Bojan's blog                Home

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI published the encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est, the first one of his pontificate. The letter focused on Christian love - its essence in the first part, and its working in charity through human institutions in the second part. In the past I've come to appreciate then Cardinal Ratzinger's works, and some of them are among my favorite books on Theology. I am pleased to find the same level of well thought-out arguments and crisp style in his encyclical as well. Even the part that press has dubbed "lyrical" are based on Biblical passages and the early Church Fathers, and the narrative never slips into mare sentimentalism.

As previously mentioned, the second part of the encyclical deals with charity, its place in Church's overall mission, and its role in a civil society. Here the proper relation between the Church and State is touched upon, and the argument is both subtle and forceful. For me one particular paragraph sticks out:

The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.

It is inevitable that the encyclical of such intellectual depth will not make for an easy summary, even less so for a catchy headline. Overall the press coverage so far seems even-headed, although there are plenty of headlines of the Pope's First Encyclical Warns Against Casual Sex type. Here a recent quote by Richard John Neuhaus could come in handy: I have been led to embrace something like an Occam’s razor with respect to journalistic distortions: Do not multiply explanations when ignorance will suffice.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that Google has gone through another reshuffling of its search algorithm, and the latest victim is my humble homepage. For months now www.tunguz.com has been at the top or close to it whenever you searched Google for either Tunguz or Bojan Tunguz. Recently I noticed a drop in traffic to my homepage, and when I googled the above two terms, my website was ranked pretty low, almost non-existent.

This all seems pretty fickle to me. Maybe I did not have all that many links to the homepage in the lower-level directories, but I did not use any shady tactic to promote my website somewhere else either. I am not running some kind of commercial enterprise, and the only people who would want to come to my website are those who are interested in me personally. In the same vain, the best place to find more information about me is from my homepage.

The good thing in all of this is that my UIUC homepage still comes at top of all these searches.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sharmin went home for the holidays, and she had been gone two and a half weeks. Needless to say, I've missed her a lot and I can't wait to see her again. She is coming back tomorrow, and after a substantial ordeal (two layovers, two airlines, and a long drive at the end) she will be home again. I just hope that everything about her trip goes smoothly, and I pray for her safe journey.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a voracious reader (Sharmin would say that I read like a donkey) and I am always looking for an opportunity to pick up a new book in the area that interests me, which is almost anything. Most of the time I am reading several books at once, and if a book is voluminous it can take me a long time to finish it. These days I am busy with my work, and I don't have enough spare time to go into many subjects' fine details. However, I still like learning about it in more than just superficial way.

A couple of years ago I discovered Very Short Introduction series of books by Oxford University Press. These are slim volumes of about hundred to hundred and fifty pages each, and they are geared towards general public in their style. Some of them, however, deal with fairly technical fields of knowledge, and even the accessible style can preclude non-experts from fully understanding the subject matter. Overall they are very well written, and I've been devouring them for some time. I've gone through 25 of them so far. My personal goal is to go through all of them one day.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today was the first day of teaching for me in the Spring semester. This time around I will have a much bigger teaching load. I'll teach two three hours lab sections instead of the usual two. My big concern at this point is the six straight hours that I'll be in the lab on Fridays, but I think I can pull it through.

The unusually mild winter seems to continue. Today's been another sunny day, and the temperature was well above the freezing. One could almost get used to winters like this one ...

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been a member of social networking site Orkut ever since its inception about two years ago. It's a site that is run by Google, and like many of its beta services membership is by invitation only (e-mail me if you want to join). The technology behind it is based on Microsoft's .NET platform, and in an opinion of many users it is not on par with other Google's services. Nevertheless, the site is a lot of fun and I've been able to meet a lot of interesting people this way from all around the world.

Discussions on Orkut can be heated sometimes, especially about hot-button topics like religion and politics. To me these topics are the most interesting ones and it can be extremely rewarding to have discussions about them with smart, sensible people who don't necessarily share your point of view. One of these people is Sameer Choudhary. He is Hindu and he is getting his MS from Purdue University. Since Purdue is not too far from me, I decided to go and meet with him yesterday. It was very interesting in its own right to be meeting someone for the first time whom you only interacted with through online discussions. We had really good conversation, and I was enriched by learning more first hand about his beliefs and religious practices. I was also able to clarify a few things about my own religion to him, and we were able to grow in mutual respect and understanding.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Due to some unforeseen technical problems with my current hosting provider I have not been able to put up any new blogs for more than two months. In the meanwhile, I've been trying to rebuild my "serious" website Naboj. There I am trying to create means by which to provide more dynamical and interactive way of reviewing scientific articles. Because of the aforementioned problems with my current web host, I was forced to fish around for a more flexible hosting plan. I finally settled for Bluehost. So far I am really happy with them: they are very flexible, straightforward, feature-rich, and the customer service is very easy to work with. i highly recommend them.

Posted by Bojan Tunguz at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)