Category: Politics and Current Events
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Tram Nguyen, editor of “Language is a Place of Struggle”: Great Quotes by People of Color, discusses one of the more notable quotes of the election campaign.
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Intellectual and political leadership should be neither elitist, nor populist; rather it ought to be democratic, in that each of us stands in public space, without humiliation, to put forward our best visions and views for the sake of the public interest. —Cornel West, Scholar It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy,…
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Alan Greenspan’s faith has been shaken, but will he apologize for his sins? Marilyn Sewell examines how blind allegiance to abstract economic theory can lead to harmful rationalizations.
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Dating Jesus: link to Beacon Press page for the book When did Sarah Palin become a fundamentalist? I’d like to know, because I never once saw her in the pews of my own fundamentalist church in southwest Missouri, where I came to Jesus, taught Sunday school, and worked a church bus route. When precisely did…
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In case you haven’t heard, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is an “average Alaskan hockey mom.” For anyone who didn’t grow up on skates, like I did, it’s a relatively new colloquial term that plays off of the term “soccer moms,” a moniker used extensively in the 1996 election season to neatly describe the…
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The Great True Faith of our times may have been badly shaken in recent days; but faith that is shaken remains, at its core, a matter of blind devotion. And while Merrill Lynch is gone forever, that big bronze bull still flares its massive horns down at Bowling Green Park, a few blocks south of…
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The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment is “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really…
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I’m reminded of that now in the weeks since the Palin nomination–weeks when apparently even so-called liberal women with “special” children have to remind themselves of their political affiliation because of what I see as their weird identification with Ms. Palin, and Trig, her now-famous Down’s syndrome son, displayed like a new brooch at the…
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In the run-up to tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, which will be hosted by Gwen Ifill, we’re seeing an slight uptick in traffic from conservative blogs linking to her cousin Sherrilyn Ifill’s post on The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama. For those of you who clicked through to read the entire…
