o1mnikent

Green ceramic discarded. Chink chink. Keys tingle, motor revs, cats escaping. He smelled the garbage. Forgot to empty it. Remember, Wednesdays, even though it’s early. Slush slishes, tires forage paths. Trees pass by, library approaches.

Trip trap trip trap he grabbed the handle.

 …this is me returning my unfinished copy of Ulysses to the library.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

the church and postmodern culture: conversation: Pubs, Clubs, and Alternative Worship II: Follow-up Reflections

A different voice from Carol Gilligan – Los Angeles Times
Today, with women’s and gender studies departments so strongly oriented toward issues of identity, Gilligan’s ideas seem almost quaint as academic concerns. As far as pop culture goes, they’ve become downright common-sensical. “Women think differently than men” is practically the core notion of the self-help industry (Venus and Mars, of course). But Gilligan herself is still working over the themes that made her name, this time in a whole new genre. At 71, a dozen years after being named one of Time’s 25 most influential Americans, Gilligan has written a novel.

PublicEye.org – Winter 2007: Living in the Gap, The Ideal and the Reality of the Christian Right Family

The Christian Right and evangelical Christians are not one in the same – “Survey research shows that 70 percent of evangelicals don’t identify with the Religious Right,” reports Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay – but conservative evangelicals have been largely responsible for developing and promoting the anti-gay, anti-feminist “family values” agenda that has powerfully shaped the culture and platform of the Republican Party.

Thus if we want to understand what the ideal Christian Right home looks like, we must turn to the truly staggering amount of childrearing advice conservative evangelical preachers and pundits dispense to followers.

The Smart Set: The Art Catalog – January 30, 2008
The theorists are always arguing about what makes something art. 30,000 Years of Art says let’s just move on and look at some more of it.

sp!ked review of books | I am an intellectual blasphemer
Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented.

or, How to Follow the Presidential Campaign Sans Cable News

If you live in Washington, you’ll want to caucus next Saturday, February 9 at 1:00 in the afternoon. Don’t skip the caucus in lieu of voting in the primary. The primary is only a straw poll and has little more than symbolic value. The caucuses determine the delegates to conventions. If you live in Lynden, you’ll want to refer to this article in today’s Tribune that explains the process and lists the locations for each party.

If you can’t wait for the caucus to see who your neighbors are voting for, you can always refer to one of many websites that disclose campaign donations. I find the New York Times campaign finance website the easiest to work with.

Speaking of the Times, they also have a fascinating animation that illustrates campaign stops geographically, along with a schedule that lists future campaign appearances. It’s a useful predictor of campaign drop-outs. Yesterday I noticed that all of John Edwards’ campgain stops for today were canceled. Odd, I thought. Turns out there was a reason for that.

If you’re still following primary polls after the New Hampshire kerfuffle earlier this month, this site and this site are useful.

Since, as in 2004, religion plays a significant role in the campaign, I’ve enjoyed reading the GetReligion blog, which includes frequent contributions by Terry Mattingly, the religion editor of the Grand Rapids Press.

For other campaign matters, especially on the Democratic side, I’ve been following Andrew Sulliven’s blog. He also wrote a fascinating article on Barack Obama in last month’s Atlantic and also makes occasional appearances on the Colbert Report.

GovTrack: H. Res. 888: Text of Legislation
Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding…

Terry Eagleton: Coruscating on Thin Ice – LRB

In the 18th century, the doctrine of the imagination was among other things a corrective to the antisocial implications of empiricism. If all I can really know are my own sense impressions, how can I ever come to know you, other than as a fat grey patch on my eyeballs? Are we not eternally shut off from one another by the thick walls of our bodies? I can know for certain that I am in pain, but I can only infer or deduce that you are, even when flames are sprouting from your hair. If this is so, then there would seem to be a need for some special, intuitive faculty which allows me to range beyond my own sense-data, transport myself into your emotional innards and empathise with what you are feeling. This is known as the imagination, product of a flawed epistemology. It makes up for our natural state of isolation from one another. The moral and the aesthetic lie close together, since to be moral is to be able to feel what others are feeling. It would be interesting to know what sadists would make of this assumption.

…The dethroning of God was not only the elevation of art. It was also the invention of Man. Because God had created human beings in his own image and likeness – that is to say, fashioned them as free – they were now able to press that freedom to its limit by abolishing the source of it and installing themselves in his place. Man was now the transcendent peak of creation, owing almost as little as the Almighty had to nature and biology. As Nietzsche scornfully pointed out, surprisingly little was thereby altered. Instead, the religion of Yahweh gave way to Feuerbach’s religion of humanity. There was still a stable metaphysical centre to the world; it was just that it was now us rather than a deity. Idolatry accordingly gave way to narcissism. In Nietzsche’s view, the toppling of God, if it were to constitute a genuine revolution, would have to involve the subversion of Man as we know him as well. Otherwise God would simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality.

Like aesthetics, then, humanism was covertly theological all along….