Leigh M. Johnson

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 7: A Song You Never Tire of Hearing

I have a terrible habit of taking songs that I love and putting them in regular rotation on my iPod, or using them as the ringtone (or worse, the wake-up alarm tone) on my phone, and it never fails that, over time, I grow very very sick of them.  This is a worse offense than tiring…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 6: A Song That Reminds You of Home

Instead of choosing a song that reminds me of Memphis, I’ve decided instead to pick a song that reminds me of my family home.  In particular, this song reminds me of waking up on Sunday mornings and getting ready for church in my childhood and young-adult years. Mine has always been a church-going family. In…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 5: A Song That Reminds You of Someone

Before I reveal my pick for a “song that reminds me of someone,” let me say a little bit about the someone in advance. My “someone” is not just one of the best best friends in the whole wild world, not just any grossly-underappreciated poet and philosopher, not just any garden variety wunderkind, not just any…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 4: A Song That Makes You Sad

As I’ve said many times before on this blog, the four essential ingredients of a great song (in my estimation) are three chords and a sad story.  I think I’ve always had a particular affection for sad songs, one that has only grown over the years, and my guess is that if I made a…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 3: A Song That Makes You Happy

For today’s pick, I’m returning home to Soulsville, to draw from one of our deepest cultural and musical wells: Stax. The Stax “sound” is the sound that I most closely identify with Memphis, my home, and even the saddest of songs from the Stax vault has always possessed the power to cheer me up. Those…

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Reading Amoris Laetitia, Part 1

Earlier this week, I finished reading the recent Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation from Pope Francis entitled Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”). Subsequently, on various news outlets and social media, I have seen a number of so-called “summaries” of Amoria Laetitia that can at best be described as grossly inadequate and ungenerous readings of it and, at worst, as…

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Campuses Are Not Sovereign Nation-States

The photo to your left is of a sock-monkey, hung by a noose from one of the windows on the campus of Rhodes College this week. It should go without saying, I hope, that not only is the sock-monkey itself a manifestly racist symbol (echoing the colonialist project of comparing blacks to apes in order to justify their…

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Not Every Idea Needs a Tool, But Every Tool Needs an Idea

Last semester, I conducted a test-run on a new assignment I had devised for my courses– the “Technology and Human Values” project— and I was, quite frankly, floored by the work that students did for it. The basic assignment is for students to work in groups of four or fewer to devise a merely-possible technological solution…

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Reading Amoris Laetitia, Part 2: The Introduction

I’ll just assume that many non-Catholics, like myself, have absolutely no idea what authority Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia exerts (or exhorts) as a “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation.” So, first, a primer on Papal texts. An apostolic exhortation is but one of many different types of communications from the Pope to the community of clerics and laypersons that constitute…

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“Grace and Frankie” and the Right to Die

There are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor.  Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…

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