According to President Obama, I was solidly within the majority American opinion last Monday when I breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing his decision to lift the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. In his trademark careful and conscientious rhetoric, Obama acknowledged the deep moral difficulties this issue poses,…
Read MoreI forgot to mention that Angela Davis visited my institution a couple of weekends ago and delivered the keynote address for the Women’s and Gender Studies Conference that we hosted. (Aside: I’m not generally inclined to be star-struck, but I definitely was a little around Dr. Davis. I was charged with taking care of her…
Read MoreAs compromises go, this doesn’t seem to be a good one: the State Board of Education in Texas recently approved its science curriculum standards, which Board members describe as “a compromise between those who are critical of teaching evolutionary theories without scrutiny and those who feared attacks on evolution would lead to the teaching of…
Read MoreThe image to the left is a postcard that someone sent to PostSecret, an online website that asks people to write their “secrets” on one side of a postcard and mail them in anonymously. (I’ve written about PostSecret before on this blog.) It is the brainchild of Frank Warren, who now travels all over the…
Read MoreA long time ago, as an undergraduate, I took a course on contemporary American literature that included several texts by John Barth, including The End of the Road (1958, revised 1967). I was in the full glory days of my existentialist period at the time, so Barth’s The End of the Road and the twin…
Read MoreFirst, a few caveats about this post, just for clarification: (1) By “cheating,” I mean academic cheating. Plagiarism, mostly. I don’t mean relationship cheating, or sports cheating, or cheating on your taxes. I do actually care about those… well, two out of three of them, anyway.(2) The title of this post is (obviously, I hope)…
Read More[If you’re wondering where the first two parts of the “mourning” series are, see The Work of Mourning (November ’06) and Mourning Again (November ’07)] As you may or may not remember, then-President George H.W. Bush banned images of American coffins (and dead) in 1991, against protests that the ban was an attempt to cover…
Read MoreOver at anotherpanacea, there’s a really fascinating and mature consideration of what AnPan calls “Critique in the Age of Hope.” The basic concern underlying AnPan’s essay, as I read it, is that the general ethos of good-will and hope that has accompanied President Obama into the White House might find its expression in an unwitting…
Read MoreThose pensive-looking guys to the left are 20th C. philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Although they come from different ends of the philosophical spectrum– existentialism and literature for Sartre, mathematical logic and analytic philosophy for Russell–they did share a passion for and commitment to the life of that long-lost animal, the engaged intellectual. It…
Read MoreJudith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Berkeley, delivered a lecture Thursday night at The University of Memphis entitled “Vulnerability, Survivability: The Political Affects of War.” For the most part, Butler’s lecture drew upon her recent work in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Who…
Read More
Recent Comments