As Walter Brueggemann argues in Sabbath as Resistance, contemporary US culture is based on excessive production. “Our motors are set to run at brick-making speed,” he writes, alluding to the ancient Hebrews in the Exodus stories who made bricks with and without straw, at and beyond quota, so they could meet their enslavers “insatiable” demands […]
Lessons from the designers
The Seventh-day Adventist denomination revealed its latest visual identity standards today at the General Conference’s spring meetings in Maryland. I’m impressed. The core font family, Advent Sans, is open source, based on Google font typography, and designed for more languages than those that use the characters A-Z. The twenty-year-old Bible-cross-flame symbol is unchanged and set on a […]
Disrupting the familiar
I’ve been reading about the life and death of Jesus since I was about three years old. And I spent many Friday nights during my childhood singing my way through all six cassette tapes of Handel’s Messiah (only Hogwood’s interpretation of the 1754 Foundling Hospital version will do!). Like the Nativity story in December, the Passion […]
Not so different and not all the same
In the lead-up to the Oscars, I missed something: directors nominated in the Best Foreign Film category issued a joint statement on Friday, and it’s quite remarkable. The fear generated by dividing us into genders, colors, religions and sexualities as a means to justify violence destroys the things that we depend on – not only […]
Some pay in blood: The silence of the coal
Silencio Blanco is a touring company of seven puppeteers from Santiago, Chile. Their latest work, Chiflón, El Silencio del Carbón, (The Silence of the Coal), is a haunting, tightly choreographed performance that invites audiences into the lives of generations of coal miners—parents, spouses, and children—and the worlds that literally cave in on them. Baldomero Lillo […]
Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975
Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream. “A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, […]