Reflections on the Summer of 2010 Daniel A. Siedell Classes start next week.  As I hustle to put together course syllabi for the fall semester my work this summer has forced me to reconsider the contours of my academic vocation.  We academics live in bubble.  We live in a world in which seminar rooms, the […]

One musical trend that I’ve found particularly fascinating over the last few years is the mashup, in which two or more completely dissimilar songs (e.g., “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Bootylicious”, “Every Kinda People” and “Creep”) are mashed together, with the sum being greater than the whole of its parts (e.g., 2ManyDJs’ “Smells like Booty”, Totom’s […]

[Cross-posted from Fors Clavigera] Many of us have intellectual debts that never surface, as it were. They are not the sorts of debts that one could track in the footnotes of our work. They are more submerged and subterranean than that. Such debts are often accumulated early on in one’s formation; indeed, they are often […]

Here comes Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I’ve been curious about it, but then a critic put into words the very problem that has made me suspicious.

Young reviews Gina Oschner’s critically acclaimed novel THE RUSSIAN DREAMBOOK OF COLOR AND FLIGHT, with an eye to how the novel’s post-Soviet characters mirror Young’s own experience living with her missionary family in Latvia.

Multiple Specters Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx’s well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a “specter is stalking” us. It was this same “specter” that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce […]

(x-posted at the de-scribe) In Part I I addressed some of the shortfalls of the overall project while affirming what was perhaps the inevitable ‘shortfall’ of the two dialogue camps. Putting aside any larger intentions of this collection the chapters themselves maintained a steady offering of what it means to “to be differently ethical and […]

  An attempt this week to organize some thoughts, inspired by my work on Bruno Latour, about how to describe my approach to hermeneutics.   1. Material Semiotics Broadly, my hermeneutic approach could be described as a “material semiotics,” but the kind of material semiotics I’ve got in mind requires us to read the relationship between the “material” […]

The Old Testament recognizes that riches can be gained through wickedness and oppression, but it also teaches and exemplifies that those to whom God grants more than ordinary wealth can and should make use of it in ways that are righteous before God, both in attitude and in practice.