According to a 2020 nation-wide survey on religious pluralism, conducted by the National University of Colombia together with World Vision Colombia and the Swedish Church, 70% of Colombians disagreed with the idea that religious organizations should back a specific political party or candidate. Of those, almost 60% of Evangelicals/Pentecostals (the category established by the survey team) also disagreed. In other words, only a small minority of Colombians support the idea of churches or religious organizations backing a political party or candidate.
That said, the essay still captures the specific historical moment of November 2016 and its significance both in U.S. and Colombian politics. The piece also offers explicitly ethnographic insight into one mega-church in Colombia, where I carried out years of research. With perhaps insufficient nuance, I wrote as though the singular experience of the MCI could characterize a broader Evangelical political world. Currently, there are significant sectors of Colombian Evangelical movements that are committed to peacebuilding and restorative justice, just as there are similar movements in the Colombian Catholic church. Equally, there are sectors of Colombian Evangelical and Catholic movements that are committed to more conservative and internal reform, and campaign for policies and laws that reflect those commitments.
Eight years since the signing of the Peace Accords, peacebuilding still requires deep and attentive social dialogue, invested analysis of and from all sectors of civil society, and a full regime of truth-telling at all levels of power. It requires strategy and time. It also requires acts of believing in something that does not yet exist. And from scholars, peacebuilding also requires the sensitivity to not uncritically impose the heuristics of empire on incomparable contexts. Colombia continues to teach lessons about the necessity of decolonial and anti-imperialist critique in studies of religion. I hope readers still find elements of that critique here.
The plebiscite was instated by President Juan Manuel Santos, a recently minted Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Hopes for the ratification of an historic peace agreement between the government and the FARC, the oldest insurgency movement in the Western hemisphere, were dashed when the No vote overtook the Yes vote on October 2. The vote, which was lost by fractions of a percentage point (50.2/49.7), was meant to solidify what President Santos assumed was overwhelming popular approval of the peace agreements. So confident was the Santos government that they had not even considered a Plan B. Yet the influence of the established center of power would demonstrate its fragility; a pattern that seems to be repeating itself the world over.
The new agreement, admittedly better than the first agreement, is based in firm commitment to human rights, dignity of all, and democratic process. It was forged not by ignoring a radical set of religious ideas and hyperbolic misinterpretations of language, but rather through deep and difficult engagement with profoundly differing ideals. While the New Evangelicals are a transnational political force to be reckoned with, and carefully, at that, the possibility of civil debate and dialogue is a lesson we can all learn from a country that has borne the horrific burden of half a century of civil war. Colombia has emerged from the ashes, ready to begin the long process of sustained implementation of peace. Recognizing, naming, and addressing diversity and difference has become key to designing the blueprint for a new country. And religion, as always and for better or worse, has played more than a passive role.
Cambridge Mechatronics Ltd (CML) has developed Zero Hold Power (ZHP) actuator technology which enables focus correction at very low average power consumption. By leveraging the high force-to-weight ratio of SMA this actuator architecture only draws power to move between positions. Therefore, with ZHP technology, the average power consumption is drastically reduced, offering a clear benefit over traditional focus correction mechanisms which often demand constant power, draining the battery. Therefore, this technology is ideal for applications requiring occasional position changes and are constrained on battery size.
Our SMA Zero Hold Power technology has several applications in Head Mounted Display (HMD) systems. A first use-case is to compensate for thermal focus drift (athermalisation). This is where a change in the temperature causes the optics to change focus, diminishing the system performance. The ZHP actuator intermittently and accurately repositions the optic to prevent loss of performance. An additional benefit is that this architecture can remove the requirement for expensive and heavy glass lens elements. Thanks to the zero hold power feature this is achieved without compromising on the system power consumption. Athermalisation is important in many other markets including IoT cameras and front-facing smartphone cameras.
In contrast, in a dynamic focus display, the virtual image distance (green planes) is constantly updated to match the stereoscopic distance of the target. Thus, the vergence and accommodation distances can be matched. An extension to this is using similar actuator architectures for prescription correction, preventing the need for custom optical inserts.
About CML: Cambridge Mechatronics Limited (CML) is a world-leading developer of mechanical, optical, electrical, silicon, and software designs for system-level solutions using its Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) platform technology. Actuator solutions based on SMA wire (thin as hair) can be controlled to submicron accuracy. These actuators are particularly suited to applications requiring high precision and force levels, in a fast, compact, and lightweight design.
Another major regression with the new vertical-only tabs on panels: AFAIK they can only be places on the very far edge of the screen, right edge on this case, which adds some tremendously long commutes to my constant mouse travel. compared to having them on top, or even vertical, but letting put them on the left edge.
I like the vertical tabs but there needs to be an option on which side to dock them. Having them forced to the outside of the viewport means there is extra mouse travel required to access them. In V7 I have the UI configured for minimal travel to access pretty much everything.
Now, the originator of this postmodern approach to power/knowledge was, of course, Michel Foucault. It is central to his entire notion of "discourse," which itself descended from his essentially poststructural (poststructuralism is an academic species of the larger cultural genus postmodernism) adaptation of the structuralist position that reality (and the knowledge thereof) is constructed by systems of signs. That is to say, the signified, in the structuralist view, is not something detected outside the sign system: it is constituted by the sign system. From here it is not a very large step to the poststructural position that whoever controls the sign system controls what counts as "reality," as "truth" itself.
There is certainly no shortage of historical instances in which this vision of power/knowledge has indeed been played out. The Third Reich, for example, rejected relativity theory as "Jewish physics," and that was that as far as Germany was concerned. George Orwell, for his part, gave dramatic expression to this sort of thing in 1984: 2+2=5 if Big Brother says so.
Thus, it comes down to a simple question. What is a more effective response to the post-truth claim, for example, that climate science is hoax: the position that all scientific claims are expressions of power/knowledge, or the position that concrete empirical evidence gets us closer to the truth of climate change than do the claims of power? This is not a rhetorical question, because I do not suppose that everyone will agree with my own answer to it, which happens to be as simple as the question itself: I prefer to oppose power/knowledge with objectively measurable data. For me, reality is not subject to a referendum.
And just as interestingly, as I was putting the finishing touches on this blog, an essay by Mark Lilla appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education saying substantially the same thing: i.e., if students accept "the mystical idea that anonymous forces of power shape everything in life," they "will be perfectly justified in withdrawing from democratic politics and casting an ironic eye on it." Now, two Humanities professors in agreement doth not a movement make, but it's heartening to see that my thoughts are shared by someone else.
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