February 2012
8 posts
“Would you redeem it ? then yourself transplant
Awhile from hence. ...”
– John Donne, To Sir Henry Goodyere
“Vital materialists will thus try to linger in those moments during which they...”
– Jane Bennett,
Vital Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Convo with Slavo →
“This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is…we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose…. The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions.”
- Zizek
“Truth without goodness and beauty degenerates into dogmatism, and lacks the...”
– J. de Gruchy
http://themediares.squarespace.com/ex-libris/
1 tag
January 2012
24 posts
4 tags
“To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or a...”
– Michel De Certeau
They will tell us we are un-American. But when... →
Actual Politics: Slavoj Zizek’s collected occupy sayings.
Wounded is the Wounding Heart
Leave her alone...
3 tags
“New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously...”
– Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
“Ritual and Ceremonial things move not God, but they exalt that Devotion, and...”
– John Donne (via triadic)
“The poem, as always, precedes our progress. But perhaps our progress made the...”
– Oh my de Certeau,
The Mystic Fable
“All at once this text is no longer one of those intended to teach us something...”
– Valery, on poetry
4 tags
“All new technologies develop within a background of tacit understanding of human...”
– Understanding Computers and Cognition,
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
7 tags
“In suggesting that many modernist texts are shot through with and even shaped by...”
– John A. McClure,
“Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality”
“TRANSPARENCY IS THE GAUGE OF ALL VALUE WHEN CUTTING WHEN WRITING
A DIAMOND IS...”
– Christian Bök, from Crystallography (via minisoap)
“[T]he moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice,...”
– Slavoj Žižek
4 tags
No one can be a neighbor, unless he can be near
St. Augustine remarks on the superiority of local charity to what Dickens might call “telescopic philanthropy”:
“All other men are to be loved equally; but since you cannot be of assistance to everyone, those especially are to be cared for who are most closely bound to you by place, time or opportunity.”
On Christian Doctrine 1.29
Evangelical Brain Trust →
Molly Worthen’s smart review of the new book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age—a study of one of my favorite topics—contemporary Evangelicalism and its relationship to intellectualism in America.
“But their promises to reconcile the Bible with modern thought do not conceal that this balancing act has forced evangelicals to live in a crisis of...
But it’s a political delusion to think Rick... →
John Gehring’s issue by issue deconstruction of Rick Santorum’s political theology and how it “ignores the Catholic social justice tradition’s broad moral agenda” as it disregards the Vatican’s stance on nearly everything, from torture to financial regulation.
5 tags
New post from Martin Luther →
The Economist on what the Arab Spring has in common with the Reformation
“The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing...
December 2011
28 posts
3 tags
Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?
Chris...
“North Korea and evangelical empires have the same principle of leadership:...”
– Frank Schaeffer
2 tags
Cosmically Irreverant and Comically Cosmic
John McClure on postmodern fiction:
“The postmodern works that most interest me (Pynchon’s, Reed’s, Denis Potter’s, Tarentino’s) read, to borrow Italo Calvino’s title, like “cosmic comics.” Wild and defiantly unrealistic exercises in irreverent citation, genre-splicing, excess, caricature, and the grotesque, they run so against the grain of...
6 tags
The Past, the People, and the GOP
As scholars, writers, and critics we spend a significant portion of our lives thinking, talking, and writing about the past. The nature of language itself insists that we constantly grapple with history, as it requires us to define ourselves in light of or against what came before. And, as we seek to articulate ourselves (and others), and to speak about the present in any kind of coherent way,...
This Terribly Significant Business of Other People
Phllip Roth on being wrong: the impossibility, and yet, the unassailable value of knowing others.
“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong all over again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the...
2 tags
Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street? →
Rowan Williams thinks “yes.”
4 tags
"I refuse to believe corporations are... →
Another excellent post by my friend and colleague Gaelan Gilbert, this time on persons and post-humans.
“That tension manifests itself in regard to the issue of personhood. For while the ontological question of personhood still and will forever persist among those who take seriously the factors which exceed mere economics, the functional definition of personhood in legal procedure has...
7 tags
Politics, Religion and the Tea Party - Fault Lines... →
Al Jazeera on Politics, Religion and the Tea Party
December 13, 2011 by Gaelan Gilbert
A brief Al-Jazeera special on the situation of Evangelical religious perspectives and political agendas in the 2012 American presidential campaigns, with special attention to the Tea Party, as well as great critical input from Frank Schaeffer (formerly Evangelical, now Eastern Orthodox) and Chris Hedges...
Sacramentality and the State
In David Coleman’s 2007 book, Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England, he describes how the Reformation’s redefinition of the Christian sacraments (in contrast to how they were traditionally defined by the Roman Church) was essentially a nation-building strategy:
“[S]acraments become a means by which the realm [the commonwealth in this case], rather than the...
“Ah sir!, how much our apprehension is modified by the signs we use! And how...”
– Diderot
mini in a mini →
alaina:
“Amazing Grace” - Cat Power & Dirty...
Theology Does Not Just Belong to Theologians →
A dated, but wonderful article in the New York Times Review of Books about the quest of Michel de Certeau by one of my new scholarly heroes, Natalie Zemon Davis.
Emerging Adulthood →
Thanks Gaelan