o1mnikent

The Quest of Michel de Certeau – New York Review of Books

The Road Before Us: The 1967 Grand Rapids riot
What do we make of this event forty years after the streets of Newark, Detroit, and Grand Rapids were filled with clouds of smoke? While a few newspapers have written upon the fortieth anniversary of the riots in Detroit and Newark, many seem content to let the past remain untroubled. This is especially true in our region. Little, if any, was written to commemorate the 1967 riot in Grand Rapids, and the impact that the event had upon the greater metropolitan region has likewise been pushed aside. To ignore this story is to forget a part of ourselves, and forgo future directions that our region might choose.

It Can’t Be Great If Nobody Notices – WSJ
Mr. Zaid has a fine eye for authors who value media attention more than the work that inspired it: “What matters isn’t the poem,” he observes, “but to appear on television as a poet.”

Ten great Christian rock songs
Given the relentlessly upbeat tone of Christian radio — “Positive music! Safe for your family!” as the announcers like to say — you might forget that the Bible does not guarantee a carefree life for believers. The best Christian rock wrestles with those things that “drain the life right out of me”…

Like-Minded, Living Nearby
In 1976, less than a quarter of the American people lived in so-called “landslide counties” – that is, counties in which the spread between the two major presidential candidates was 20 percentage points or more. By 2004, nearly half of us lived in this kind of politically tilted territory. How could this be? Well, we know one thing: It isn’t gerrymandering. Nobody redraws the boundaries of a county every 10 years; they often stay the same for a century. Nor does it have much to do with natural population increase, which might push one group or another into a new proportional dominance within a certain geographical area. As it happens, there has been relatively little population growth in most parts of the country. The longer one thinks about it, the more seriously one has to consider Mr. Bishop’s claim: that the local landslide effect has been largely the result of demographic resorting.

Tom Wright’s literal belief in the Resurrection…
Tom Wright’s literal belief in the Resurrection makes him a hero to conservative Christians worldwide. Here he declares war on militant atheists and liberals, and explains why heaven is not the end of the world

A Jesus for Real Men – Christianity Today
Fortunately for women and men alike, the Bible never speaks of Christians as reformed men and women, but as altogether new creations (2 Cor. 5:17). The Fall has done more damage to the human heart than the masculinity movement seems willing to admit. For instance, a man’s natural inclinations may prompt him to be “Boss, Bold, Brash, Bully, and Blunt,” as one of GodMen’s sayings suggests. But most of these are qualities of the old self that are destroyed when one is transformed into the image of Christ. A man’s urge for battle—with fist or pen—may well be natural, but that doesn’t automatically make it godly. In other words, conversion does not sanctify our instincts; rather, it demands that we submit all our instincts to the lordship of Christ and crucify the sinful ones, what Paul calls “the flesh” (Eph. 2).

ayjay:

It’s always amazing to me that people think, “Because I thought this up, instead of reading it in doctrine, that means it’s more true.” It’s a funny prejudice. I mention in my essay [in Poetry] my girlfriend who thinks she hears her dead husband in a wind chime. And she thinks I’m crazy to believe in the resurrection? Often, people think, “If it’s in my own head, it can’t be corrupt.” But for me, if it’s my own head, it’s got to be corrupt. It took me a long time to come to that.

[Mary Karr, poet and memoirist]

The end of the line?

The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought”.

No wonder the semi-colon is dying.

The Color of Plants on Other Worlds
Plants are green because the sun that keeps them alive is a type G star. If they’d evolved for a red dwarf, plants would be black…