I attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s lecture “Some Through the Fire! Some Through the Flood!” last night at the University of Memphis as part of the conference “The Obama Phenomenon: Race and Political Discourse in the United States Today.” I have to admit that I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Like most Americans, the only…
Read MoreI’m attending the much-anticipated conference at the University of Memphis this weekend, “The Obama Phenomenon: Race and Political Discourse in the United States Today.” The keynote address is this evening and is being delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Our local news broadcasts have done all they could in the past week to stir up controversy…
Read MoreAhhhh, Texas. Turns out their legislature is considering allowing students over 21 to carry concealed guns on campus. Supporters say that there’s good reason for this manifestly ridiculous idea, of course, citing the tragedy at Virginia Tech almost two years ago and, I suppose, the fact that there weren’t enough armed students to make that…
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 MoreJust go ahead and file this away in the “Amazing Adventures in Double Entendre” File. In an attempt to resuscitate the revolutionary patriotism of Bostonians circa 1773, FOXNews and the Republican Party are calling on their constituents to organize their own April 15th “Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s tax policies. What’s more, they’ve also…
Read MoreOver at Slate, Timothy Noah has begun an 8-part series called Why No More 9/11s?, in an attempt to answer the question that has probably stymied all of us at some point in the last eight years. Immediately following the September 11th attacks, most counterterrorism experts and others in the know predicted that it was…
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…
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