In the News: The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and more!
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
Tag: Killing the Buddha
In the News: Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more!
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
Daily Links: Unscrupulous Scribes
Orientalism, feminism, sexism, hedonism and beauty. Continue Reading →
“Touch” the Infinite
From “Oh, Infinite Stream of Data and Light” by Beatrice Marovich, at Killing the Buddha:
But what if, perhaps, the infinite itself didn’t have another agenda entirely? What if my actual, sensible, embodied feeling of resistance was, in fact, the aftershock of an infinite intuition? What if the infinite had bubbled up through my synapses and then my organs like a kind of indigestion? What if the infinite, itself, had been on a mission to get to me—into my intuition—to suggest, in a still quiet voice: I’m not just out there, I’m in here, too.
"Touch" the Infinite
From “Oh, Infinite Stream of Data and Light” by Beatrice Marovich, at Killing the Buddha:
But what if, perhaps, the infinite itself didn’t have another agenda entirely? What if my actual, sensible, embodied feeling of resistance was, in fact, the aftershock of an infinite intuition? What if the infinite had bubbled up through my synapses and then my organs like a kind of indigestion? What if the infinite, itself, had been on a mission to get to me—into my intuition—to suggest, in a still quiet voice: I’m not just out there, I’m in here, too.
Heaven for Infiltrators
Ashley Makar writes at Tablet about Sudanese refugees in Israel. A clip:
The Knesset’s information branch reports that there are over 24,000 “infiltrators” and asylum seekers in Israel: almost 19,000 Sudanese and Eritreans, the rest from Central Africa. Up to 7,000 of these are in Eilat, where Mayor Yitzhak Halevi is on a “Save the City” campaign to rid his town of Africans. In a July press conference, Halevi said Israel has become a “heaven for infiltrators.” He added that those who are changing the demographic composition of Eilat are de-valuing properties, committing crimes, spreading diseases, and “getting drunk and frustrated.”
Thanks, Dennis Dutton
by Jeff Sharlet
Head over to Arts & Letters Daily and scroll down the left column to this sad item: links to a couple of dozen obituaries marking the death, on December 28, of A&L founder Denis Dutton. You can find details of Dutton’s wonderfully generous contrarianism there; here, I’ll point to the obvious, which is that The Revealer’s three columns, Today, Timely, and Timeless, are a riff on the format established by A&L in 1998. I was hardly alone in copying A&L; future historians of internet journalism and criticism will surely credit Dutton with tremendous influence. What makes that all the more remarkable is that he shaped the internet not by rushing breathlessly into the future but by emulating the design of an 18th century broadsheet and by clinging to vocation of “public intellectual” even as he opened the doors of his highbrow salon to countless unknowns and troublemakers. I was one of them, and it’s no exaggeration to say I owe something of my career to him. Starting in 1998, when I was a senior writer on the humanities at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dutton began picking up my features with some regularity. That impressed my editors, and encouraged them to encourage me to keep messing with The Chron’s turgid formulas. Dutton provided the cover that allowed me to go from writing dull reports on trends in diplomatic history to stories about the fringes of academe, portraits of “gypsy scholars” and meditations on the utopianism of scholarly books that can never be completed. I never communicated with Dutton, but I suspect I fell into his favor because of a feature I wrote on the resurgence of Ayn Rand in the academy; Dutton was no “Randroid,” as the objectivist’s disciples are known, but his contrarianism led him into a sympathy for libertarianism with a conservative tinge. Continue Reading →
Warhol's Religious Imagery
Read Becky Garrison’s post, “Andy Warhol’s Last Supper” at Killing the Buddha. Continue Reading →
Warhol’s Religious Imagery
Read Becky Garrison’s post, “Andy Warhol’s Last Supper” at Killing the Buddha. Continue Reading →
City of Life and Death
There wasn’t a dearth of death in Benares; as one walked or drove on its streets, small groups of men bearing the dead on biers kept passing by with little fanfare about the nature of their procession. I saw many more dead bodies in three days in Benares than I had seen in the preceding thirty years. Unlike other Indian cities, this one does not go out of its way to separate and shield the living and the dead from one another. The two categories of bodies form a continuum; life and death remain in conversation with one another. — from “City of Life, City of Death” by Ananya Vajpeyi at Killing the Buddha. Read the entire post here. Continue Reading →