popular culture

Walt Whitman counseled each of us to “dismiss whatever insults your soul.” My fervent hope is that the new Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences report—a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that was “commissioned” or “requested” by a quartet of DC pols—will be dismissed accordingly.

I wanted to think about how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that.

To these guys, the idea of women working outside the home is destroying American culture. They’re saying that a society in which a majority of women support their families cannot possibly be compatible with a strong, traditional, vibrant society. Yet we need only look to the traditional Jewish culture of Eastern Europe of less than two centuries ago in order to find an example that gives the lie to conservative handwringing over women’s work.

Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.

A new book on ‘only children’ adds an interesting dimension to the politics of making babies.

In the US half the books on Islam are devoted to telling you what’s wrong with it. Where is the serious literature by thoughtful Muslims engaging their faith? That may take some time, but for now, take a gander at a 30-part series on the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law.

Graduation time—and the living ain’t easy.

The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.

Rather than approaching the tagging as a criminal act, however, church leaders decided to take the tagging seriously as an expression of something spiritually meaningful—a cry for help, perhaps; even a mocking expression of religious skepticism. They approached it relationally, using the church building itself as a social media platform, and responding with their own message of hope.

Most mornings, I get up early and ride my bicycle. I do this because I love to ride and because I could stand to get into shape. Before I leave, I kiss my wife on the cheek and tell her that I love her. She replies in her tender, throaty whisper, “Be safe.”