CN: descriptions of graphic violence. Also plenty of spoilers for Season 1, episode 3. Some of you may have watched the Netflix drama Marco Polo. So far, it’s run for two seasons, and the second season is much better written than the first. It’s a standard mix of historical fiction, myth, war sequences, and unvarnished brutality—and yet, […]
Morrison and Vaid-Menon
Two very different and very similar speakers, teachers, and change-makers: author Toni Morrison delivering her 1993 Nobel Lecture on December 7, 1993, and Dark Matter’s Alok Vaid-Menon, breaking down “success” and complicity at TEDxMiddlebury, twenty Decembers later. Toni Morrison on Violence and Story-telling Oppressive language does more than represent violence—it is violence; does more than represent the […]
Verses from Sam Walter Foss
Off the clock this month I’ve been reading poems, and, for the first time in four years, writing some of my own. July will include an annual conference in Georgia and free time revising the poems I wrote this month. Among the art I rediscovered during June was the verse of Sam Walter Foss, an […]
About Noah—and What Happens After Trauma
This post mashes up a lot of things, including descriptions of violence, genocide, religious hatred, and religious apathy; literature and Christian hermeneutics; and mild spoilers for the new movie Noah (2014, Darren Aronofsky and Ari Mendel). Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the film yet and still intend to. Also don’t read if you’ve been struggling with […]
Reader Review #7
Discover Magazine: Grandma’s Experiences Leave Epigenetic Mark on Your Genes (Dan Hurley) Before the 1970s, genes were the fixed limits of life. With DNA as boss and RNA the secretary, combinations of genes produced a certain physiological outcome and it wasn’t clear what made one gene express and another not. But over the last 40 years, through […]
Sabbath Wisdom: Texts and Responsibility
Almost every Sabbath morning, I share with my Twitter network a series of tweets rooted in an aspect of faith or religious ethics. These tweets, tagged #SabbathWisdom, are often inspired by study conversations or sermons at my church. This morning’s series was far more extensive than usual, and I decided to share it with you as […]
