As the Sunday New York Times article on the Texas textbook debates suggested, we are in for a full scale assault on our history by Christian revisionists and their right-wing supporters. A close examination of original texts shouldn't give them any comfort as our founding fathers and mothers are very clear about their intentions for our new Republic. But we have learned in the past year that the ability to spin out lie after lie seems to find some resonance in our land.
In case, you are forced to argue with friend, foe, student or professor, books are ammunition, especially those containing some of the writings done by early Americans devoted to the whole issue of the separation of church and state. I received today a very short book edited by Forrest Church called The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders.(Beacon Press, 2004,$16.00) This 160-page book provides the essential writings of everyone from Patrick Henry to Thomas Jefferson on the subject. Since the new theocrats include the Declaration of Independence in their argument about the "Christian" nation, Forrest Church also penned The American Creed:A Biography of the Declaration of Independence ( St. Martin's, 2002). I decided on a liberal theologian as the source for the argument rather than the host of very secular historians because he is sensitive to issues of religion and is inclined to the religious. There are several very substantive books by historians that demolish the Christian revisionist project but I believe Forrest is one of the more effective advocates for the separation of church and state.
In the meantime, while you are carrying on the fight, I'll be reading one of my favorite Nordic writer's Henning Mankell and his new The Man from Beijing.(Knopf, 2010) The author of the Kurt Wallander series, Mankell wrote a wonderful novel about aging and family reconciliation called Italian Shoes, which I urge people to read for its beautiful prose.
Showing posts with label Forrest Church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forrest Church. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Pearls before Swine
Before I go search for the Arc of the Covenant, a few passing notes on cultural artifacts of another order.
Yes, Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before The Shooting has been shipped. I've been waiting for years for this. I hope it is not an omen that it arrives the day of Barack Obama's State of the Union message. It is the story of a mixed race Senator, who passes as "white" and is assassinated.
For those of you who are aging hipsters, yes Jimi Hendrix did record more songs at Electric Ladyland studios. And dig this--you can order 45s or vinyls of "Valleys of Neptune." Rolling Stone raves about it but anyone whom Yawn Wenner saw gets raves. Just check out the last few reviews of Neil Young. Apparently, there is alot more Hendrix that was finished and will be released in the future. The new disc or CD or whatever format you choose has 12 cuts on it.
If you love the Village and lower Manhattan, Patti Smith Just Kids is a wonderful memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. The book was done to fulfill a promise Patti made to him before his death of AIDS in 1989. It covers how they inspired each other's art and how, with literally nothing, they stayed in seedy hotels and cramped apartments before they hit the big time. It's hard to believe that Patti fresh off the bus from southern New Jersey slept for her first days in Manhattan in Central Park. The title comes from a story of two tourists walking in the Village and they see Patti and Robert dressed in a Bohemian manner. The wife says,"Dear, take their photographs." The husband says gruffly," No dear, they're just kids."
Feeling funky and lost hope. A friend of mine put me on to Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. His previous book was Leopold's Ghost, which portrayed the horrors and I mean "the horror" of the Belgian Congo. In paperback, Bury the Chains recounts the history of 12 men, who came together in a London printing shop in early 1787 to create the first grassroots movement to fight for human rights--the struggle to outlaw slavery. Human rights advocates will recognize a number of strategies these men created--consumer boycotts, wall posters, celebrity endorsements and lapel buttons. But the key lesson was their insistence on making their case with facts and not sensational charges. This is a great book to read to remember the roots of today's human rights movements before it got taken over by large corporate entities.
David Plouffe is indeed back,sending out e-mails for Barack Obama fans to host house parties to watch the state of the union address. I hope no one catches on what this guy can do. And, David, you're still young so you've got awhile before you become corrupt.
Have been reading Forrest Church's books of theology. Church was a Harvard Divinity Schoolmate of mine. The son of Senator Church of CIA hearing fame, he was the pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. Love & Death covers his meditations on both as he faced treatment for cancer with the certain belief he would be dead in months. He went in remission and went on to finish his life with a final book on Unitarian theology. He died of cancer last year.
Unfortunately for me I started reading his books with So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, which sounded to me like a revised version of his doctoral thesis. It covers our first cultural wars. George Washington wanted religions strictly regulated so that they could not have influence over politics. The President who was warmly supported by born-again Baptists was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Madison was an atheist and John Adams won the hearts of Presbyterians and Unitarians who at that time wanted a more official status of Christianity. Liberal churches demanded during the Civil War that having Christianity as an official religion would have spare the country. Anyway, Forrest does an excellent job in upending the apple cart in describing these early fights that continue to this day. It is a useful tool to counter the revisionist history now being done by the right.
But Forrest can write some clinkers. He was asked on a Caribbean Cruise to give a Sunday sermon. So he chose the subject of the film Titanic. Life like the Titanic is a beautiful and grand ship but it too will sink. I'm sure his audience quickly went for the pina coladas after that remark.
Finishing on biblical notes. The Ark of the Covenant is supposedly a drum that could be heard 3 1/2 miles away and terrify opposing armies. A tribe in Zimbabwe claims their priests brought it to Africa. The strange part of this is that DNA tests have identified the genetic markers for the priestly line of Jews. A separate DNA test of the priests in the tribe also show the same genetic markers, which are not found outside the Jewish race. And of course the protectors of the Ark were the priests. Who knows?
If you are greedy, boastful and don't feed the poor, you are a Sodomite. That's the real biblical meaning. That casts the Log Cabin Republicans in a wholly different light.
Off to Ethiopia. The home of the Rasta prophet Hailie Selassie.
Yes, Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before The Shooting has been shipped. I've been waiting for years for this. I hope it is not an omen that it arrives the day of Barack Obama's State of the Union message. It is the story of a mixed race Senator, who passes as "white" and is assassinated.
For those of you who are aging hipsters, yes Jimi Hendrix did record more songs at Electric Ladyland studios. And dig this--you can order 45s or vinyls of "Valleys of Neptune." Rolling Stone raves about it but anyone whom Yawn Wenner saw gets raves. Just check out the last few reviews of Neil Young. Apparently, there is alot more Hendrix that was finished and will be released in the future. The new disc or CD or whatever format you choose has 12 cuts on it.
If you love the Village and lower Manhattan, Patti Smith Just Kids is a wonderful memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. The book was done to fulfill a promise Patti made to him before his death of AIDS in 1989. It covers how they inspired each other's art and how, with literally nothing, they stayed in seedy hotels and cramped apartments before they hit the big time. It's hard to believe that Patti fresh off the bus from southern New Jersey slept for her first days in Manhattan in Central Park. The title comes from a story of two tourists walking in the Village and they see Patti and Robert dressed in a Bohemian manner. The wife says,"Dear, take their photographs." The husband says gruffly," No dear, they're just kids."
Feeling funky and lost hope. A friend of mine put me on to Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. His previous book was Leopold's Ghost, which portrayed the horrors and I mean "the horror" of the Belgian Congo. In paperback, Bury the Chains recounts the history of 12 men, who came together in a London printing shop in early 1787 to create the first grassroots movement to fight for human rights--the struggle to outlaw slavery. Human rights advocates will recognize a number of strategies these men created--consumer boycotts, wall posters, celebrity endorsements and lapel buttons. But the key lesson was their insistence on making their case with facts and not sensational charges. This is a great book to read to remember the roots of today's human rights movements before it got taken over by large corporate entities.
David Plouffe is indeed back,sending out e-mails for Barack Obama fans to host house parties to watch the state of the union address. I hope no one catches on what this guy can do. And, David, you're still young so you've got awhile before you become corrupt.
Have been reading Forrest Church's books of theology. Church was a Harvard Divinity Schoolmate of mine. The son of Senator Church of CIA hearing fame, he was the pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. Love & Death covers his meditations on both as he faced treatment for cancer with the certain belief he would be dead in months. He went in remission and went on to finish his life with a final book on Unitarian theology. He died of cancer last year.
Unfortunately for me I started reading his books with So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, which sounded to me like a revised version of his doctoral thesis. It covers our first cultural wars. George Washington wanted religions strictly regulated so that they could not have influence over politics. The President who was warmly supported by born-again Baptists was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Madison was an atheist and John Adams won the hearts of Presbyterians and Unitarians who at that time wanted a more official status of Christianity. Liberal churches demanded during the Civil War that having Christianity as an official religion would have spare the country. Anyway, Forrest does an excellent job in upending the apple cart in describing these early fights that continue to this day. It is a useful tool to counter the revisionist history now being done by the right.
But Forrest can write some clinkers. He was asked on a Caribbean Cruise to give a Sunday sermon. So he chose the subject of the film Titanic. Life like the Titanic is a beautiful and grand ship but it too will sink. I'm sure his audience quickly went for the pina coladas after that remark.
Finishing on biblical notes. The Ark of the Covenant is supposedly a drum that could be heard 3 1/2 miles away and terrify opposing armies. A tribe in Zimbabwe claims their priests brought it to Africa. The strange part of this is that DNA tests have identified the genetic markers for the priestly line of Jews. A separate DNA test of the priests in the tribe also show the same genetic markers, which are not found outside the Jewish race. And of course the protectors of the Ark were the priests. Who knows?
If you are greedy, boastful and don't feed the poor, you are a Sodomite. That's the real biblical meaning. That casts the Log Cabin Republicans in a wholly different light.
Off to Ethiopia. The home of the Rasta prophet Hailie Selassie.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Look Forward in the New Year
The official explorer of the National Geographic--a great title--Wade Davis has a new book out on why ancient wisdom from the earth's vanishing peoples remains important to us. Davis fans will remember him for A Serpent and The Rainbow, his investigation into voodoo and how zombies are created. He didn't have to leave Washington to find that out. Wade Davis has explored the Amazon and Peru.
Arthur Danto's wonderful and small Andy Warhol argues that Andy was the most important artist of the second half of the last century. It is a good read and he makes a cogent case. The only piece of work he mentioned that I have not seen is Roger Maris Swinging the Bat. I have never even seen an image of it. I also never knew that the Brillo Boxes were made of wood and handcrafted by woodworkers in New York City. The most interesting rift in the book was Danto's discussion of why Andy's film Empire State is a masterpiece--it's philosophy at its most fun. Since I have a small library about Andy, I was skeptical that this book would be worth it. It's masterful.
A personal project of mine this year will be to revert to my Divinity School days and read theology. Last year, my Harvard Divinity School classmate Forrest Church died. He leaves a treasure trove of theological writing that I have yet to read. As America's polarization now seems fixed between the religious right and those who support a secular society with some respect paid to science, I need to arm up for what looks to be a brutal intellectual struggle.
More and more I am convinced we lost almost a decade in the fight against terrorism. The recent outbursts by Dick Cheney and the Republicans have only solidified that belief. I believe the cottage industry of producing books and studies on Islamic Fundamentalism has failed to illuminate the problem. Trace the route of the underwear bomber and his class background. It's clear there is no front in the war against terrorism and that we need a new paradigm to unravel what I think are awesome strategic errors that actually put the financial well-being of the United States at risk. It will be interesting to see whether the past decade will be seen as some mistake or false start or the time when America made such structurally wrong decisions as to start its decline as a superpower.
I think this year will test the military-terrorist complex in the United States and raise central issues about what a $1 trillion a year buys us. Is the war to combat terrorism simply another money-making venture or does it have anything to do with making our nation secure? We experienced in the first year of Barack Obama the fight on Too Big To Fail in the economy; now we will see the same in the whole security industry. What is it that compels the United States to act on a gigantic scale when smart, sharp thinking could save us alot of time, energy, money and people's lives?
Our soldiers have now served in some cases twice as long as the entire World War II. Despite the bravado of our armed forces, they are showing serious problems with PSTD and other stress related illnesses, which we have known from study after study affects people who are on active duty too long. We will be experiencing blowback from this for years. We simply hollowed out our military for reasons that now escape me.
The underwear bombers postings about his despair reminded me of the terrible days in Liberia and Sierra Leone when child soldiers were conscripted by warlords and commanded to commit the most awful acts imaginable--lopping off people's arms with machetes and tearing babies out of women's wombs. Today, these child soldiers are pariahs, shunned by society, and haunted by their acts. Programs to rehabilitate them to some semblance of functioning have by and large failed. Their sleep is disturbed by nightly nightmares and they had to be detoxed from their regimen of dope and booze. They are lost and one wonders how many of the underwear bombers will also end up lost like the child fighters.
Arthur Danto's wonderful and small Andy Warhol argues that Andy was the most important artist of the second half of the last century. It is a good read and he makes a cogent case. The only piece of work he mentioned that I have not seen is Roger Maris Swinging the Bat. I have never even seen an image of it. I also never knew that the Brillo Boxes were made of wood and handcrafted by woodworkers in New York City. The most interesting rift in the book was Danto's discussion of why Andy's film Empire State is a masterpiece--it's philosophy at its most fun. Since I have a small library about Andy, I was skeptical that this book would be worth it. It's masterful.
A personal project of mine this year will be to revert to my Divinity School days and read theology. Last year, my Harvard Divinity School classmate Forrest Church died. He leaves a treasure trove of theological writing that I have yet to read. As America's polarization now seems fixed between the religious right and those who support a secular society with some respect paid to science, I need to arm up for what looks to be a brutal intellectual struggle.
More and more I am convinced we lost almost a decade in the fight against terrorism. The recent outbursts by Dick Cheney and the Republicans have only solidified that belief. I believe the cottage industry of producing books and studies on Islamic Fundamentalism has failed to illuminate the problem. Trace the route of the underwear bomber and his class background. It's clear there is no front in the war against terrorism and that we need a new paradigm to unravel what I think are awesome strategic errors that actually put the financial well-being of the United States at risk. It will be interesting to see whether the past decade will be seen as some mistake or false start or the time when America made such structurally wrong decisions as to start its decline as a superpower.
I think this year will test the military-terrorist complex in the United States and raise central issues about what a $1 trillion a year buys us. Is the war to combat terrorism simply another money-making venture or does it have anything to do with making our nation secure? We experienced in the first year of Barack Obama the fight on Too Big To Fail in the economy; now we will see the same in the whole security industry. What is it that compels the United States to act on a gigantic scale when smart, sharp thinking could save us alot of time, energy, money and people's lives?
Our soldiers have now served in some cases twice as long as the entire World War II. Despite the bravado of our armed forces, they are showing serious problems with PSTD and other stress related illnesses, which we have known from study after study affects people who are on active duty too long. We will be experiencing blowback from this for years. We simply hollowed out our military for reasons that now escape me.
The underwear bombers postings about his despair reminded me of the terrible days in Liberia and Sierra Leone when child soldiers were conscripted by warlords and commanded to commit the most awful acts imaginable--lopping off people's arms with machetes and tearing babies out of women's wombs. Today, these child soldiers are pariahs, shunned by society, and haunted by their acts. Programs to rehabilitate them to some semblance of functioning have by and large failed. Their sleep is disturbed by nightly nightmares and they had to be detoxed from their regimen of dope and booze. They are lost and one wonders how many of the underwear bombers will also end up lost like the child fighters.
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