter. The company has big plans to expand its market beyond museums and amusement parks during the next few years, and bring the nation's shopping malls a new generation of IMAX features that will be more Hollywood and less PBS.

"T-REX: Back to the Cretaceous," an IMAX 3-D film directed by Brett Leonard ("Lawnmower Man," "Virtuosity") and starring Peter Horton of TV's "thirtysomething," is being hyped as the first IMAX movie with blockbuster potential. (It premiered in New York in October, and will open in wider release, on at least 40 screens nationwide, through January.) When you view them on the largest IMAX screens through 3-D glasses, the dinosaurs in "T-REX" will appear bigger and taller than they did in real life. But they're not going to command nearly the amount of attention or respect that IMAX needs to make the huge transition from destination entertainment to mainstream commercial success.

Old wine in new bottles

Fri, 10 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000

For John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop of Newark, every week is Holy Week. Spong says he lives in "constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence," and he believes his vocation is to exhume and resurrect the spiritual content of Christianity from its worldly internment in the Christian church. That's the stated goal of his new book, "Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile." But the title is false advertising, and maybe even false witness, because the presumption of this book is that Christianity is already dead.

Contemporary Christians, according to Spong, have entered a period of religious disorientation on par with the Jews' Babylonian exile, when everything that had given meaning to their religion was destroyed. In the same way, Christians today "are exiled from the worldview in which [their] creed was formed." We cannot repeat the Apostles' Creed with integrity because it's flush with misnomers such as "Father Almighty." "Father" won't fly because it's "filled with limiting cultural definitions" that have been used to justify the oppression of women; and if God were truly "almighty," he would cure leukemia upon request.

21st: Guardian angels of “Gay-OL”

Thu, 14 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000

like most men who hang out in America Online's gay chat rooms, Michael Patterson met a lot of guys who started conversations by asking his penis size, suffered the virtual folderol that followed ("where r u?" "what u in2?"), chatted with studs and simps who turned out to be the same people using different screen names and heard stories from friends who'd been stood up for dates by guys they'd met online. "People act like there's not even a person on the other end of this thing," he explains.

Unlike most gay chatters on AOL, Patterson decided to go countercultural: He appointed himself the conscience of the Boston gay chat rooms. He created a new screen name, STOODUP1, with a profile that promised to clean up "the M4M rooms and [make] them fun and safe for everyone." (M4M is the AOL abbreviation of "men for men.") He recruited a few other AOL users -- none of whom he'd met face-to-face -- to help in this crusade. He issued an online all-points bulletin for the men of Boston to e-mail him stories about being stood up for dates by guys they'd met online. Finally, after collecting these allegations, he sent them to the accused, then included both sides in a STOODUP newsletter he e-mailed to anyone who asked for it.