Believer defends non-literal reading of the Bible

August 7, 2011 • 7:57 am

“Sophisticated” theologians who urge a non-literal reading of the Bible always put themselves in a bind.  And it is this: if the Bible is not to be read as a literal account of the truth, then how do we know which parts really are true, and which parts are fiction or metaphor?  Nobody has ever found a convincing way to winnow the true from the metaphorical, and so it becomes an exercise in cherry-picking.  I almost prefer the fundamentalist literalists (granted, nobody takes every Biblical word as literal truth) to those religious people who think, for no good reason, that they can discern the stories that are true (which always, of course, include Jesus’s divinity and resurrection) from those that are simply meant to impart “timeless truths.”

Over at HuffPo, David Lose, Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary, gives his rationale for Biblical cherry-picking in a piece called “Four good reasons not to read the Bible literally.” Here are his reasons, some better than others. All quotes are from Lose, except where indicated otherwise, are indented.

1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.  . . . The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of Chopin, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors’ experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).

He’s right that the self-contained claims for Biblical inerrancy are week. But I’m not so sure that the authors wrote not to impart what they thought was true, but to be “persuasive” (and what does that mean anyway?).  How can you persuade people, for example, of Jesus’s divinity without telling them that he was truly born of a virgin, resurrected, and performed miracles?

2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness. . . But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history — in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today — but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author.

Lose is right again that the different accounts of, say, things like the Resurrection are at serious odds with one another.  And he’s not troubled by them. But he should be, for if the discrepancies are signs of “confessions of faith,” then they’re also signs that maybe what is described didn’t happen at all.

3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally. We tend to think of anything that is labeled “conservative” as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church’s brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. For instance, St. Augustine — rarely described as a liberal — lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. . . Earlier Christians — along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity — simply didn’t imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment.

This really ticks me off, for it’s complete crap.  While many earlier Christians and church fathers may not have seen the Bible as totally inerrant, they certainly thought that many if not most of its stories were literally true. Anyone who studies the history of Christianity knows this, and it’s disingenuous for Lose to pretend otherwise.

And to prove this he trots out the old warhorse of St. Augustine.  I’ve dealt with Augustine’s literalism in a previous post, and have also corresponded about it recently with my friend Grania Spingies, an ex-Catholic.  Rather than paraphrase what she told me about Augustine, which verges on stealing her own ideas, I’ll simply present an excerpt from her email, quoted with permission:

The most that can be said for Augustine is that he was an educated man who was prepared to believe that those parts of the Bible that were evidently not literally true (at least to the extent of his knowledge at the time) could be interpreted as metaphorical.  He was a philosopher and applied this to areas (such as eschatology) that had to be “fixed” as it was clear they were not accurate.

He was on the other hand very much a believer in the faith and therefore his reasoning was typical of theology today: trying to reverse-engineer an explanation to excuse obvious short-comings in their sacred texts. Even Aquinas said of Augustine, “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the theories of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found contrary to the faith, he amended.”

In Augustine’s own words: “Faith goes before; understanding follows after.”  In other words, he was a cherry-picker too.

Another thing he did was to take something that he believed was a literal and historical text and try to glean a further philosophical aphorism or truth from it. (This is common enough—priests do this all the time for their Sunday homilies). It didn’t mean that he didn’t think the words had a literal meaning or truth, just that they could also convey an extra moral lesson as well.

Here’s Augustine’s money quote, showing in his own words that he thought that a great deal of the Bible was to be taken literally:  “But just as, I think, they err greatly who are of opinion that none of the records of affairs in that kind of writings mean anything more than that they so happened, so I think those very daring who contend that the whole gist of their contents lies in allegorical significations. ” (City of God, Book XVII, Chapter 3, paragraph 2)

And, there were plenty of things that Augustine believed in literally:

  • Adam & Eve
  • Jesus (Ha! the theologians never take him metaphorically!)
  • Original Sin complete with serpent 
  • Creation of world by God from nothing as in Genesis
  • The gospels (again his own words: “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself. “
  • Other Bible characters: “Who else save Joshua the son of Nun divided the stream of the Jordan for the people to pass over, and by the utterance of a prayer to God bridled and stopped the revolving sun? Who save Samson ever quenched his thirst with water flowing forth from the jawbone of a dead ass? Who save Elias was carried aloft in a chariot of fire?” (Tractates, XCI, Ch XV, 24-25, 2).

Quite a number of Augustine’s books are online here. But you have better things to do with your time than read them. He may well have been an intellectual giant of his day, but his ideas are so outdated and even then, so deliberately tendentious, that they are like much of modern theology—so much sophisticated hot air.

Finally, Lose’s last point:

4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.  Read the Bible even for a little while and you’ll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister — twice! — in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the “heroes of the faith” are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that’s the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels — “jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul calls them — to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being “fully human and fully divine” that is normally reserved only for Jesus.

But is that really the point? Is Moses really supposed to come off as a murderer? And, for that matter, is the Old Testament God supposed to come off as a genocidal and egocentric bully?

And was God himself supposed to be a “complicated person with feet of clay”?  The most telling thing, though, is Lose’s final sentence here.  While all the other stuff in the Bible could be metaphor, or fictional, Jesus himself is “fully human and fully divine” without a scintilla of doubt.  If he wasn’t, then Christians like Lose might as well hang up their faith. Why is the truth reserved for Jesus’s story alone, while everything else is up for grabs?  Clearly, some parts of the Bible are not negotiable.

St. Petersburg: to the Finland Station

August 7, 2011 • 5:22 am

I often wonder what Russia would have been like had Lenin and the Bolsheviks not assumed power during the Russian Revolution.  A revolution was clearly in the offing anyway, and surely the tsar would have been deposed, but perhaps had Lenin not existed, Russia might have avoided the tortures, famines, and persecutions of the years under Communism.

At any rate, I saw few signs of those times in St. Petersburg.  There are a few plaques and statues of Lenin, but not much else.  There are, however, a few monuments to the revolution. One is at the Finland Station, a railroad station famous as the arrival point of Lenin on April 16, 1917, an event that ultimately triggered the October revolution that put the communists in power.  Lenin was in Switzerland when he heard about the earlier February revolution, and he, in complicity with the German government, arranged to be ferried across Germany in a closed train. (Germany was at war with Russia, and hoped that Lenin’s arrival there would speed Russia’s withdrawal from the war.)

Lenin then went to Sweden, and was taken to St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) on a train whose locomotive is now preserved on the platform at the Finland Station (below). This locomotive is also the same one, with the same driver, that brought Lenin back from Finland when he had to beat a hasty retreat there in August after the Bolsheviks had been arrested.  Lenin returned to the Finland Station for the second time in October, 1917.  The rest is history.

When Lenin arrived the first time, he made a famous address to the crowd while standing atop an armored car.  The substance of his revolutionary speech has, as far as I know, been lost to history.  Lenin’s writings, produced during his exile in Switzerland, were well known to the Russian public, but his arrival in Petrograd was the first time that many of them had actually seen the man who would so alter their lives. Here’s a depiction of his arrival:

The title of my post comes from a famous book by literary critic Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, an erudite but readable account of the history of revolutionary thought beginning with the French Revolution and culminating with Lenin’s arrival at the station. I’d recommend it if you have any interest in the Russian Revolution. (Wilson was, by the way, one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best friends when they were undergrads at Princeton).

Here’s the plaque at the locomotive site. (As I said in a previous post, I had to do some extremely fast talking, helped by a Russian student, to get onto the platform to see the locomotive. I think that few tourists try to see it, for entry to the platform is forbidden):

My colleague Ilya Ruvinsky translates the Russian as follows: “13.6.1957 – June 13, 57.  The Government of Finland gifted this steam engine to the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in memory of the trips taken by V. I. Lenin in Finland during difficult times.”

A statue of Lenin stands in the square in front of the station, supposedly right on the spot where he addressed the crowd from the armored car. He seems to be standing on a turret:

Sadly, the original Finland Station was torn down in 1970 to make way for the new station, a Soviet-style monstrosity.

One other relic of the Revolution is a naval vessel that floats, permanently at rest, in the Bolshaya Nevka harbor.  It’s the Russian cruiser Aurora, built in Petrograd for the Russo-Japanese war.  The ship returned to Petrograd in 1916, where revolution was already in the air, and many of the crew became Bolsheviks.  Supposedly at Lenin’s orders, the ship fired a blank shot at the Winter Palace at 9:45 p.m., Nov. 7, 1917 (October 25 under the old-style calendar).  It was that shot that was the signal for the assault on the Palace that led to the Bolsheviks’ assumption of power.

The Aurora was sunk during the Nazi’s siege of Leningrad, but was raised, repaired, and now serves as a museum.  I couldn’t enter because it was closed on the day I visited, but the ship is still evocative of not only the Revolution, but of a bygone era when warships look antiquated to our eye (note the two masts for sails):

Perry has his Big Prayer Meeting

August 6, 2011 • 1:06 pm

Today’s New York Times reports on the big prayer meeting that Texas governor Rick Perry had at Reliant Stadium in Houston.

Standing on a stage surrounded by thousands of fellow Christians on Saturday morning, Gov. Rick Perry called on Jesus to bless and guide the nation’s military and political leaders and “those who cannot see the light in the midst of all the darkness.”

“Lord, you are the source of every good thing,” Mr. Perry said, as he bowed his head, closed his eyes and leaned into a microphone at Reliant Stadium here. “You are our only hope, and we stand before you today in awe of your power and in gratitude for your blessings, and humility for our sins. Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”

This is, of course, a prelude to Perry’s likely bid for the Republican nomination for president.  It was opposed by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which filed (and lost) a court complaint that Perry’s participation in a religious rally violated the First Amendment.  And there was more Jesus-ing:

“I wish you could see what I see here,” announced Luis Cataldo, a leader of the International House of Prayer, a Christian ministry in Kansas City, Mo., as the event began at 10 a.m. “This is the body of Christ.”

He said that there would no long speeches, no banners, no signs. “You didn’t come here to listen to people preach,” he told the crowd. “You came to pray, and Jesus wants to hear your voice.”

These people don’t seem to realize that even among religious Americans, there are many who don’t worship Jesus. But of course who ever won an election by catering to Muslims, Jews, or atheists?

Can species arise in a small space?

August 6, 2011 • 10:51 am

One of the big controversies in the study of speciation involves the spatial scale of the process.  Can an ancestral species split into two descendants within a single small area (“sympatric speciation”), or do populations have to be geographically isolated before they can evolve into new species (“allopatric speciation”)?  Clearly the formation of new species is easier if gene flow between the incipient species is prevented, for that gene flow impedes the evolutionary divergence that creates new species. (My—and most biologists’—notion of species are groups that cannot exchange genes because of evolved, genetically-based barriers to gene flow.  Those “reproductive isolating barriers” evolve more easily in populations that are physically prevented from exchanging genes, such as those isolated by rivers or mountain ranges, or those that invade a remote island.)

In the book on speciation I wrote with Allen Orr in 2004, we concluded that sympatric speciation, while theoretically possible, was rare.  There were a few putative examples of species that seem to have arisen in small areas (the tiny lakes in volcanic craters of Cameroon, for example, contain more than a half-dozen species that descended from a common ancestor), but these examples were not common.

However, even if sympatric speciation were common, it would be hard to find, for you have to identify closely related species that you know were never geographically isolated. Given the history of climatic change and the movement of species’ ranges even in recent times (glaciation moves species around willy-nilly), that’s a tall order.

In our book, Allen and I suggested a way around this problem: look for closely related species confined to very small areas like isolated island and volcanic crater lakes.  If in those places you can find “monophyletic” species—that is, species more closely related to each other than to other species—you could reasonably conclude that those species had formed in those small areas—that is, that sympatric speciation had occurred.  Such studies don’t require one to know the biogeographical history of the species, since, living in small confined areas, they could never have been geographically isolated.

My colleague Trevor Price and I did the first systematic study of this problem, looking at bird species on isolated “oceanic islands” (that is, those islands that arose from beneath the sea, bereft of life).  Surveying 46 of these islands, we found not a single example of two avian “sister species” (i.e., each other’s closest relatives) on an oceanic island. Our conclusion: birds did not undergo sympatric speciation.  The same conclusion came from a survey of island lizards by Jon Losos and Dolph Schluter in 2000.  In these groups, then, geographic isolation seems necessary for the origin of new species.

In a new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alex Papadopulos and six other authors continue this strategy, but looking at plants instead of vertebrates.  They chose to survey the flora of an isolated oceanic island, Lord Howe.  Lord Howe is small (about 16 square kilometers), was formed as a volcano about 6.9 million years ago, and is located between Australia and New Zealand:

Although I’ve never been there, it’s a gorgeous place. Here’s a aerial photo sent to me by one of the paper’s authors (click for a splendid enlargement). You can see that while a bit of of the island is settled, a lot of it is native forest, and thus affords a good chance to see if an ancestral species can split into two or more descendants in this small space.  An earlier paper by Savolinen et al. had shown that two species of palm trees on the island were each other’s closest relatives, and this result spurred scientists to do a more extensive survey.

So did they find speciation events occurring in Lord Howe plants?  The short answer is yes.  I’ve written a two-page commentary for the journal, explaining the results and why they are important. Although the paper itself and my commentary are behind a paywall, I’ll be glad to send pdf files to anyone who requests them by email.

A survey of the plants, combined with a phylogenetic study of the genera of those plants (such a study is required to show that two closely related species on Lord Howe really are each other’s closest relatives) identified at least nine other species—and perhaps as many as 18—that may have descended from common ancestors on the island.  Adding the two species of palms that were already identified, this brings the proportion of total species on the island that arose via sympatric speciation to between 4 and 8%. That figure is larger than most biologists would have guessed.

As I note in my commentary, this is not only an important finding, but one that can be extended to many other islands and groups.  After all, the oceans are full of isolated islands, and many of them have endemic species just begging to be studied systematically.  It’s through that kind of work that we’ll eventually learn how common is the process of sympatric speciation.  If it seems to occur often on these islands, then it probably also occurs often on the continents, where it’s much less likely to be identified.

Oh, and here are the two sister species of palms that formed on Lord Howe: Howea forsteriana (l.) and H. belmoreana (r.).  The former, also known as the Kentia Palm, is grown throughout the world as an ornamental plant.

____________

Coyne, J. A. 2011.  Speciation in a small space. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, published ahead of print August 3, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1110061108
Coyne, J. A. and H. A. Orr. 2004.  Speciation.  Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA.
Coyne, J. A., and T. D. Price. 2000. Little evidence for sympatric speciation in island birds. Evolution 54:2166-2171.
Losos, J. B., and D. Schluter. 2000. Analysis of an evolutionary species-area relationship. Nature 408:847-850.
Papadopulos, A. S. T. et al.. 2011.  Speciation with gene flow on Lord Howe Island.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, published ahead of print July 5, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1106085108
Savolainen, V., M. et al. 2006. Sympatric speciation in palms on an oceanic island. Nature 441:210-213.

Caturday felid: The cats of St. Petersburg

August 6, 2011 • 3:57 am

Although I’m told that Russians love their cats, you couldn’t prove it by me.  In my ten days in St. Petersburg, I saw exactly one living felid: a feral cat in the park at the Peterhof, Peter the Great’s summer palace 45 minutes from the city.  And I only glimpsed the black cat (which, by the way, ran across my path) for a moment:

My personal observation, then, supports the hypothesis that the city of St. Petersburg harbors no cats.  However, there are monuments to felids in the city.  One striking one was in the gardens of St. Petersburg State University.  I was told at first that it was a monument to the cats studied by Pavlov (who worked there), but ultimately found out that this was an urban legend. The truth, however, is just as interesting.  During the Soviet era, there were lots of dire experiments conducted on cats at the University.  Supposedly some of them got loose, and ran around the grounds with electrodes protruding from their heads. Regardless, one of the physiology professors collected money to put up a monument in honor of the cats who gave their lives for these experiments.

this is the only picture I asked to have taken of me in the city:

There are two other statues of cats in the city.  One memorializes Yelisei the Cat, a hero of the siege of Leningrad in World War II:

If you don’t know the story of the seige, it’s heartbreaking, and a testament to the fortitude of the Russian people.  The city was cut off and bombarded by the Germans for 872 days—from August, 1941 through January, 1944.  Over a million people are said to have died, many from starvation, and for much of the time there was no outside supply of food.  The statue to Yelisei seen above (not my photo) supposedly memorializes the prowess of this cat at catching rats, which became an endemic health problem after many cats either died or were eaten during the blockade. Yelisei was supposedly one of many outside cats brought into the city to control the rats.

Here’s another cat statue from St. Petersburg, and again this is not my photo. I’m not sure what it commemorates; perhaps a reader can tell us.

I’ve previously posted on the basement cats of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, whose job is to keep the palace and art collection free of rodents.

Although I spent a lot of time in art museums, I saw only one painting that included a cat. But it is quite a famous one, Merchant’s Wife at Tea (1918), by Boris Kustodiev. It’s at the Russian Museum, and I sneaked this picture because I hadn’t bought an expensive pass to photograph the art:

The museum shop did sell expensive Russian lacquered boxes with images of kittehs. I didn’t buy any, but here’s a photo:

Finally, I am always curious to see what the locals feed their cats.  I went into Lend, a fancy supermarket, and after diligent searching found the cat food section.  Most of it appears to be imported, though with Cyrillic characters. Here are some cans:

But the most amusing thing was the variety of bagged cat food for cats of different temperaments and ages. These include the following varieties:

  1. Food for “specially demanding” or “sensitive” cats
  2. Food for “senior” cats who are “young at heart”
  3. Food for “fluffy homebodies,” or “in-home” cats
  4. Food for “tireless adventurers,” or “active” cats
  5. Food for “little explorers,” or “junior” cats

I almost expected to see an empty bag for “dearly departed” or “dead” cats.

Hawking is an atheist

August 5, 2011 • 12:12 pm

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll describes a panel discussion he had with two accommodationist scholars (Paul Davies and John Haught) following a broadcast of a new show on cosmology starring Stephen Hawking, “Is there a creator?”. That show and the discussion will air on the Discovery Channel this Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

Carroll makes it clear that despite certain ambiguous statements by Hawking, the man is certainly an atheist, and the answer to the question posed by his show’s title is an unambiguous “no.”  This is also clear in an interview conducted with Hawking by USA Today.

Carroll is understandably peevish that a show about cosmology is so easily hijacked into questions of religion, but was happy to get in his licks.

The more I thought about it, the more appropriate I thought the episode really was. I can’t speak for Hawking, but I presume his interest in the topic stems from similar sources as my own. It’s not just a coincidence that we are theoretical cosmologists who happen to go around arguing that God doesn’t exist. The question of God and the questions of cosmology arise from a common impulse — to understand how the world works at its most fundamental level. These issues naturally go hand-in-hand. Pretending otherwise, I believe, probably stems from a desire on the part of religious believers to insulate their worldview from scientific critique.

Besides, people find it interesting, and rightfully so. Professional scientists are sometimes irritated by the tendency of the public to dwell on what scientists think are the “wrong” questions. Most people are fascinated by questions about God, life after death, life on other worlds, and other issues that touch on what it means to be human. These might not be fruitful research projects for most professional scientists, but part of our job should be to occasionally step back and look at the bigger picture. That’s exactly what Hawking is doing here, and more power to him. (In terms of his actual argument, I’m sympathetic to the general idea, but would take issue with some of the particulars.)

While you’re over there, check out Sean’s two new posts on the water-on-Mars discovery and his new paper on the origin of the universe.

And if you watch the Hawking show, and the post-show debate, weigh in here with your take (I’m the only living American who doesn’t get cable television). I’ll be “debating” Haught in October (not a debate really, but two back-to-back talks on faith and science), and try to follow his views.

More religious miscreants

August 5, 2011 • 10:15 am

The Gainesville Sun reports that the goddies are vandalizing cars that sport evolution emblems such as Darwin fish.  After having Darwin emblems repeatedly removed from their cars, biologist Brian McNab and science historian Betty Smocovitis now report that the vandalism has escalated: both have long nails driven into their tires.  Relevant to yesterday’s question by David DiSalvo, has anybody reported atheists vandalizing cars sporting the Jesus fish?

And this, from UPI, is unbelievable.  I present the story in its entirety:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (UPI) — The U.S. Air Force has halted a presentation for missile launch officers on the ethics of nuclear weapons because of objections to its religious content.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said it was approached by 31 officers upset by the briefing, CNN reported Thursday. Chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had been doing the briefing for almost two decades.

“There were several things that they found disgusting,” Mikey Weinstein, who founded the watchdog group, said. “The first was the fact that there is actually a slide that makes it clear that they’re trying to teach that, under fundamentalist Christian doctrine, war is a good thing.”

Weinstein said he and others in the foundation were “literally blown away” by some of the slides. One quoted Revelations describing Jesus Christ as a “mighty warrior.”

The Pentagon canceled the briefings last week. Senior Air Force officials said they did not know of the content.

I hate to nit-pick here (LOL!), but Weinstein was figuratively, not literally blown away.  Literal blowing-away is what would happen if those Christians got their hands on the button. Beyond that, I’ve always heard that some fundies are in favor of nuclear war, but I haven’t actually seen that in action.

h/t: Steve

St. Petersburg: food

August 5, 2011 • 5:10 am

Since I was in St. Petersburg for only about ten days, and five of those were at a scientific meeting, I can’t say that I’m deeply acquainted with Russian food.  What I did have I enjoyed very much, but what I’m presenting is just an eclectic selection of pictures of what I ate, or what I saw.

First, two places I did not eat, but which you’ll want to see anyway:

The menu (in Soviet Russia, the cheeseburger noms you):

The plush chicken was advertising some chicken restaurant next door:

The St. Petersburg equivalent of McDonald’s is “Teremok,” a chain that specializes in blini, or Russian crepes.  They also have kasha, or buckwheat porridge, and kvass, a lightly alcoholic drink I’ve mentioned before, which is made from fermented rye bread.  The food at Teremok is very good, and I ate there several times during my perambulations. Here’s a five-dollar lunch of a cabbage and egg blini, a bowl of pea soup (Russians seem to have soup as a fixture of lunch and dinner), and a big cold glass of kvass, which I like very much:

Breakfast at our hotel, the Oktiabrskaya off the Nevsky Prospekt, was awesome.  It was a huge buffet with about five steam tables, a juice station, a fruit station (often with a huge bowl of fresh cherries) and a separate room with pastries, tea, and coffee. The Russians seem to favor cold meat, cheese, and vegetables for breakfast:

Also little pancake-y thingies, which I often ate with eggs, though I don’t know what they are:

And the pastry table:

During the conference, the organizers fed us very well. We had a four course meal for both lunch and dinner at good restaurants. Here are some of the dishes.  Lunch and dinner would begin with a salad, usually made of chopped ingredients.  Here’s a lovely one with beef and vegetables.

Then a soup, often borscht, which can be made out of vegetables other than beets. It invariably comes with a dollop of sour cream:

Main courses include cabbage stuffed with meat and rice (I love this dish, as my mother often made it when I was a kid):

or stuffed grape leaves (dolmades in Greek); I didn’t know this was a Russian dish as well but I always love it:

Codfish with stewed eggplant:


Chicken cutlet with beet sauce. I confess that this was the only dish I didn’t like, as the beet sauce was not only too sweet, but didn’t complement the flavor of the chicken:


Dessert and lunch and dinner was usually forgettable, and I know little about Russian desserts. I was told that they’re not a huge feature of the national cuisine.

I haven’t been on dinner cruises on boats (they’re a staple of Parisian tourist life), but my impression was that the food on such junkets was always dire.  But that wasn’t true of our cruise down the Neva, kindly provided by the organizers of our conference.  The food was fantastic, beginning, as usual in Russia, with a huge and tempting array of salads:

One can easily make a meal from the salads (which include tongue and smoked fish), for they’re often better than the main courses:

And what is a festive meal without many shots of cold vodka? Truth be told, I was scared of the stuff, as I’m not used to downing shots of hard stuff. But I found it surprisingly smooth, and it complemented the food well. In fact, I drank more than my share, so I had a bit of a buzz.  Cruising down the Neva and viewing the royal palaces is an absolute delight when seen through a slight vodka-induced fog:


When I was on my own, I got an email from Eric Michael Johnson, who runs the website The Primate Diaries.  Eric was in Russia doing his thesis research on the concept of cooperation in evolution, and invited me to lunch at a place called Tolstiy Fraer (The Fat Friar).  Here’s Eric:

We had a lovely lunch, and I’d recommend that place for traditional Russian food at reasonable prices.  I had blini with mushrooms and sour cream:

Followed by chicken Kiev with potatoes and vegetables (a stent on a plate):

One of my favorite hobbies in foreign countries is visiting both the markets and supermarkets, for there you can get a good idea of what the people eat.  I went to one supermarket, called Lend. It was very expensive and carried a lot of foreign goods. But the deli counters were traditionally Russian. Here’s the “salad” bar:

I also checked out the cat food, which I always do in foreign supermarkets. I’ll show some Russian cat food when I post on St. Petersburg cats tomorrow.

I had only once chance to go to a market, and it was on a Sunday, so it was quiet.  This is the indoor Kuznechny Market, which I stumbled upon after visiting Dostoyevsky’s house:

The honey vendors had a huge selection:

The honey was sold in combs, jars, and these lovely jugs:

Dried mushrooms:

Russians seem very big on mild white cheese; it was popular at our hotel breakfast. The market carried a huge selection:

I rarely visit a place as far away as Russia without staying for several weeks, so I was sad to leave after only about ten days.  I clearly had only scratched the surface of the national cuisine.  My main impression: I love blinis!