Category Archives: The Cultural

Pedro the Lion Rises from the Ashes With Phoenix

With ‘Phoenix’, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan Emerges from the Mines of His Interiority : NPR: By offering up his own interior narrative, Bazan holds a mirror to the self-mythologizing we all do in retracing our own steps. To write Phoenix, Bazan spent time in the namesake city; the soaring “My Phoenix” is the kind […]

Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong?

A powerful essay on the “co-opting” of minority cultures by Parul Sehgal. This is something I am deeply interested in understanding and observing within “participatory culture,” which often takes part in remixing texts of many kinds. Sehgal’s points are a clear and necessary check on the “fast and loose” nature of those borrowing culture to create culture. Calling […]

Modern Day Parable on Environmentalism (Joel Salatin)

Reading in the Christian Century today there was a review of Joel Salatin’s newest book “Mad farmer?” and read this parable from the “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic,” as Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore’s Dilema. Salatin writes: We have neighbors—I’ll call them Cleve and Matilda—who would be the bane of liberal environmentalists. . . . […]

When The Church Becomes a Department Store

You can drive around most neighborhoods here in the suburbs and find at least some vacant buildings. Some of them are small, and if not historic, they at least have a history.  While others are just enormous squares, nondescript, no personality or history at all. “throwaway” buildings might be a way to think about it. […]

Interfaith Clergy Letter to the Editor in Clark County

(This is a letter a group of us from Clark County wrote in response to some of the controversy surrounding September 11th this past week. We submitted it to our local papers which did not pick it up so I thought I’d post it here.) This year, a small group of clergy in Clark County […]