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
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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.”
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"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
3 tags
The Virtue of Not Being a Genius →
“Trilling does not dazzle; there are no Empsonian or Ricksian fireworks in his writing. Nor does he hector us: there is none of the Leavisian or Eagletonian certainty about the one right answer. Rather, he shares with us his experience of finding certain books indispensable in reflecting on the mysteries and glories of being alive.”
From Stefan Collini’s thoughtful review...
“The problem that confronts any writing, but particularly the kind of writing...”
– David O’Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo
artifice of eternity
“The poem, as always, precedes our progress. But perhaps our progress made the poem possible, by one of those roundabout ways spawned by the wiles of history.”
- de Certeau, Mystic Fable
“Literature often shoots ahead of us”
- Celan, The Meridian
Congratulations boys! →
“The adored body is as elusive as the vanishing God. It haunts writing, which...”
– de Certeau
I thought that we were fine
Sharon VE cover
