The one good thing about teaching (I’ve heard there are others–vicious rumors, I contend) is I get to introduce my students to the work of Wendell Berry. Berry is an academic, but he is also a farmer. He is a cultural critic, yet also an agriculturalist who creates rather than just deconstructs. He is neither […]
In Luci Shaw’s “Hate Invasion,” anxieties, like crows, “clot” and “colonize” the mind and heart of the poet, who longs for divine answers to earth’s evils.
Kevin Austin discusses the evil of modern-day slavery in morphing persons into things, slavery’s prevalence in our own communities, and the future hope for ending slavery through the work of modern-day abolitionists.
We’ve arrived! Or, maybe, I should say, “We’ve come a long way, baby!” Or, maybe, I shouldn’t. I really don’t even care to mention it, but I’m going to anyway (I need some blog filler every once in awhile–like, twice a week). Making an appearance more than a year ago, I initially ignored it. I […]
If this is gospel music, count me in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLlysJ7VCNQ&feature=related The Sound of Sinners. Released on the great triple-LP Sandinista. When I first heard Sandinista, I can’t tell a lie (well, I can, but for now I won’t), I didn’t like it. I was just another one of those ‘Young Punks’ they occasionally referenced and […]
Carl Sachs and I shared a session at last week’s North Texas Philosophical Association meeting. Sachs gave an interesting paper about what Kant calls “the affinity of the manifold.” I’d just been gathering my notes for a post on Levi Bryant’s chapter in The Democracy of Objects on the “virtual proper being” of objects (I’ll finish […]
From personal faith to social critique, Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books presents an incisive, hopeful approach toward understanding culture and loving others.
To illuminate the complex vision of human nature in The Dark Knight, Lauren Wilford traces the development of Director Christopher Nolan’s worldview from his early noir pictures to the Batman films.
Just last week, I was reading Deena Weinstein’s landmark 1991 study Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the final chapter, which deals with metal’s “detractors” from across the political spectrum. While conservative criticisms of heavy metal are well-known through the work of groups like the Parents Music […]