Issue 9: Pop Revolutions

Click here to view an interactive gallery of Eliacin Rosario-Cruz’s photography.

Click here to view a collection of paintings by Andre Martin.

Review: Only Revolutions. By Mark Z. Danielewski. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 360 pp. In his House of Leaves (published in 2000), Mark Danielewski toys with the apparatus of truth-telling, weaving scholarly narrative into first-person account, embedded in the shreds of paper written, supposedly, by a blind man, all of which attempts to describe a documentary film (which may […]

All around and above us were those towering walls of light, curving across building fronts, embedded in the sidewalks, custom-fitted to light poles: a cartoon lion eating a man in a suit; a rain of gold coins falling into the canoe of a naked rainforest family; a woman in lingerie running a bottle of Pepsi […]

For several years now, a revolution has been gaining momentum in popular culture in the United States: ‘conflict free’ diamonds. I’ve been on the hunt for the ‘right’ diamond for the past few months since deciding to propose to my girlfriend of two and a half years. She was not concerned with the size or […]

[F]rom its inception, capitalism has been a force of cataclysmic transformation in one country after another. Capitalism has radically changed every material, social, political, and cultural facet of the societies it has touched, and it continues to do so. Understanding this revolutionary impact of capitalism . . . is a formidable and important intellectual task. […]

“Guns don’t kill people; people do,” goes the slogan of Second Amendment defenders. On the surface, this is at least partly true—firearms generally do require human hands and wills to fulfill their purposes—though critics will rightly note that the bumper sticker argument hides deeper truths about gun accidents, corporate profits, machismo, racism, classism, and policymakers’ […]

In the 1960’s Martin Luther King Jr. called for a revolution of values in the United States that would address racism, materialism, and militarism. His words were clearly understood as a call for societal change. In the 1980’s Aung San Suu Kyi called for a revolution of the spirit in Burma that would end dictatorship […]

It has almost stopped raining, but cloud’s still lower than our house. Abandoned shoes and burn marks show points of departure on the street, blackberries and sloes fill the hedges, waders call at night. I used to have a bookcase that opened out on hinges to reveal a secret room beyond. If there is such […]

We must disregard old favourites, learn to forget the past. It is usually found where there is not too much direct sunlight, a sudden picture that was hidden but is still included. No-one was able to write down things exactly as they happened but images are preserved with amazing sharpness. We are surprised by the […]

Review: Pan’s Labyrinth. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Warner Brothers, 2006. 120 minutes. Superman: comic made movie. The staples of any superhero movie include: (obviously) a super hero, an ever-present evil force, and enough drama to carry through for at least a sequel, and preferably a Number 3. Such trilogies build expectation for the “final battle […]

The Other Journal (TOJ): Can you talk about the origins of Geez, how it got started, and who was originally involved? Will Braun (WB): My colleague Aiden Enns was working at Adbusters Magazine in Vancouver, BC–Adbusters of course being a hip and snarky, anti-consumer, anti-capitalist type of publication with a lot of images–and he moved back to Winnipeg where I […]

Sex in the church is completely screwed up. This is a conclusion I have reached, not based on my own experience or thoughts in an ivory tower, but by talking through the experiences of people I have known who have been, and still are, faithful followers of Christ. Some of these have been married folk, […]

Review: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Directed by Larry Charles. Dune Entertainment, 2006. 84 minutes. On a recent trip to New York, I spotted a subway poster for public safety. It read something like “There are 16 million eyes in New York City, and we are counting on all […]

The first time I heard the name Jandek, I was backstage at a Wilco show in Asheville, North Carolina. I was holding a tape recorder and smoking an American Spirit cigarette and my hands were shaking with nervousness. I was interviewing Jeff Tweedy for my hometown alt-weekly and I had asked him the question “What […]

Part the First – Armchair Theorizing and Rocking Out Is the fact that we are living in postmodernity enough for us to understand it? Or do we have to examine this thing, whatever it is, playfully called “pomo” by hip theologians and professors, and define it? Are the conservatives right about the wishy-washy moral spinelessness […]

Shamayim Matthew 25:21 Abba has your back He traces His Name Loveletter by loveletter Vertabrae to vertabrae Where your swollen Jansport Barely fits a Concordance for Prodigals And Prodiguys who forgot their road map Back home instantly catching the New Jerusalem Syndrome through osmosis During the dedication of an altar Call from your futon A […]

The most significant revolutions reset reality so thoroughly that we don’t notice their effects. We see everything through their set of pince-nez without reserve, without realizing that there could be any other set to set on our noses. The Polish poet, essayist, novelist and Nobel Prize-Winner, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), had a thing or two to […]

In this interview, Miroslav Volf discusses the relationship between Christianity and revolution, what it means to practice transformative theologizing, why evangelicals need a more integral understanding of salvation, his current efforts to articulate an account of human flourishing to serve as an alternative to prevalent accounts of flourishing as experientially satisfying life, his concerns about the Hiltonization of American culture, and perhaps most importantly, how his most recent book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006), awarded the Best Book award by Christianity Today in the area of Christianity and Culture, seeks to address one of the most pressing issues of our time—the memory of wrongdoing suffered by a person who desires neither to hate nor to disregard but to love the wrongdoer.

Ever since my first summer at church camp, at age fourteen, I can recall an emphasis on a few themes: physical purity, scripture reading, marriage/dating, and the grace by which we are saved. A few years ago, though, I began to wonder: is faith merely a matter of personal piety, and inter-personal boundaries? It felt […]

Per mia figlia chi Roma mi mostrò ‘ It’s a strange courage you give me…’ All space is sacred space and all matter sacred matter though here in this hard city dirty with the grime of empire where what triumphs, Io triumphe, and what horrors have not been seen, space and matter appear more sacred, indeed, eternale. […]

BECKY: Shane, I’m interested in what you had to say in your book about the difference between normal and ordinary. It seems as though you make a distinction between the two, identifying normalcy as something that is not revolutionary, and ordinary as actually being something extraordinary. Can you explain this? SHANE: Well, the subtitle to my book […]

Beginning in the fall of 2006, a new campaign began to sweep across America called The ONE Campaign. Promoted by the likes of Oprah and Bono, Matt and George, Angelina and Brad, ONE has quickly become the campaign to be involved in. And with awareness for global poverty and disease at perhaps an all-time high, more […]

We were so impressed by Dr. Hopkins thinking on the dynamics of globalization that we asked him to provide the keynote address on the second night of Film, Faith & Justice 2007. The title of his insightful lecture was, “The Race of Globalization: Liberation and Identity in the World Market,” and if you were there (and […]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television series about a young woman chosen in her generation to fight the forces of darkness, was on the air from 1997-2003. It never drew a large audience, but was very well received critically, dominated the coveted youth demographic, and continues to have a cult following. It also has a […]