thinking/out/loud

2010-04-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

Palangga ta ikaw, Mama!

You know mother is around when for the very first time in so many months, your laundry bin's been cleaned inside out. Your bed has a fresh change of linen. When you wake up in the morning, a breakfast of eggs, fried rice and a hot mug of coffee is waiting for you at the dinner table. The clothes you wear to the office actually look neatly pressed and your colleagues notice it. Best of all, there's a woman in the house you can hug and kiss!

2010-04-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

W.

I was around five when I first fell in love. My very first day in grade school. I remember it oh so vividly: I didn’t want to go to school, at least not yet, preferring instead to spend my afternoons chasing dragonflies in the grassy lot behind our house. I had had my taste of kindergarten and didn’t quite get the hang of it. But Mama, who was a public school teacher, wanted to enroll me as a salingpusa in a colleague’s class; there I was – furiously wiping away tears with my hands as I stood behind my mother’s skirt and oblivious to her entreaties that things will be okay as soon as I meet my teacher- when she passed by.

She seemed to float as she walked, this pretty girl who, from out of nowhere, entered my life at such an inopportune time. It was such a fleeting but heavenly moment; she threw a glance at me and and my tear-soaked gaze met hers; the embarrassed cry-baby in me smiled at her, and she smiled back, and then she went on her sweet, sweet way; I don’t remember now if at that time, she was with her mother. All I remember were her lovely round eyes and the dimples on her cheeks. Inexplicably, my heart beat like mad as my tender gaze followed her, until she disappeared in the noisy sea of students excited to attend their first day at the Lagao Central Elementary School.

Right there and then, I decided that I was going to like school after all, and then–dutifully headed for Mrs. Tulio’s class.

2010-02-24T02:07:00.000-08:00

Simula ng pagkatakot

Sino, kung ako’y magpapalahaw, ang dirinig sa akin sa samahan/ ng mga angel? At kung may isa man sa kanila ang biglang yayakap sa akin/: ako’y malulunod sa ganoong hindi makayanang kalagayan. Sapagkat ang kagandahan ay walang iba/ kung hindi simula ng pagkatakot, na ngayon pa lamang /ay halos hindi na natin kayang bunuin.*

*salin ko ng ilang mga linya sa Ingles ng tulang Aristophanes ni Rilke

2010-02-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

This impatient intransigence for the sublime

THESE DAYS, I feel that my life is bone-dry, empty of the excitement that always seems to grip the very depths of the lives of others. It is always the others who seem to bask in the rapture of high spiritual experience, never I. Yet I long for the experience of spiritual high, the fire of passion for God, a lasting glimpse of the Holy.

I am tired of living by rote and long for a mountain-top experience, one that lasts a lifetime. But how?

Even poets suffer this impatient intransigence for the sublime, for that “weight of glory,” as C.S. Lewis put it in a famous sermon of his. “One can even imagine a poet who experiences the sublime and demand a high style to express it,” writes the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski in Another Beauty, “but precisely because this is a rare event that requires patient waiting, in daily life he becomes one of poetry’s ironic prosecutors.”

Alas, there is the “painful world” they have to deal with, where the craft of that finely-tuned phrase is a daily and frustrating struggle. It doesn’t help that they must live through the commonplace, all the while longing for the dry bones to quicken and then to die, and then to live again, with a sensitivity to the tiniest ripple of emotions in the space of the personal: “To wake and fall asleep, drowse off and waken, to pass through seasons of doubt, melancholy dark as lead, indifference, boredom, and then the spells of vitality, clarity, hard and happy work, contentment, gaiety, to remember and forget and recollect again, that an eternal fire burns beside us, a God with an unknown name, whom we will never reach.”

When evening falls on the drudgery of the everyday, I sometimes retreat to a small corner of my thoughts, where I can listen to some Bach or Rachmaninoff on my turntable, and, like the prophet Elijah feeling that he has reached the end of his rope, I simply wait for sleep to come.

August 24, 2005.

2010-02-14T07:12:00.000-08:00

Ngiti ng buwan
(pasintabi sa makatang si Ted Kooser)

Kung hindi ko man nasumpungan
ang iyong ngiti
sa kabigatan ng maghapong abala,
sana, gaya ng makata'y
maging magaling ako
sa pagbubuhat ng kalungkutan;
Kung ang mukha ko ma'y
isang maskarang habi
ng mga aninong ngayo'y
lumulukob sa akin,
nawa'y ngiti pa rin ng buwan
ang pasalubong ko sa mundo
ng aking takipsilim.

2.14.10

2010-02-04T23:58:00.000-08:00

Recent Flights of Book-Banditry

Man, I've been too busy to keep track of my flights of book-banditry in the last few months. Just the other day, I bought a fairly recent American edition of Grey's Anatomy (P225) and the feminist theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's path-breaking work on feminist hermeneutics In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (P115). There's also a collection of George Plimpton's anthology of sports essays On Sports (P120). (Plimpton, founding editor of the Paris Review, died a few months ago, didn't he?). Last Sunday, I made a big catch of bargain books at P20 each, including Pete Hamill's long essay on Journalism at the End of the 20th Century, A.J. Cronin's novel The Citadel, J.G. Ballard's short story collection War Fever, and an O. Henry Short Story Awards anthology for the year 1984.

And I know I still have more books yet unaccounted for, including purchases made in Gensan over the Christmas holidays (surprise of surprises, the National Bookstore branch at the newly opened Robinson's Mall there had a treasure trove of bargain-books for the picking. Among other titles I found there a hardcover new edition Oxford English Bible for P200, which is a steal).

I also see more and more back issues of Granta magazine surfacing in BookSale outlets. A good sign. They usually go for P75 but the newer editions are priced at between P115-P150. On the other hand, I hardly see back issues of Harper's and the New Yorker magazines in the stands these days.

2010-01-31T07:38:00.000-08:00

My friend Gilbert Tan alerted me to this: my post below was lifted in full and published on Page 120 of the commemorative book Cory Magic, which came out in December last year. It is pictured -- courtesy of my friend -- as it appears there. Only that contributors like me don't get to have a complimentary copy of the rather expensive tome!

2009-08-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

An historical rupture?

The amazing thing about all this is that it's totally spontaneous; it can't be, couldn't have been, orchestrated by a mad and hideous conspiracy. It has the moral clarity and historical certainty --the pure bliss -- of an impossible dream. Those who read Gramsci for critical insight will call it a caesura, this uncoordinated but synchronized movement of people that we all hope, is already the tipping point.

2009-07-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

Government forces should allow humanitarian convoys into evacuation centers in Maguindanao

Newsbreak magazine has featured a statement we at the Center for International Law issued over the dire condition in makeshift camps of thousands of civilians displaced by renewed fighting in Central Mindanao between government forces and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

2009-06-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Danger of Words

A disciple of Wittgenstein once wrote a book about the "danger of words" (the psychiatrist M. O'C Drury, 1996, Wittgenstein studies, Thoemmes Press). This illustrates the point, if in a hilarious and instructive way, as only the masters of the Queen's English can, on the life-changing issue of what makes potato chips click, and according to the demanding and weighty craft of legal interpretation.

2009-05-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month's last salvo, from Knopf

April, T.S. Eliot's cruelest month, has finally bid us goodbye. With its passing, poetry month also ended. Knopf's last feature for the month is yet another Polish master of the craft, with whom I am delighted to be acquainted for the first time:

* They Carry a Promise, the first collection in English of the poems
of the Polish master Janusz Szuber, who here ponders the duties of his
craft:

****************************************

Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table
And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.
One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.
I tried to be honest, avoid untruth
As far as the truth about myself and events
In their general contour was accessible to me.
Then a few longer phone conversations
And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.
How great! Superb! Who can write like that about desire and love,
Admitting that when they burn out
And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,
They guide the poet’s hand. In them and only in them
All future incantations.

(Translation by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough)

2009-04-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Bridge Cafe, Groenburgwal, Amsterdam.

Memories of my one-year Amsterdam sojourn.

2009-04-05T22:39:00.000-07:00

A mom's 30-year search for a son

I wonder if there was - or there ever will be -- a happy ending to this story I filed nine years ago for the Philippine Star:

A mom's 30-year search for a son by Romel Bagares Updated May 14, 2000 12:00 AM

Whenever Nina Ferrer hears the roar of jets above her small hut in San Jose, Antique, she runs to the nearby beach to wave at the aircraft.

Though she is no madwoman, Ferrer is stranded in an island of the past. Up there in the skies, she says, could be her son who, more than three decades ago, was taken away by her first husband.

"How long ago was it?" she asked. "My son must be 35 now."

As she spoke, Ferrer's face turned red with emotion. "I have cried so many times over my baby, how I want to know where he is now, whether he now has a family of his own. I just want to see him before I die."

Ferrer lost her son Virgilio in 1966 to her American husband who took the then two-year-old boy to the United States and never came back.

The last thing she heard was Virgilio had been jailed in the US for unclear reasons, and that he did not want to see his mother or know anything about her.

But Ferrer's friend, Ting Elvas, consoles her. "God is not deaf that He should not hear your cries," she tells her. "We will see your son soon."

All her life Ferrer has been singing sad songs. She lost her mother at a tender age and, being the youngest of six siblings, was given away to an aunt who resolved to turn her into a teacher.

Ferrer, however, had a different dream for herself. She wanted to be a famous singer like her idol Janet McDonald, the American who played a beautiful Indian maiden in the movie The Indian Love Call.

She still remembers every detail of that movie, particularly its theme song which she hasn't sung in years: "When I'm calling you, will you answer too... You belong to me and I belong to you."

Ferrer pursued her dream by joining, in 1959, a televised singing contest in Manila. She did not win, but was hired by the host to be part of the staff.

One day in the early 1960s, she was invited by a friend to Olongapo to meet lonely American sailors looking for female company. There she met a handsome serviceman, Herbert Waine Gill from Long Beach, California. They fell in love and soon got married.

But the marriage never produced children. Gill, as Ferrer later discovered, was impotent.

While married to Gill, Ferrer met a Filipino mestizo in the US Navy with whom she had an affair. The relationship bore her a child, a boy she christened Virgilio Luisito. Though Gill knew that the boy was not his son, he still liked him for looking very American with his brown hair and fair skin. He treated him as if he were his own child, and Ferrer thought everything would work out fine.

But she was mistaken. One day in 1966, when the boy was two years and six months old, Ferrer came home to an empty apartment. The place was in shambles, and her son was nowhere to be found.

"My husband was obviously in a hurry to leave. He brought with him everything, including our family pictures and Virgilio's baptismal certificate," she recalled. Gill also took her US green card and their marriage certificate.

Ferrer received a letter from Gill several weeks later, announcing that Virgilio had survived the trip to the US. She got another letter several years later which informed her that the boy was growing up fast and that he had been enrolled in a Catholic school.

Another joy
Distraught, Ferrer returned to her hometown in 1974 and got married to a shipping company employee, Abelardo Guillermo. A year later, she and her new husband had a son whom she named Abraham Joy.

"I named him Abraham after the great patriarch of the Bible who had longed for a son for so long until God blessed him and made him a father of many nations," she said. "I also named him Joy because somehow he eased the terrible pain within me."

Abraham Joy is now 24 and a third year business student in Sibalom town in Antique. Mother and son live in a small hut at the corner of a beach resort owned by one of Ferrer's nephews.

Although her second son is a source of happiness, still Ferrer longs for the company of her first "baby."

Ferrer said she cried in disbelief when she read a letter from the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington DC telling her that her son was in prison and "has no desire to see, hear or write his biological mother."

The letter was in response to a query Ferrer made in July 1997, asking US navy authorities if her son was in the naval service. How she got to send the inquiry is a story in itself.

Sometime in 1992, as US troops were pulling out of Clark Field, an American serviceman came to Iloilo looking for Ferrer. The man said he was helping his colleague look for his mother. His colleague's name was Louis Wayne Gill.

Ferrer learned about the American only a year later. When she looked for him, the serviceman was already gone.

"So near and yet so far," she sighed.

Ferrer then wrote the US Navy and asked about her son. But according to Navy officials, no Louis Wayne Gill ever entered the service.

The officials, however, said they had located Herbert Waine Gill, Ferrer's former husband, and that he had told them that he had divorced her for "adultery and voluntary abandonment" in 1967.

The US Navy's inconstant reply to her queries only sharpened Ferrer's feeling of loss. Now 62, she is a widow and lives through the meager pension of her late husband and the earnings of a small sari-sari (variety) store.

She says she is looking for her son not to ask for anything. "I am not interested in money or anything. I just want to see him again before I die," she said. "I am not losing hope."

2009-03-10T08:33:00.001-07:00

Ang Huling El Bimbo

I first heard their music in a humanities class at UP. One or two of them ( I don't remember anymore) happened to be in the same class as I was. The professor was the wife of their very first manager. The man played for the sole pleasure of the class a demonstration tape (CDs were largely unknown in those analog days) of what would soon be their first big hit --"Pare Ko". Back then, I was a promdi who didn't know a thing about urban popular culture and who couldn't care any less about a band of virtual unknowns called the Eraserheads.

"Ugh," I muttered to myself, "how vulgar could a song get!"

I now hazard to say members of that humanities class were most probably among the very first ones to hear the song just before it was released in the market. But it went on to conquer the Philippine music world by storm, heralding a new gilded age for Filipino youth bands and earning for the Eraserheads the monicker the Philippines' Fab Four.

And it didn't even matter to me that one of them also stayed (or squatted) in the same dormitory as I did, the venerable Narra Residence Hall. Some mornings, I'd run into him in the hallway as I headed for my wing's common showerstalls. Often, he'd have a girlfriend's tight embrace as he made his way to the canteen.

The Eraserheads was just one of the many bands that made Narra a venue for their jamming sessions. It was the height of Narra's infamous free-wheeling decadence (a contemporary act that also made a name in the local music scene was Yano, whose members also proudly called Narra their home sweet home).

At Narra, the Eraserheads existed happily with a professor named Bading Carlos, pre-final examination week X-rated expositions, open house celebrations that featured a raffle where the top prize was a night in the company of a prostitute, fraternity rumbles, pot sessions, drinking binges, among many other adolescent excesses.

Looking back, I couldn't believe I survived the Eraserheads and all that!

2009-01-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

Unfinished

So many drafts waiting to be finished:

12/27/08

I always seem to find myself bringing some work with me

9/2/08

That was haw-haw.

8/1/08

Catholic writers revisited

Why is it that some of the best writers around have been Roman Catholics? Tolkien was faithful to his church to the very end. You can say he was also instrumental to the conversion of his good friend C.S. Lewis to the Christian fold (albeit to the Anglo-Catholic variety). There's of course Flannery O' Connor, whose fiction on the American South was, as someone said, "Christ-haunted" (she wrote about life in the fundamentalist Bible belt from a decidedly Catholic lens, coming out with fiction that showed deep and abiding respect for a people steeped in faith, no matter how hard they try to run away from it, or bastardize it). There's Walker Percy. And yes, the British essayist and fiction writer G.K. Chesterton, another favorite source of quotable quotes for evangelicals. Graham Greene, a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism (?), whose fiction expressed the inner tensions between his own life and the faith he has embraced;

6/9/08

Bargain Books Galore Part II

Economic crisis notwithstanding, the bargain book business in the Philippines is booming, and to a bargain book bandit like me, things couldn't be happier. I'm listing some of the best spots there are in Metro Manila. I'd say Booksale is still the best place to explore as far as prices and choices are concerned.

SM Manila Booksale shop. Located at the basement of the mall, this stall offers a wide variety of choices. Right now, for those who have good money, the shop has an amazing selection of newly-issued Borders classics, with their beautifully designed covers. This is also where I ocassionally come across really good theology and philosophy titles. This is where I found the German New testament scholar Mier's excellent tome on Jesus and the theme of judgment in the Gospels. I also think this stall can give the booksale shop at Robinson's Manila a run for its money.

Booksale shop Robinson's Manila.

When it was smaller, it was the shop that offered my very first used book buy -- Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, for P45 pesos. That was 15 years ago. How time flies by.

Booksale Shop, Valero Street, near the RCBC Towers. Now, here's one spot that's hidden from public view. On a recent foray, I found Stanley Hauerwas' most recent essays on theological ethics here (his collection of essays first delivered in the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland).

3/14/08

Lord,

Why can't I seem to find poetry in my heart any

2008-10-31T22:07:00.000-07:00

Soledad's Sister in Italian

I'm a huge fan of Filipino writer Butch Dalisay, and it's not just because he admitted me into his college creative writing class on advance prose despite my writing inexperience, or that once, with the intercession of my good friend Boojie, he jazzed up my dear old Apple Powerbook 540c at no cost (well, Boojie brought with us a case of SanMig and some pulutan); it's just that he's one of the best Filipino writers in English around. As someone who keenly follows his literary production, I'm happy to note his second novel Soledad's Sister is now being translated into Italian (the novel was shortlisted for last year's inaguaral Asia Man Prize, the Asian version of prestigious Booker Prize in the UK). In a recent piece for a column he writes for The Philippine Star, he posts an interview with his Italian translator, who wanted to know something about the milieu of his new novel. I think in the span of a few paragraphs, Dalisay manages to capture for his translator's benefit what Manila, the Philippines and the wandering Pinoys are all about:

A translator’s interview
PENMAN By Butch Dalisay
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Philippine Star

Thanks to my agent Renuka Chatterjee, my novel Soledad’s Sister has been accepted for publication sometime next year by ISBN Edizioni in Italy. First, of course, it’ll have to be translated into Italian, and the publishers have asked Clara Nubile, herself a published author, to do the job. Clara wrote me to ask me some questions about the book and the Philippines as a whole, so I sent her back my answers, which I’m excerpting here, to give readers an idea of what I’m telling people out there about us. These are, of course, just my own perceptions; I’d make a lousy ambassador of goodwill.

CLARA NUBILE: Nice to meet you through your novel, Soledad’s Sister, which has the unforgettable taste of durian — tender and ferocious at the same time. How did your novel come to life? What was the spark that ignited it?

JOSE DALISAY: Nearly one out of every 10 Filipinos is working and living abroad — that’s more than eight million out of 90 million Filipinos. This diaspora, which has been going on for many decades now, is the single most important development that will define Philippine society for a long time to come — economically, politically, culturally. One day I came across a newspaper report saying that more than 600 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs, as we call them) come home every year as corpses. It was a chilling statistic, and it gave me the idea for this novel.

How would you describe your way of writing? How you would describe Jose Dalisay, the writer?

I’m one of probably a very few Filipinos who make a living out of writing. That’s because I write a lot, in all kinds of genres — fiction, non-fiction, journalism, drama, screenplays, some poetry — in both English and Filipino. I get the most satisfaction out of my fiction and column pieces in English, however, because I don’t have to make commercial compromises in them, the way I have to when I write screenplays, which are commercially produced, or political speeches, or commissioned work. I’m a fairly traditional writer in the realist mode, and I write about all kinds of subjects — politics, history, culture, the passing scene. I like looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some readers will find me boring, but I’m not going to write like the 25-year-old I’m not. I’m glad and lucky to be 54.

And what about the contemporary literary scene in the Philippines, both in English and Tagalog?

It’s a very vibrant scene, with new writers and books coming up every year in both English and Filipino. We have literary traditions going back to pre-Hispanic times and we have over 100 native languages, in some of which a written literature survives. Filipinos are a very expressive people, and writing and performances (in music and dance) come naturally to us. You cannot censor a Filipino! Unfortunately, literature as a market suffers from the fact that our people are largely poor and cannot afford to buy books, so our print runs are extremely small. No one here makes a living out of writing fiction in English (I earn from commissioned works, screenplays, journalism, etc.).

The influence of the colonial past, from Spain to the United States: how would you describe postcolonial Philippines?

One good description of the Philippines (provided by the essayist Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil) is that we spent 300 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Many enduring traces and influences of our Spanish past remain — even in the language — but the modern Filipino is highly Westernized (i.e., Americanized). Several layers of thought and perception coexist quite comfortably in the Filipino — the pagan, the Christian, the capitalist, the Marxist. We absorb and adapt easily, as the situation demands.

Manila. A haunting place. A memory of memories. The bay. The leaden sky. The enthralling sea. The scents of street life. The beauty of daily life in a big, voracious, cannibal city. Your own Manila, just a brief description.

An aging beauty, sometimes sorrowful and languorous, maybe in the afternoons, but all dressed up and lipsticked for the evenings.

There is a huge emigration of Filipinos all over the world. What is the effect of this emigration back home? Orphaned children and psychological and emotional problems between fathers, mothers, sons and daughters?

Every departure has a price, and we don’t mean the airline ticket. Our overseas workers are buoying up the economy, keeping our heads above the water in times of global economic distress and in the absence of good, well-paying jobs at home. But those separations are tearing at the very fabric of family — the most important thing to Filipinos, and also, ironically, what our OFWs are seeking to protect and promote by working abroad. But also, we Filipinos are a vagrant people, lovers of travel, eager to see and experience new things.

And what about music, which, somehow, is another character of your novel. Karaoke bars, musical competitions. Every Filipino seems to be a potential singer.

I’ve said before that the shortest distance between two points is that between a Filipino and a microphone. Yes, we love to sing. It’s a form of relief and release, and it costs nothing. I suspect it’s a kind of poor man’s revenge — to be able to sing My Way as well as or better than the rich man down the street — so karaoke is democratizing.

In his essay “The Philippines: Born in the USA,” the journalist Pico Iyer writes that “Every Filipino dreams to be American when he/she grows up.” What is your opinion or your experience?

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course — but just barely so. I grew up reading American textbooks. I learned more about America than many if not most Americans. We need to demystify or demythify that idea of America as being central to our lives. We care too much about America in a way that America will never care about us. The world’s a much bigger place now; it always has been, but we just didn’t know it. Our OFWs are discovering that larger world.

Prostitution is another plague of Southeast Asia, and of Philippines as well. Is it a legacy of American colonization and the massive presence of American soldiers?

Well, the Americans didn’t invent prostitution, but their presence here didn’t discourage it, either. That said, the Americans are gone but prostitution is still here, and I suspect it always will be, until we have a society that offers people better alternatives.

Aurora and Soledad. Rory and Soli. Two sisters, so close by birth, so far by life. One is the anti-mirror of the other. How would you describe their sisterly bondage?

I’m going to say something so plainly true it’s almost stupid, but I’ve always believed — and have tried to show this in my fiction — that where people are alike, they really are alike, and where they’re different, they really are different. So these sisters share enough as sisters might, but are otherwise they’re their own persons.

The male characters in your novel seem to be hopeless, ineluctable Latin-lovers, lost in romance, sex, dreams, a need to escape. Love and loss. Love and longing. Fascinating characters. Filmic, in a way. How would you describe Filipino men and their mentality?

We’re romantics, yes; we could feel as much if not more for those we lose as for those we covet. And once we get something or someone, we take that object or person for granted. We’re creatures of desire, loss, and guilt. There’s probably a million Filipino men out there who’ll roundly and loudly disagree with me, but I suspect there’ll be a lot more who’ll say, “Yes, that’s me!”

The Filipino community in Italy is well integrated in the social and cultural structure. Why do you think it is easier for Filipinos to get integrated in other nations and cultures?

We’re great survivors, and part of that is our ability to adapt and to adjust, our resourcefulness in the face of hardship and privation. Sometimes that translates to keeping a low profile, staying out of trouble, agreeing to whatever the prevailing terms of reference are. We’re not known for making waves — which is both a good and a bad thing.

2008-10-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

Disclosure in the global economic crunch

While we were away, stock markets the world over crashed. And the story is greed getting the best of them writ large. The trouble is, when the high and the mighty are humbled, the rest of the world suffers. It seemed only a matter of time, following the collapse of the American sub-prime mortgage market, for the domino-like effect to finally make its presence felt in the world market. The integration of many economies into a multi-layered world market only made an economic catastrophe so much easier to happen. Now it seems inevitable that we're headed for a frightening global recession.

Once again, the private is no longer so private. Deregulation in the name of the primordial interest of private capital is exposed as untenable. Thus we see the private becoming a legitimate public interest as well. Or, as the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd would put it, the private sphere has enkaptic interlacements with the public sphere. The market activities of huge transnational corporations left to their own devices have public ramifications. Governments ought to respect the internal integrity of the market; that is, give it space to function as it should. But it doesn’t mean that governments give everything up in the name of deregulation. In other words, it is not deregulation for its own sake. Some oversight is still needed, to make sure that the market does not overstep public legal bounds.

The current global economic crunch somehow demonstrates that the realms of both the transnational and the international have an integrated public sphere on which private transactions rest. It cannot be otherwise. States and transnational corporations cannot be allowed to run like Hobbesian monads with no other consideration but their own interests. This process of "disclosure" -- of the differentiation and integration of the world into a global economy, highlights the fact of such things as the global commons, of public goods that are a concern of everyone in the place, precisely because what happens to them affects everyone else, as well as of an inevitable interdependence that cannot be founded on the interest of only one state.

……………………..

Two books just off the press!

The annual book fair came and went with a nary a comment on this page. In fact, I should have, because I have two important reasons for it. But first, a disclosure that in more than one way, I have a personal stake in these two important reasons. In the case of the first, Dr. Jonathan V. Exiomo's book Interpreting the Text: Towards a Filipino Biblical Hermeneutics from a Ricouerian Perspective, I served as an editor. In the case of the second, Roderick G. Galam's The Promise of the Nation: Gender, History and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilocano Literature, I was a conspirator in some way (well, when I was an editor of the Philippine Law Journal, I published in the journal in article form what is now a chapter in the book. I was also the author's sounding board when he was completing the book). Both works break new ground in their respective author's chosen fields. The first book is published under the auspices of the Alliance Graduate School, the second, of the Ateneo University Press. And both authors are friends of mine. Mr. Galam and I go a long way; we had been friends since our college days and in fact, were residents of that infamous and late lamented Narra Residence Hall at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and fellow members of the now defunct Narra Christian Fellowship (NCF). Dr. Exiomo, president of the Alliance Graduate School, is a fellow founding member of the Alliance Book Club, a small group of like-minded friends who like to discuss ideas and their relevance to the contemporary world.

I promise to post an extended review of the two books soon.

2008-08-07T03:38:00.001-07:00

Yes, coffee is good for your health

College certainly ruined my life for good. That's when I started drinking lots of coffee. Cramming for exams, you know. It was a natural progression from there to my years as a newspaper reporter and a law student. It's even worse working in a law office. There'll always be deadlines to beat, which means many sleepless nights and more coffee, not to mention that cafes are a rage these days. Ah, all that talk about the bad things imbibing too much coffee does to you. And now, here comes this piece from the New York Times saying more or less that yes, coffee is in fact, good for your health. If that's any consolation, consider too that spending too much time in your favorite cafe (or coffee shop, as it is called in Manila), can also be bad for your pockets!

2008-08-04T02:10:00.000-07:00

A chronicler of the Soviet gulag writes 30

He called Stalin “the man with a moustache” and paid dearly for it. But the man would struggle on through a series of imprisonments, intimidations, censures and personal crises over a span of many decades with an uncompromising integrity very few of his contemporaries could claim as their own. His courage gave the 20th century a voice of dissent yet unmatched – one that singularly confronted the horrors of Soviet Communism with a literary account that was at once haunting as it was eloquent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 89, stood in the best Russian literary tradition that counts Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as some of its illustrious forbears.

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Will the Anglican center yet hold after this?

Having attended an Anglican Church in Amsterdam that was decidedly evangelical in orientation, I have developed a certain fondness for the Anglo-Catholic tradition. My brief but treasured encounter with Anglicanism has given me a fresh appreciation for ritual, tradition and liturgy that my broader evangelical upbringing sorely lacked. Perhaps I can say that in the Anglican community I discovered in Amsterdam, I saw that the fusion of evangelicalism (the stress on personal conversion and commitment to Christ) and Catholicism (the stress on continuity with tradition and creed) is in fact possible. The experience allowed me to view Roman Catholicism (the religion of my younger years) from a third perspective. Yet I have always wondered how evangelicals within an increasingly liberal church Communion as far as its North American brethren are concerned could choose to stay within its confines. Today, the Anglican Communion is struggling to keep the center from collapsing. It seems that it is only a matter of time before the dispute over issues of sexuality (read: ordination of homosexual bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions) rents the communion into an irreconcilable split.

2008-07-31T02:29:00.000-07:00

Or is it just shrewd politics at work?

I accompanied the boss last night to dinner with a top honcho of the largest German political foundation who is now based in Singapore as chief of its Asia Rule of Law program. Over paella at Casa Armas in the Podium, our chit-chat gravitated towards the Thai-Cambodian border dispute after he mentioned that prior to his current posting, he did time in Cambodia. Sure, every now and then, there'd be border clashes, he said, adding that in fact, a few years ago, angry Cambodians burned down the Thai embassy, which happened to be located just across their Cambodian office. This recent tiff, however, is all for a show. Well, the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was up for re-election. And what better way to show his constituents that he's the man that's still fit for the job than by doing a little muscle-flexing? Apparently he was in cahoots with some friends over at the other side of the border. Proof of that is that Hun Sen won the elections hands down and right after that, things quieted down again at Preah Vihear, according to our interlocutor.

Oh well. Sounds like Batman and the Joker locked in a Yin-Yang embrace.

Bernard should tell this to his Thai and Cambodian friends at the International Center.

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2008-07-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Blame it on the French?

Ah, the vicissitudes of colonialism. Cambodia's Preah Vihear temple complex hit the headlines again after UNESCO declared it a new world heritage site only last July 7, 2008.

Well, it's Cambodia's, on the say so of the World Court in a famous 1962 case known to students of international law by the temple's name. The Thais claimed the complex as theirs but in the end, they lost the legal argument. The World Court said the French, who used to be the Cambodians' colonial master, had drawn a map in colonial days clearly showing the temple as part of the territorial boundaries of its colonial subject. Unfortunately for the Thais, they couldn't show any such map establishing that from time immemorial, the complex had always belonged to them.

The declaration of the Paris-based Unesco has apparently opened old wounds.

Naturally, overjoyed Cambodians couldn't keep to themselves their happiness over the declaration; their Thai neighbors of course, remembered the slight they suffered when they lost the case -- and the temple -- to the Cambodians. Now Thailand is sending troops close to the area that should no longer be in legal dispute. In the very place, Thailand still occupies land to the north adjacent to the complex that, according to the International Court of Justice's half a century-old ruling, should belong to Cambodia.

So, is there going to be a shooting war between the two countries anytime soon?

We hope not.

My friend Bernard, a law student and resident of the University of the Philippines International Center, also hopes no such thing breaks out. He's worried that the lone Thai and the three Cambodians who are residents at the Center would soon come to blows over the world famous temple.

Bernard is beside himself telling me the story that last night, the only Thai at the dormitory paid his Laotian roommate a visit after the former realized the terrible implications to his personal security of the numerical superiority of the Cambodians. The poor and outnumbered Thai saw the angry looks the Cambodians have been throwing at his direction since news broke out that the Thai government had deployed troops in the vicinity of their beloved temple in the wake of the Unesco declaration. He got so jittery that he decided to seek counsel from Bernard's Laotian roommate, who happens to speak Thai too. The Laotian spent the whole night reassuring the Thai and later complained to Bernard how the whole thing is beginning to get on his nerves (not to mention eating up so much of his time and energy).

But for now, rapprochement seems the farthest thing from the minds of the Cambodians at the Center, their Thai counterpart thinks. And he is just as unwilling to surrender the temple to the Cambodians according to what international law has ruled long ago. The chill in Thai-Cambodian relations at the Center is but a preview to the messy border dispute the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will soon have to face.

Good thing that this semester, no French student is billeted at the Center. That, or the international crisis at the Center would be sure to escalate and French President Nicolas Sarkozy just might be forced to send Carla Bruni to mediate.

2008-07-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Crumpled hopes for a Crumpler

Looking for a used Crumpler messenger Roll-O-Notes laptop bag. I'd say this is the best laptop bag there is on earth. But mighty expensive when bought brand new. Anywhere between P6k-P7k at the local Crumpler store. Been searching ebay.ph for a pre-owned one but found nothing. (Well there was one auctioned off for a ridiculously low price of P1.5 k but by the time I discovered it, someone else had already won the bid). There are some units from the British ebay; they sell at about P3k a piece but the mailing and handling fees are prohibitive, readily doubling the costs in the end. Definitely not a good idea.

2008-07-04T08:33:00.001-07:00

Mac Back/Double Take

Woohoo!!!!!! I finally got my dear old reliable Mac G3 Pismo back in the groove after letting it off for a year in hibernation....

And Manila Times columnist (and child rights advocate) Eric F. Mallonga does a double take on what I've said at a lecture in Subic recently .

2008-06-29T11:07:00.001-07:00

Notes from Recent History

While surfing the Net, I came across this piece I wrote seven years ago as a newspaper reporter -- and how strange it reads now, after the many strange realignments that have taken place in the Philippine political firmament since Mr. Estrada's ouster and Mrs. Arroyo's rise to power:

Edsa Freedom Walls target 11 pro-Estrada senators
by :Romel Bagares 1/26/01 Philippine Star

At the EDSA Shrine, public anger again boiled over the 11 senators who voted down at the impeachment trial, the plea to open the second envelope believed to contain more damning evidence against deposed President Joseph Estrada.

"This is symbolic because this is where we won the victory," said lawyer Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan as he scribbled on one of the four "freedom walls" put up Wednesday by the Akbayan multi-sectoral party at the historic shrine.

His words, in black ink, expressed the sentiment of hundreds of thousands of people who flooded the Edsa Shrine to remove Mr. Estrada from office. "Isulong ang bagong politika (advance the new politics)."

The walls – white cloth stretched over two by three meter wooden frames – bear three to a frame, except for one, the names of the infamous 11 senators, namely, Senators Francisco "Kit" Tatad, Ramon Revilla, Robert Jaworski, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Tessie Aquino-Oreta, Nikki Coseteng, John Osmeña, Juan Ponce Enrile, Blas Ople, Gringo Honasan and Vicente "Tito" Sotto III.

The Akbayan party printed in bold letters on top of each frame the words "Huwag nang iboto, taksil na senador (Don’t vote, traitor of a senator)."

Organizers couldn’t have chosen a better place to put up the freedom walls. Three woman employed at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) just across the shrine, rushed to the frame reserved for the names of two senators, Santiago and Oreta.

"Ayan, kay Tessie, kay Tessie (Here’s Tessie’s, here’s Tessie’s)," one of them excitedly said. She wrote: "mag-ballroom dancing ka na lang (go ballroom dancing instead)."

As everyone knows now, the senator has been labeled by an angry public as the "dancing queen" for her antics that fateful Tuesday night.

One man, apparently an Ilonggo, wrote under Sen. Santiago’s name in Hiligaynon: Kahuluya ka gid! (You’re such a shame!)!"

In minutes, the walls filled up with words of anger and disgust:

"Magbasketball ka na lang (Go back to basketball)" (Sen. Jaworski).

"You’re a complete disgrace even to the gay community" (Sen. Osmeña)

"Paingles-ingles ka pa, wala ka namang sinabi (You speak in English but your words don’t mean anything)" (Sen. Sotto).

"Tulog ka lang ng tulog (You just slept through the whole thing)" (Sen. Ople).

"You’re the worst fashion trendsetter, (you have the) best suits for burial." (Sen. Coseteng).

"Bicolanos against balingbings (turncoats)!" (Sen. Tatad).

"Sinira mo ang aming kinabukasan (You destroyed our future)" (Sen. Enrile).

"Pahiram ng anting-anting mo (Let me borrow your good luck charm)" (Sen. Revilla).

"Di ka na mananalo (You won’t win ever)" (Sen. Honasan).

"Promil overdose (Sen. Santiago).

"Mag-Japan ka na lang (Sen. Oreta).

Many of those who wrote on the walls even signed their names.

"This is a warning to traditional politicians that their days are numbered," said Pangilinan, a convenor of the Kongreso ng Mamayang Pilipino (KOMPIL II), an alliance of civic groups which spearheaded Mr. Estrada’s ouster.

Vic Rodrigues, the 27-year-old barangay captain of Sacred Heart, Quezon City and an Akbayan party member, said organizers plan to put up more freedom walls in strategic places in the metropolis, such as malls, wet markets, and schools and universities.

"This time," he said, "we will ask people to write their dreams and aspirations for the country."

The party, began in 1995, was born out of a split in the Left in the early 1990s. It espouses popular and participatory democracy, and has won a party-list seat in Congress.

According to party organizers, they also intend to bring the campaign against traditional politics to major cities in the Visayas and Mindanao. At a meeting at the height of the four-day People Power II, KOMPIL II leaders vowed to discredit the 11 senators in the coming elections.

Many people stopped by the freedom walls to take a look. One young man in checkered short sleeves and jeans walked up to the third frame.

Above Sen. Tatad’s name, he scrawled an ancient Hebrew phrase familiar to generations of Bible readers: "Mene, Mene Tekel Up Arsin." Roughly translated in English, it simply means, "You have been weighed, and you have been found wanting."

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2008-06-25T01:02:00.000-07:00

Between human tragedies and “natural evil”

As I write this, I think of the hundreds of grieving Filipino families left in the wake of the fury of typhoon Frank. Is there such a thing as “natural” evil? The American theologian Gregory Boyd, in his book Satan and the Problem of Evil, raises this question in his discussion of the gaps in the standard “blueprint” theodicy that seeks to explain tragedies wrought by “natural” disasters such as storms and earthquakes in terms of the all-encompassing but mysterious wisdom of a good God. His is a straightforward repudiation of that kind of theodicy, one that instead asks Christians to take seriously the challenge that Satan and his minions in the spirit world give to the dominion of the Kingdom of God in the here and the now. At the same time acknowledging that as humans, we do not have a full picture or a God’s-eye-view of things, Boyd says that we must realize that the Devil, as Scripture says, is still the “prince of the air” who exercises power, even if limited, over the natural world. He can stir up nature; and it is in his best interest that he does so. After all, it is his in evil nature to destroy, to kill, to maim, to cause untold human suffering. (This present darkness, when mixed with the human propensity for carelessness and exploitation, could pack an even more potent and deadly force). And who usually gets the blame for all that misery and death and destruction that come in the wake of these “natural” disasters? The language lawyers usually use to describe these events is a giveaway (but we don’t even need lawyers to tell us what the answer is) – caso fortuito, an act of God.

2008-06-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

Prof. Solum on Bagares? :)

About a week ago, I joined the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a cutting-edge, web-based academic service dedicated to the dissemination of the latest researches in social science. My author's page on SSRN may be accessed here. I immediately posted my work Rethinking the Foundations: Sovereignty, Community and the International Legal Order from a Social Pluralist Perspective and lo and behold, Prof. Lawrence Solum of the University of Illinois Faculty of Law quickly took note of it in his well-regarded, if not famous, legal theory blog, right after his post on the most recent work of Prof. William Stuntz of the Harvard Law School ( himself an evangelical Christian academic who edited an anthology of essays on Christian legal theory published by the Yale University Press). Ah, the wonders of electronic networks!

2008-06-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Another Beauty

I am trying to reconstruct the pieces from my old blog and here's one that I particularly liked, an appreciation for a fine book I found in a booksale shop at SM Manila:

In Praise of a Poet of Tortured Beauty

The magazine Books and Culture tells us that the New Yorker’s special issue on 9/11 carried on the back page his poem, Try to Praise Our Mutilated World, and many people clipped the poem and posted it on refrigerator doors, sent it to grieving friends, read it in public gatherings, even quoted it in sermons. In the interview with B &C (August/September 2002 issue), the Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, explains that he wrote the poem long before the ghastly events at the World Trade Center took place; yet for many, it spoke of a way to cope with tragedy, of a world, which, though hideously imperfect, still offers us visions of hope:

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

(Translated by Renata Gorczynski)

The poet, who grew up in the ruins of postwar Poland, says the poem embodies “the experience of someone who tries to live and write,” one that “is very rich and encompasses the register of ecstasy, of joy,” indeed, of one, who, because he has accepted that the world we live in is wounded, finds reasons in the mundane details of the everyday to rejoice amidst its pains and sorrows. I find more of the musicality of this optimism in his book Another Beauty, which is a memoir that details his growth in his persona as a poet as well as a citizen. The title is taken from a poem from his first ever collection of poetry published in English, Tremor, and in this work, I readily see the dedicated predilection to acknowledge that beauty, yes, salvation, even if temporal, is found in recognition that relationships, and yes, community, matter:

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversations bides its time
in others’ poems.

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

To me, this is, really, a hyperbole for community – where one comes face to face with the realization that the self, by itself, does not really amount to much outside his or her recognition of the beauty that the Other radiates. It is as well a call to the discipline of humility, for when we acknowledge that we are, by ourselves, inherently incomplete, we see the intrinsic worth of the lives of the Other; this insight, to me, is a theological wonder.

This appreciation for the Other is glimpsed in his recollection of a fellow dissident who fought against the communist dictatorship with him in Poland, Adam Michnik (an interesting study of character, as you can read here, and the founding editor of Poland’s largest daily newspaper, the Gazeta Wyborcza):

I first met (him) in Warsaw in 1973. I had already gotten to know many intellectuals in the opposition. Almost all of them spoke sotto voce, not exactly in a whisper, but in carefully modulated tones. Their caution was rational and justified; we all lived beneath the enormous roof of the secret police, our conscience had been rationalized, microphones might be hidden in the lamps, in the flowerpots that held seemingly innocent plants, in the walls themselves. We’d all head of stories about bugs concealed in chandeliers, in the tables and sofas. I knew people who kept their hands over their lips even at home, and who transmitted important information only on scraps of paper, which were then destroyed. Intellectuals fell into two camps, the conformists and the resisters, but even these resisted cautiously. Adam didn’t belong to this category. He couldn’t be placed in any standard, psychological or sociological bracket. He didn’t keep his voice down, he was loud and witty, he radiated courage and joie de vivre. He wasn’t a poet, he didn’t write poems. But he recited them: he knew scores of poems by heart, Milosz, Herbert, Slonimski. This wasn’t the main thing, though; all it takes is a good memory to quote poems. Something else was important. Adam was then, I think, one of the few happy people in Poland (and perhaps, in all of Eastern Europe).

I don’t mean the kind of private happiness that consists of finding a nice, pretty wife and an interesting, well-paid job, the happiness that comes from the consciousness that you are a healthy, decent, and useful individual. I have in mind the much rarer form of happiness that arises when you locate your true vocation with pinpoint precision, when you find the perfect outlet for your talents, not in the private, domestic sphere, but in the larger human polis.

The mystery of Adam’s calling lay in its paradoxical nature. Adam drew upon his own anarchic needs and dreams whenever he confronted – so boldly, with panache and glee – the secret police, the Party, corrupt and well-fed prosecutors, dim-witted ministers. He was a joyous anarchist, tossing down his challenge to the vast apparatus of power. He wasn’t your typical anarchist, though; he stood for good and honorable things, he sided with right and justice (as they ought to be, not as they were).

A person like Adam who’d happened to live on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in an orderly bourgeois society, would no doubt have turned to dark and evil gods. He would have read and recognized De Sade and the other spiteful, downcast, bitter masters who’ve turned against the world. He would have praised doubtful powers, made his pact with Satan. In this world, though, Adam realized that he’d been given an extraordinary opportunity. He could be both good and furious at once, both negative and decent, critical and honest, maniacal and just. He could be a subversive, an anarchist, a revolutionary, and at the same time, a conservative defending basic human decency and order; the order in which we lived had squelched the ordinary, imperfect human world.

I came to know other dissidents later, but only a few shared Adam’s peculiarity, the mad joy he experienced being an upright anarchist, a reasonable revolutionary who had reconciled fire and water, the passion for destruction and the desire to build. What luck, to find in this world a calling both contradictory and genuine, impossible and actual, that fits one’s life like a suit cut by the finest tailor!

(Incidentally, there’s an interview with Michnik in the Spring 2004 issue of Dissent Magazine, where we read that the man has now become an ardent supporter of the US-led war in Iraq).

I like Zagajewksi’s definition of happiness, which you find “when you locate your true vocation with pinpoint precision, when you find the perfect outlet for your talents, not in the private, domestic sphere, but in the larger human polis.” Much of the paralysis affecting many of us today precisely arises from this failure to locate with “pinpoint precision” what we are in this world for, though it can well be said that the deepest discontentment happens when we know what we are here for, but are unable to do anything about it.

Zagajewski, like his compatriot and literary model Czeslaw Milosz, belongs to a generation of Eastern European writers who clung on perilously to faith in the Transcendent in the face of a Marxist Police State. Perhaps, it’s the fact that Zagajewski comes from a country devoutly Catholic, where, as in East Germany, the church offered space for voices of dissent that drew strength from the deep mysteries of faith. In his book Another Beauty, I read of the city of his obsession, where he studied philosophy as a young man, Krakow, a city he knows by heart despite all these years, “a city cluttered with the massive clod of churches and convents, broad and heavy like aging peasant women gathering on a rainy autumn day.”

Here he writes of his agnostic uncle, who many years ago, regularly entertained in his home a young priest by the name of Karol Wojtyla to debate with him on the intricacies of belief, or the lack of it, in God. Here, he writes of his dislike for the nihilists, for Nietzsche, most of all, whom he calls “that splendid saboteur”:

As I read the bitter, ironic, modern writers, I ask myself: Why do we keep turning back to Nietzsche? There’s not doubt that they are Nietzsche’s offspring; they’re entranced by that great stylist, that splendid saboteur. And I ask myself: Apart from anxiety, apart from ironic, inspired sorrow, what have they got on their side? Since only a child would argue that on the one hand we have profound, witty, mocking geniuses, and on the other, relentless routine, mediocrity, the quotidian with its gray suits and dull poets, the dreariness of the orthodoxy and parliaments, the monotony of academic painters, clergymen with professionally pitched voices, churches, offices, banks, the international corporations that fund obedient professors who sing the praises of virtue, the family, and the balanced check-book. No, the situation is far more complex. On this side, too, you find despair in search of fire, clarity, affirmation, despair seeking expression and finding it, if at all, only at great cost. But after all, this isn’t a speech-and-debate competition!

Zagajewski’s uncle in old age, would return to the folds of faith. He wryly remarks of this as a victory for the young priest, who would later become Pope John Paul II, the first Pole, and the first non-Italian in a long, long time, to ascend to the throne of the Roman Pontiff – a fact that his countrymen relished no end, and celebrated with much fanfare.

Here, the poet writes of his love for music, which, he says, shares this common ground with poetry: poetry itself. Music, for him, is a poetic language that excites the emotion as well as the imagination: “Music out forth form and rhythm, it builds its airy structures on a substance as delicate as breath, as time.” Which is why as a student in Krakow, he was an ardent habitué of the concerts conducted by the city’s many music schools. (As a collector of vinyl records myself , I can identify with his pleasure at finding phonograph records being sold for a song in bargain music shops!).

Here, in Another Beauty, Zagajewski too, writes of his countless ruminations into the world of learning, yes of books, as a wide-eyed student enamored with a city with a long history, his favorite refuge being Krakow’s Jagiellonian Library where he spent countless hours reading two sets of books: the first, of those meant to please his professors, the second, of those meant for him. The first type consisted of textbooks, the second, of poems, stories, essays.

Inside that library, he says, he would meet the modern masters, people who not only did not believe in God, but had forsaken everything “noble and lofty;” yet he also discovered in the books of the old library people “who managed to combine in some astonishing fashion deep, unostentatious faith with a powerful sense of humor and an unacknowledged love of good that was active and practical.” He found in them the powerful truth that he himself “wasn’t alone in those old churches; and not all the other visitors belonged to the ranks of careless tourists using their cameras instead of their heads.” It was certainly a consolation for him to have found intellectual giants with whom he can discuss the “mysteries, the things that can’t be talked about.”

Yet being young, and consumed with the passion of youth, he somehow set these things aside for an urgent activism. But in the end, the confession comes that as an adult, he would rediscover what he said was his “earlier responsiveness to religion.” In that same library he found the works of Milosz, most of which had been banned by the State.

Milosz, too, would write of his slow but sure recovery of faith; though he might not be classed by the devout among the Poles as a practicing Roman Catholic, he had come, after an intense personal struggle with the collapse of the ideologies of his youth, to the inescapable conclusion that the only thing that really gave meaning to the human phenomenon is the idea of the Transcendent; in short, God. (When he died last September, Pope John Paul II, who had become close to him in his later years, would write a short note to fellow Poles who had questioned Milosz’s catholicity to assure them that yes, he died in the embrace of the church of his birth). I especially like Milosz’s ruminations on the French philosopher Simone Weil, an enigmatic figure in the annals of 20^th century thinkers for her conversion from atheism to unorthodox Roman Catholic mysticism.

It seems to me that in the days of the Cold War, intellectuals in the West, because of the freedom from pain and want they enjoy in their capitalist milieu, and perhaps, because of a profound ennui arising from a pointless material comfort, can afford to live in the theater of the absurd they have constructed for themselves and their followers; their poor cousins in the East, however – in the dark realities of the Marxist Police States that have engulfed their countries – can only find hope and strength to go on with life and struggle in the faith of their forebears. I remember reading an account of how Harvey Cox (yes, the liberal theologian, now with Harvard Divinity School), was serving as a youth minister in Germany at the time when the country was being partitioned between the liberal democratic West and the communist East.

Cox spoke of having repeatedly smuggled volumes of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics into contacts in the East, at a time when the reigning theological rock stars in the so-called “Free World” were the Death of God theologians.

When asked why he chose the hefty but by then anachronistic works of the neo-orthodox theologian over those of the existentialists who proclaimed, after Nietzsche, that God is dead, he replied to the effect that it really was a choice between hope and hopelessness. He wanted to give the Christians in East Germany something solid to stand on; it was simply cruel and pointless to give them something that would only sink them deeper into despair. (The more fundamentalist of the lot, of course, would still fault Cox: why not smuggle the Bible instead?)

Of course, for today’s postmoderns, Cox’s logic makes a lot of sense, even in the absence of belief in the metaphysical worth of the claims of faith (whether or not God exists or that He offers real hope does not matter, as long as people find their lives cloaked with a new sense of purpose and meaning in these very assertions of faith). That, perhaps, is what someone like Rudolf Bultmann would call a Myth that must be De-Mythologized.

But back to Zagajewski, for whom the quest for the Transcendent is much like the sublime pursuit of poetry, which, he says, a poet rarely attains, if at all; “One can even imagine a poet who experiences the sublime and demand a high style to express it,” he writes, “but precisely because this is a rare event that requires patient waiting, in daily life he becomes one of poetry’s ironic prosecutors.

The poet believes it is the possibility of impossibility – the experience of the bliss of the sublime – that brings him back to the experience of the reality of the “painful world;” and where does it leave him, then, once the force of gravity pulls him back?

Here, to an essentially existentialist confession of the continuing yet seemingly unattainable struggle of life: “To wake and fall asleep, drowse off and waken, to pass through seasons of doubt, melancholy dark as lead, indifference, boredom, and then the spells of vitality, clarity, hard and happy work, contentment, gaiety, to remember and forget and recollect again, that an eternal fire burns beside us, a God with an unknown name, whom we will never reach.” Still, he struggles with hope, with the poetry of hope anchored on the tortured beauty around us – his “God of an unknown name” perhaps – though to the orthodox and evangelical, it may sound like an empty one (or to C.S. Lewis, yet another evocation of that "weight of glory" only a better world beyond the present reality could offer).

2008-06-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Bargain Books galore

THE PROGNOSIS -- food, fuel, political crises and all -- is that the bargain book scene in the Philippines, or at least, in Metro Manila, is getting better and better. I say this with the benefit of hindsight that's at least fifteen years' worth.

Proof of that is that my budget can hardly keep up with the treasure troves that I find shop after shop that I visit these days. The other day, after a court date, I dropped by one of my favorite haunts, the booksale stall at the basement of SM Manila, and I discovered much to my surprise that it now carries rare books -- or what passes for rare books -- in a separate section.

Well, nothing there that comes from before the 20th century, of course, but that the shop now tries to cater to the antiquarian crowd is something new. I'm not much into it, and the oldest work in my collection is a mid-19th century print of John Bunyan's Choice Works (Thomas Johnson, 1851) a parting gift from a Dutch classmate from my recent Amsterdam sojourn, though I'm dying to find a copy of what is considered the first major work in English done on one of the great masters of international law, the Italian Protestant thinker Alberico Gentili. I actually refer to the dissertation of G.H. J. Van Der Molen at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the first quarter of the 20th century. Other than being the first such work in English on Gentili's thought, it's also something of a founding text for present-day feminists, for it was the first ever doctoral work on international law completed by a woman in the whole of Holland. That's Van Der Molen for you and me. (For starters, she knew Max Huber, or she was one of his top students, and Huber of course, was the guy who gave the Las Palmas island in that famous arbitration case to the Dutch -- a home court decision? -- instead of to the Americans. Had he decided the other way around, the Philippines would have had a stronger claim to a far larger territory than it has at present.) Anyway, before flying back home, I tracked on-line a copy in an antiquarian shop at Den Haag, which was going for 50 euros, but I didn't anymore have the time to go there and buy it. The next time I checked, the copy had been bought. You can say that's about how much or how little of an antiquarian I am.

But back to bargain books hereabouts.

(to be continued)

----------------------

2008-06-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

(Non)stirrings of the past

I feel a certain tug in the heart reading this poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:

FIRST LOVE

They say
the first love's most important
but not my experience.

Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.

My hands never tremble
when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string --
not even ribbon.

Our only meeting after years:
the conversation of two chairs
and a chilly table.

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

Yet, just exactly as it is,
it does what others still can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.

- from the New Yorker Anniversary Issue (2004)
(translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

2008-05-20T03:02:00.000-07:00

Ka Bel, a revolutionary

This, a shock:

MANILA, Philippines -- Anakpawis Representative Crispin Beltran died Tuesday from brain injuries after falling from the rooftop of his home in Bulacan, according to reports culled byNQUIRER.net.

Dr. Arnold Corpus, emergency room doctor and attending physician to Beltran, said the former Kilusang Mayo Uno chairman died at exactly 11:48 a.m.

The doctor said he suffered a cut at the right side of the head and broken ribs.

Corpus said the head injuries proved fatal to the militant congressman. He was brought into the hospital at 9:42 a.m. Doctors tried to revive him for two hours and was resuscitated five times before the family decided to discontinue life support.

Beltran’s daughter, Ofelia Beltran-Balleta, announced his death to reporters.

Beltran lapsed into a coma at the hospital, after he developed a blood clot in the brain caused by the fall at around 6 a.m.

In a phone interview with INQUIRER.net, Balleta said Beltran went up to his roof from the mezzanine to fix a leak. While going down, the congressman suddenly lost balance and fell. She added that it was a 14-foot drop and Beltran fell face first.

Balleta said that when Beltran was brought to the hospital, he was still conscious and then suddenly went into cardiac arrest.

She also clarified that a heart attack did not cause Beltran’s fall. “The heart attack is just secondary but he died from hemorrhage that led to him being brain dead,” Balleta said.

Doctors told the family that Beltran was brain dead as of Tuesday morning, said Lualhati Roque, Beltran’s chief of staff.

Bayan Muna partylist Representative Satur Ocampo, who rushed to the hospital after learning of the accident, informed reporters before Beltran died that “only his heart and lungs were being revived. He's experiencing repeated heart seizures.''

Roque added that his family was informed that they had to make a decision whether to continue life support for the congressman. His doctor had explained to the family that his heart was only being kept alive by a drug being injected into his body.

His family said Beltran was really fond of fixing things in his house, an activity, which became a morning habit for him.

“He was physically active,” Balleta said.

“The whole family is grieving,” Mau Hermitanio, another staff of Beltran, told INQUIRER.net.

Beltran, 75, left a wife and 11 children.

Balleta also revealed that the family did not have a chance to talk to Beltran before he died.

“Walang chance kami nagkausap [We did not have the chance to talk],” she said.

Prior to Beltran’s accident and eventual death, Balleta said the family was busy preparing for the congressman’s privilege speech at Congress on Tuesday on power rates and the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

Balleta said Beltran’s body would be initially transferred to the Funeraria Paz in Quezon City. After which, the family would bring Beltran to his hometown in Muson, Bulacan then to the University of the Philippines Chapel in Quezon City.

“We are thankful to those who extended their support and condolences. He died for the plight of the workers,” Balleta said.

-----------------------

I've had the privilege of working with Ka Bel at the House of Representatives as part of a team of lawyers who put together three impeachment complaints against Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Years before that , as a journalist reporting on civil society issues, I had written articles about him and his labor rights advocacy. Ka Bel was what the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci would call an "organic intellectual," or someone learned in the objective and material conditions of reality not through the halls of the academe but through his being himself, an active participant in the struggle to transform these very same conditions. Though I do not count myself as among those who fully subscribe to the political ideology for which he was a life-long provocateur, his commitment and dedication to his brand of political struggle was both humbling and awe-inspiring.

2008-04-28T18:56:00.000-07:00

Religion in small doses?

Filipino evangelicals have concert-like worship services and "purpose-driven life seminars" to attract new members; Polish Catholics do it with even better style, as can be gleaned from this wire service story:

LUBLIN, Poland--A striking brunette sashayed down the catwalk, showing off her simple yet elegant white robe and black headgear to the enraptured audience.

Sister Lucja of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus smiled as the crowd burst into applause.

Faced with a slump in the number of nuns, monks and seminarians in Europe's Roman Catholic heartland, the Church in Poland is trying to dust down its image.

The recent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion show in this city in southeast Poland was just the latest sign.

"The name 'fashion show' is provocative. We want to show that we live simply, and that even if we sometimes dress in an old-fashioned way, our clothes are a reflection of our lifestyle," organiser Father Andrzej Batorski, a Jesuit, told AFP.

After Sister Lucja, other nuns, then Jesuits and Capuchin friars hit the red carpet to show off their cassocks in the main hall of the Catholic University of Lublin.

The 90-year-old university is a renowned center of religious and secular teaching and research in Poland, where more than 90 percent of the 38-million-strong population professes to be Roman Catholic.

Some two dozen orders took part in Batorski's fair, setting up their stalls to try to spread the word that taking religious vows isn't a thing of the past.

The stands boasted multimedia displays, leaflets, giveaway calendars and -- at the missionary orders' booths -- souvenirs from Africa and Asia.

Meanwhile, religious chants echoed from loudspeakers.

Under Poland's post-World War II communist regime, the Church played a dual role as both a religious institution and as a bulwark against the authorities.

While its clout has remained significant since the regime's demise in 1989, and is certainly far stronger than in most other European countries, it has been a victim of its own success in helping bring about political change.

In a democratic country where the free market has brought previously unimaginable opportunities for a new generation of Poles, drawing new recruits is becoming a headache.

The mainstream Church's image has also been tarnished by an ultra-Catholic fringe whose outbursts regularly grab headlines, turning off would-be recruits.

"Ten years ago, we had 25 novice nuns. Last year we only had six," said Agnieszka Kranz of the Servant Sisters of Debica, a small Polish order.

Such figures are a worry for the Polish Church, and even for Roman Catholicism beyond the country's borders.

Until recently, the Polish Church was training more than a quarter of Europe's priests, monks and nuns, and supplied them worldwide to fill gaps in other countries.

Last year, the number of Poles taking vows fell by around 25 percent.

For the 2007-2008 academic year, Poland's diocesan seminaries, which train priests, recruited 786 new students, down from 1,029 the year before.

The total number of trainee priests has fallen by 10 percent in one year, to 4,257.

The country's monastic orders are also feeling the pinch.

The number of novice nuns slumped from 728 in 1998 to 468 last year. The number of new monks fell by half to 797.

"For the Polish Church, this is ringing alarm bells," said Monsignor Wojciech Polak, who oversees recruitment.

Batorski said it is up to the Church to reach out to young people, speaking a language they understand.

"We wanted via the fair to enable people to meet those who have chosen a monastic life, to show that they are just regular individuals," he said.

"At the same time, we wanted to give a voice to people who have taken vows, allowing them to explain their chosen path and their faith," he added.

The Polish Church has also jumped headlong into cyberspace, and also turned to other planks of public relations.

Most orders have their own website -- and the Jesuits have even posted a video on YouTube. Others have tried television advertisement and the Franciscans even give their monks public speaking training.

At the Lublin fair, however, the impact seemed limited.

"I'd miss men, and nuns don't use make up or color their hair," said Dominika Pietron, an 18-year-old school student.

However, she said she appreciated her hour-long discussion with a nun there.

"Religion helps you take a look at yourself, and builds confidence. But it should only be taken in small doses," she said.

2008-04-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

The Great Crash of the 21st Century?

I almost did not make it through my Economics 11 class under Ms. Solita Monsod. I'd like to think it was my singing that saved the day for me. Just before the Christmas break, she walked up the stage of the old auditorium at the UP School of Economics and started calling on students to sing her a Christmas song. I was sitting just a few rows from the dais, and Ms. Monsod, her signature coffee mug in one hand, zeroed in on who else but me. My 1-E blockmates from the College of Mass Communication ( I was the only mathematically-challenged bloke in a block of about 20 students in those days when students entered UP through the block system) erupted in wild applause as the star economics professor commanded me to make the last day of class before the Christmas break happy. I tried my best to do justice to the first Christmas song that came to mind -it must have been the old ditty Joy to the World -I can't remember for sure. But my crush was in that same lecture class, after all, and I wanted to make a good impression on her, who is now very much married, I gather, and living in a foreign city that used to be the foreign city of my dreams. When it was all over, wilder cheers erupted as Ms. Monsod announced she was not going to ruin any further our Christmas anticipations by keeping us in class any longer.

There's very little that I retained of that class (to begin with, there was very little that I understood of it, supply and demand dynamics and all of that). If there's anything that made a deep impression on me on how volatile markets could make life terrible for everyone, it's John Kenneth Galbraith's book on the Great Crash of 1929 that brought the first big era of Depression in modern times as well as stirred the great dust bowls of North America, not to mention paved the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. In fact, it's a book I first read when I was in high school. (A good companion read would be James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ironically originally made for that great symbol of crass capitalism, Fortune magazine).

And now it seems the world is headed for another recession. Or may be the world is finally coming to Hegel's End of History. And do you know who's laughing his way to the bank in the middle of it all? It's George Soros, the prophet of doom whose prognostications on the coming collapse of the US market because of a bad real estate mortgage policy very few people believed. He just made US$ 4 billion by hedging on the miseries of others. Of course, not many people remember fondly how he made his fortune, for instance, by betting on a weak British Pound in 1992, and yes, an even weaker Thai Baht in the throes of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. I'm sure he's made others happy too, through his multi-billion dollar charities and advocacies, built on the libertarian Open Society philosophy of Karl Popper, who was his professor at the London School of Economics. Read here on why the Hungarian Jew still commands little respect from economists, despite his multi-billion dollar successes.

2008-04-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Poem No. 2 for Poetry Month from the Dame of Polish Poetry

Her late compatriot Czeslaw Milosz called Julia Hartwig "the grande dame of Polish poetry." Knopf's poetry series for Poetry Month has more to say: Hartwig, now in her late eighties, belongs to the same generation of Polish poets as Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska. Her voice was shaped by the events of the Second World War and Solidarity, in which she played an active role. Her poems have all the gravitas of the history she has lived through—she tells of the husbands who returned silent from war, of watching regiments with red stars enter her home city of Lublin. But she is also a poet of joy and light, one who craves what is best in both nature and culture and celebrates the small miracles of understanding and happiness, when they come. Hartwig's work is translated by the distinguished translators from the Polish, John and Bogdana Carpenter.

I must admit I have a thing for Polish poetry, having been introduced to the works of Milosz and Adam Zagajewski. But this is my first time to come across a poem by Hartwig:

Tell Me Why This Hurry

The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms
and this flowery procession moves without any restraint
Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines
petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies
Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays
nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias
yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses
flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts
lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows
holy fires of fern one-day grails
Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing
in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness
all with the wind racing in one direction only
crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand
eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction

2008-04-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month is upon us all

And I almost forgot everything about it. Knopf's month-long tribute to that sublime art opened on April Fool's Day with a poem from Mary Jo Salter writing about a time that's now forgotten by, if not far-removed from, creatures of the present-day used to email, internet, SMS, DVD and satellite technology:

A Phone Call to the Future

1.
Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.

2.
This was the Fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more—this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.

The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter's running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.

They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.

3.
It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,

you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.

Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It's less than that, not anymore a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.

Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental—
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional Fifties.

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

2008-03-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

Between books and love

A good friend of mine introduced me to the world of book-banditry -- and my life has never been the same again. I recall his girlfriend complainining -- good-naturedly of course -- how my friend and I never seemed to run out of stories to tell to each other about our life-long weakness for the printed page. I could only hope she didn't mean she simply disappeared in the background the moment her boyfriend and I started chattering happily about a beloved vice.

As economists would say, ceteris paribus, could books indeed get in the way of love? A recent essay in the New York Times takes stock of the situation and comes away with a conclusion that for most, it's really up to the parties to make an act of will and say otherwise.

In my friend's case, it didn't seem to be the case. His girlfriend supported his interests, and took the effort to survey the lay of the land, so to speak. They may have differing tastes as far as books were were concerned, but early on in the relationship, they decided together that love was far more important than literary taste. And there is no greater proof to that commitment to love, I think, than the fact that they later tied the knot, for better or for worse, books or no books. Alas, love conquers all, including the allure of books.

2008-03-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

Just off the press

The venerable Philippine Law Journal has just published a long essay of mine with the title: Rethinking the Foundations: Sovereignty, Community and the International Legal Order from a Social Pluralist Perspective.

The book-length essay, a revised version of my master's thesis, came out on issue 1 of Vol. 82 -- the PLJ's international law issue (pp. 68-237). I have the happy privilege of having this article of mine published in the law journal's volume marking the University of the Philippines' centenary.

I haven't seen my complimentary copy yet but the editors sent me a PDF file of the article's pre-publication final draft. When I was negotiating with the editors for the possible publication of the piece in the pages of the journal, my first concern was that they'll instead require a shortened version; I didn't want it published in abridged form. In the end, they agreed that the essay should be published in full, all 170 pages of it. Perhaps, it helped that I used to be an editor of the PLJ and that I sent them the piece with a note that it is in fact a work-in-progress that will be printed in book form in Amsterdam.

2008-03-05T02:39:00.000-08:00

Losing my Religion, Part II

Finally, a reply by Franky Schaeffer to Os Guinness' review of his book Crazy for God, an unflattering look at his father, the late evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer.

In the same pages of Books & Culture, we also find a rejoinder by Guinness.

2008-02-26T16:02:00.000-08:00

Losing my religion

As I often tell others, the works of the late evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer steered me towards an intense study of the intellectual integrity of biblical Christianity in my university years.There I was, struggling with the proposition that faith has become irrelevant, when a friend of mine mentioned Schaeffer to me. Reading his works and getting acquainted with the L'Abri community he had founded, I became convinced that evangelicalism still has something important to say to world. I have since transcended Schaeffer's approach to philosophy but I owe him a great debt of gratitude for steering me to stay on course. Hence it would come as a surprise to me when I learned later that his beloved son Franky had converted to the Orthodox faith, decrying all that his father had stood for as a big fraud. Recently, Franky would publish his memoirs of his family's life in L'Abri, aptly entitled ( or is it derisively entitled ?) Crazy for God. OS Guinness, who knew the Schaeffers well as a partner in the ministry (and would later on part ways with Francis over a disagreement on the issue of ministry direction) writes a well-considered review of Franky's book, disputing the caricature the son had reduced the father into in the book. With many others, I hope Franky would write a riposte to the Guinness piece.

-----------

John Marks , a well-known media personality in the US, is another self-confessed former evangelical. He has written a book accounting for how he got saved and was lost again. Read here a thoughtful review of the book by an evangelical who stayed in the faith, as found in the pages of Books and Culture.

2008-02-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

Out of Touch

Like the majority in the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), our leaders in the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) have been out of touch with reality. The PCEC recently issued a statement on the ZTE-FG Broadband scandal, occasioned by Jun Lozada's damning testimony linking the First Gentleman to the multi-million dollar scam. This is the PCEC's statement:

The emotional testimony of Jun Lozada before the Senate has been the favorite topic in many discussions in all levels of our society. However one views his words and actions, his revelations on the ZTE and other projects deserve greater attention and further investigation.

We appreciate the Senate for starting this investigation and bringing this to the attention of the Filipino people. But before the whole issue is muddled up with too much politicking, let us get to the bottom of it, fast. Let the truth be known, let culpability be determined and punishment be meted to those who will be found guilty.

We call on the Senate, Congress, and the President to form an independent, non-partisan, credible body to investigate the case and look at any legislative and/or executive remedy to
hasten the filing, prosecution, and punishment of those who are guilty. Time is of the essence here. Our people have long been subjected to accusations and charges that are left hanging. The whole system of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—is being eroded.

We affirm the President’s legitimacy as our leader. We are asking those who are planning to replace her using extra constitutional means to be prudent. Our nation can no longer bear any political upheaval. Let’s just wait for the 2010 elections.

We call on all Filipinos who are called by God’s Name, whether in government or in private sector, to go on a more serious reflection and prayerful self examination… How come
that the figures and percentage on bribes are getting higher? How much is needed to satisfy “moderate greed”? Since when have we embraced “permissible zone” as part of our ethics? Why have we become so good at being so bad? Have we forgotten the reason for our disgrace?

Moreover, we call on God’s people to pray—to ask God to “bestow the blessings of Deuteronomy 28” upon our godly leaders and to “rain down the curses” upon our leaders who persist in violating His laws.

“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people”
(Proverbs 14:34).

We plead with you to listen to this warning: “… But unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:3). It is in turning away from sin and seeking God can we hope for healing for this beloved land.

PCEC Board of Directors

14 February 2008

For more information, please call
Bishop Efraim M. Tendero at tel. no.
913-1658; fax nos. 913-1655 to 57
(local 601); or email us at
info@pceconline.org.

(emphasis supplied)

The PCEC has been turning a blind eye to the truth that all this goes all the way back to the one who has been illegitimately occupying the Office of the President, to the one who cheated her way to office, to the one who herself, presided over the signing of the graft-ridden ZTE broadband contract in China. One only needs to go over the PCEC's previous statements on the same, long-running problem named Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and see how blinded they have become to the truth. They just don't get it. I therefore call on our PCEC leaders to repent from their obstinate refusal to see the truth for what it is. The Inquirer's editorial on the failure of the CBCP to the same is apropos.

The Christian thing to do is to hold Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to account for her failure to abide by her oath of office and to ask her to resign.

2008-02-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

Sadness on Valentines' Day

A poem by April Bernard (New York Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2006 issue)

ROMANCE

I pine. There is an obstacle to our love.

Every time I hear the postman, I think: At last, the letter!
He has overcome the obstacle --

(It is a large obstacle, an actual alp, with a tree line
and sheer rock face streaked with snow even in July)

-- for love of me! For three years, nine decades, and one century
or so, there has been no letter. I still wait for the letter.

But lately I wonder if my predicament is outside the human,
neither noble nor farcical; if my heart courts pain

because it aims for immortality, something grander
than I can imagine. Most of what I imagine,

what I want, is small: Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes,
the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. I know

the gods punish the proud, but I do not yet know
why they punish the humble. Although after all

it is not humble to ask, every minute or so, for happiness.

------------------------

On the way to work this morning, the breaking news from friends: two people whom we knew held so much promise, perished in a car crash as they were driving to work. A bus lost its brakes and plowed into the path of other vehicles, and rammed into their car.

On Valentines Day, Pastor Kevin Alamag and his wife Belle left behind two little ones.

I remember Kuya Kevin and his improbable life story -- a son of a desaparecido, he grew up and was educated in the Catholic convent in the days of revolutionary ferment in the mountains of Abra; At a young age, he joined the communist guerillas to fight the government. But he met a miracle in the battlefield: one of his commanders, who had become a Christian, shared to him the Good News of Jesus Christ. It would change his life forever

His journey from the mountain jungles of Abra to the fastness of Diliman is itself quite a story. After receiving a notice that he had been accepted into the state university, he hitched a ride on a logging truck, not quite knowing how to get to Quezon City. But get there he did, with only a few clothes and a few pesos to see him through. His first week at UP, he slept at the Sunken Garden, because he had no money to pay for a room in a student's dormitory. A kindly dormitory manager at the now defunct Narra Residence Hall would eventually take pity on him, giving him a room and a job.

After earning a communications degree at UP, he worked as a writer/researcher for ABS-CBN, but soon, he found the pull of ministry irresistible. He went to seminary and it was there where he met Ate Belle.

I came to know Kuya Kevin when he became associate pastor at our small student-led church. I remember his first fumbling, if very bookish, sermon. And I remember how little by little he grew into a well-loved preacher. With a growing family (Ate Belle, after graduation, worked at seminary as registrar, until recently) he eventually moved to a big and a very challenging assignment, outside the familiar comforts of our denomination -- to UP's old Protestant church. An evangelical in a mainline church, Kuya Kevin's mettle as a pastor was severely tested. But I can say he acquitted himself well there, with a preaching ministry that drew people to the church. He tried hard to bring the church back to its evangelical roots and I believe by the time he transferred to the Greenhills Christian Fellowship, he had made many in the congregation realize how far they've pulled themselves away from the vitality of faith, from that Old Time religion, as the hymn says.

Increase our faith, O Lord, in our moments of doubt. Be our comfort in our times of grief.

2008-02-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

Madeleine L'Engle
1918–2007.

Madeleine L'Engle was a self-confessed Christian who sought to infuse her work as a writer with what she believed to be true. In this she did not in any way sacrifice her gift of creativity (though she had her own share of controversies in the often-contentious world of Christian publishing). I write in the past tense because I just discovered, after reading a tribute from her long-time friend and collaborator, the Christian poet Luci Shaw, that L'Engle had passed away. Reading Shaw's memories of L'Engle somehow reminded me of Dorothy Sayers, another Christian writer (and British dame) who also answered to the description Shaw has of her departed friend, compatriot and literary hero: "a powerful woman, large-hearted, fearless, quixotic, profoundly imaginative, unwilling to settle for mediocrity."

2008-02-08T02:03:00.000-08:00

The Comedy of Corruption

Filipinos are among the happiest people in the world. They know how to get a good laugh out of the worst situations. They simply grin and bear it. Just consider how they get back at corrupt public officials -- through countless jokes passed around by SMS. The Erap jokes come to mind. But can they match the Italians in the game of making humor an effective anti-corruption measure?

In connection with the raging brouhaha over the "ZTE-FG" Broadband Scandal, methinks Filipinos can learn a thing or two from an Italian comedian -- on how to take humor farther and use it to fight corruption, literally. Beppe Grillo is a national celebrity in his home country for doing just that, not only using political satire as a tool to shame corrupt public officials but also as a tool of some sort to prosecute them. New Yorker correspondent Tom Mueller writes how Grillo became a comedian of corruption, and how his brand of humor has led to the public undoing -- and prosecution -- of many a corrupt Italian politician and corporation. Click here . (Warning to the faint of heart : this excellent essay is punctuated by adult language).

2008-02-06T19:06:00.001-08:00

Remembered Random Thoughts on the Lion City

Singapore is a glorified Glorietta Mall, I say. My boss says it's a huge UP Campus -- with modern buildings and huge swaths of green to boot. Yet it's hotter than Manila, being closer to the equator (which explains its many malls linked to one another by air-conditioned covered walks. Singapore's taxis, though on the expensive side, are a joy to ride, because drivers don't ask you to pay extra and won't refuse passengers, the cars are mostly equipped with techno-gadgets that tell you up-to-date information on traffic, the weather, etc., and everything in the city's only 30 minutes away. I remember reading somewhere that Singapore is so small sometimes its air force has to rent air space from the Philippines for defense training. (Oh, they do have what in Manila are called colorum taxis, as we found as soon as we stepped out of Changi international airport, perhaps one of the best air ports in the world). Yes, the food scene is something to crow about. Newton's Park is where there's so much of it.

It's Supreme Court building is impressive, high technology contraptions and all, but justice and the rule of law is what government says they mean (more accurately, what Lee Kuan Yew says they mean). That is as far as politics is concerned. There is both no freedom of speech and no freedom to spit, which are relatively abundant in Manila. But Singapore can proudly point to a legal system that is business-friendly. That's why it's an international center for arbitration.

The National University of Singapore is on the list of top 20 universities in the world -- even edging out the Australian National University, but I wonder if it has the academic freedom that UP has. Singapore should have plenty of bike lanes, like Amsterdam, because it has the latter's infrastructure and financial capabilities, as well as iron-clad traffic discipline, to make it work. On second thought, who wants to bike in a hot and humid city?

It is a rich city alright, but in many ways it is also poor. For exciting art, for example, Singapore finds itself looking to its poorer neighbor, the Philippines. And what would life be for the rich Singaporeans without their Filipina maids? I hope we win our arbitration case against the snooty Spaniards. Our managing partner says that while cross-examining the Spaniards' principal witness, he thought he was defending Jose Rizal. And so it becomes thus: the colony beats the colonizer at its own game. Sana nga!

But no doubt about it, our case's sole arbitrator --a London-Paris trained Brit -- is very impressive. Bless the Queen and the British Isles!

2007-02-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

Off to the land of Nokia and saunas

Passenger 22A, sitting by the window, on board the "Flying Dutchman," Boeing 737 KLM flight KL 1169 bound for Helsinki, Finland.

Crew plied passengers with generous food and drinks -- not at all bad for the economy section of the trip. To date, there is still no budget airline plying the Amsterdam-Helsinki route so travellers have to make do with established lines like KLM, which nevertheless have instituted a discounted system for those who book their flights early.

The Big Freeze beneath my wings.

From more than 30,000 feet up in the sky, you look out the window and see that wide expanse of Scandinavia in the mid-afternoon freezing over with snow.

More ice -- or is it snow -- and at first I thought what I was looking at was a wide swath of the sea frozen over. But then the captain announced over the PA system that we're now passing over Sweden and will soon be in Helsinki in 40 minutes.

He also said the weather's fine as far as the Finns are concerned: an average of minus 15 degrees centigrade during the day and minus 22 degrees centigrade at night. That made the eight degrees centigrade we get in Amsterdam on any day seem like child's play.

A touchdown that was a little on the rough side of things on one of the runways of the newly-refurbished Helsinki International Airport. And throbbing pain on my left temple from the sudden change in cabin pressure! It happens to me every now and then on airplane trips.

At least, it wasn't half as bad as what it used to be. Tell you what, the most enjoyable flights I've ever had were ones I've taken on old Philippine Air Force C-130 Hercules transport behemoths while working as a journalist. Absolutely painless. A joy like no other. Standing-room only for the most part, and for airconditioning you can actually see small jets of freon spewing down every now and then from the ceiling . You have to shout to be able to converse with the other passengers.

From out of the cold, I step into the comfortable warmth of this bus and what do I hear? Olivia Newton-John singing about Xanadu (a mythical place of immortality immortalized by the poet Samuel Taylor Coledrige in a poem).

Finnair operates a fleet of buses that'll take you from the international airport to the center of the city. Platform no. 10 -- that's where you wait for the bus. And there's always one every 20 minutes, at 5.20 euros a head. Yep, that's a lady there on the wheel. The Finns are an egalitarian lot, you can say that.

Dormitory life.

Room no. 19, bunk no. 6 at the Stadion Hostel.

That's my relatively comfortable spot, at a cheap 16 euros a night. Call that economic determination.

Heating's not that good, I've been told by the Romanian guy named Danny occupying a bunk across mine, especially in the early morning. Danny's out here in freezing Helsinki in search of a job.

The lay of things.

This being a roomfull of men, you can right away see the patent disorder. My bunk (lower deck of the rearmost double-decker to your left) sits right next to the large three-panel glass window. Reminds me of some youth and student camps I've attended.

Japan is everywhere.

That's a young Japanese student named Sammy from Tokyo on my right. It's his third and last night at the dormitory.

Finland was his last stop in his itinerary that has likewise taken him to Sweden, Norway and Denmark. He proudly showed me a tourist's map where he had traced his winter-break travels all over Scandinavia on Eurorail, for under 150 dollars.

He also happily displayed to me some of his prized finds from a second-hand shop at the city center, like a nice designer suit he bought for only 3 euros. Sammy's one of several Japanese students billeted at the hostel -- moneyed and rearing for adventure. He'll soon be part of Japan, Inc : he's on his last year studying English at a university in Tokyo. He said in April, he'll be working as a salesman for a Japanese company that imports tires from China, Korea and the United States. His father is in the real estate business.

DAY TWO

Me, Myself and My Camera

Before the Helsinki Cathedral

A 90-minute lunch break from the conference takes me to a walking tour of the heart of Helsinki. The city is even smaller than Amsterdam; locals say you can actually cover Helsinki in one day -- but perhaps, not under -30 centigrade temperatures!

It was so cold I was afraid my nose would freeze and break into pieces. To take pictures, I often had to remove a glove from one hand; a few minutes of exposure to the cold and pulsing pain would shoot through the bared hand.

This conference is worth all the trouble: the reigning gods of international law -- many of them, anyway -- are all here. The Finnish scholar Martti Koskenniemi, of course, is the center of attraction. He chaired the International Law Commission's Study Group on the Fragmentation of International Law, and the landmark report it just released is the subject of the conference. Didn't know Mr. Koskenniemi is a good friend of my professor in constitutional law at dear old UP Law, Dean Pangalangan. They worked together at the Asian Development Bank administrative tribunal. In one of the sessions, I had the gumption to actually make a comment when I should have just shut my big mouth. I nearly died of embarrassment when I realized how stupid my remark sounded to the other delegates. It was just that I was coming from a philosophical position that, I am pretty sure, is totally alien to everyone else there. On second thought, maybe it wasn't that bad at all: at least, I tried to propound my own take on the issue at hand and it mattered not whether the others agreed with me.

2006-12-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

Amsterdam will not be without its breath-taking network of canals. Here's one photo taken along the Rozengracht.