February 28, 2007 at 12:15 am (Schule und Kirche)
A new church start in Santa Cruz, California, is breaking ground to be the greenest congregation yet. Way to go, Methodists! I can’t wait to see the Church of the Brethren start its own eco-churches. . . any day now. . . .
February 23, 2007 at 7:28 pm (Worldliness)
Listening to NPR cover the (almost always bad) news from Iraq, I am struck with a sad realization: in Iraq, if you make a mistake, in things as trivial as how you walk down the street, you will pay with your life. In Iraq, you cannot mess up, even once. That is not how people should have to live.
February 20, 2007 at 7:43 pm (Worldliness)
On the other hand, you’ve got…. well, Bush and his pals. America is divided.
February 19, 2007 at 6:41 pm (Feminisms)
Why must even advertising for progressive causes continue to exploit women’s bodies, and the cultural objectification of them? On this post from the Sojourners/God’s Politics blog, Ryan Beiler rants about a billboard he’s seen for an organization ‘fighting‘ breast cancer, advertised in a rather unnecessary way.
I would add to the list of supposedly progressive organizations using the oppressive tools of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (as bell hooks puts it) in order to popularize themselves and their work to challenge that very system: check out the cover of the January issue of Adbusters. (Adbusters has never been top on my list of woman-friendly mags in terms of HOW they get out their message, which is all the more disappointing because what they SAY they want to do, I can fully agree with.) It shows two white male cops slamming a prettily-dressed-and-made-up blonde white woman onto the street, just outside her car door. I already wrote in my angry protest letter (posted here in the Comments section); we’ll see if they actually run it.
February 18, 2007 at 9:54 pm (Feminisms)
Apparently, Britney Spears has shaved her head bald. Bald, bald, bald. Bald as a ping-pong ball. Is she bald! (To quote from ‘Free to Be You and Me’)
And it fills me with a strange feeling of joy.
Some might (and do) say that she shaved her head for attention. Fine with me. I will start by trusting my emotional response (’Hooray for her! And us!’) and theologize from there: a female celebrity choosing to sacrifice one of her most identifiable physical traits - and we know how female celebrities are judged too much by their physical traits - good for her; in particular, a blonde woman trusting her fame or achievement to be not conditional on her fetishized blonde hair - good for her; a person choosing to sacrifice her hair, as many people have to do without any choice - good for her; a woman (and a hetero woman at that) being bald - which is still a shock to society, for some reason - good for her.
I’m not a huge Britney Spears fan in general, but I sure won’t pass by any opportunity to spin a celebrity’s action as dormant feminism.
February 13, 2007 at 8:02 pm (Worldliness)
The 2006 elections were great evidence that more of this country of mine is paying attention and caring enough to be outraged. But this past weekend saw more such evidence: THE DIXIE CHICKS SWEPT THE GRAMMIES! Most tellingly of all, their heart-pounding, fist-shaking, foot-stamping single “Not Ready to Make Nice” got song of the year. Go find it if you haven’t listened to it. It’s the best possible anthem of 2006.
Part of the reason they won wasn’t just because their music stands far above much of the popular ditties we are treated to on the radio or at our Jazzercise centers (althought I acknowledge Pink as a clear exception). They won because the Recording Academy who host the Grammies were disgusted by the unpatriotically censorous treatment the Country Music Association gave the Dixie Women, refusing to play their music, shutting them out of their Country Music Awards, and allowing radio stations to host ritual bonfires of their CDs. (See the documentary Shut Up and Sing for more details.) And so, yes, those sorts of mean-spirited middle school-meets-Fahrenheit 451 antics still are being played out by some folks, but at least for now there is a vocal protest against it and for some sense of justice and/or peace.
There is also hope in the existence of special places like the fine state where I currently reside, the place described succinctly by one audience member at the Grammies (quoted in the New York Times article linked above): “Dude, you’re in California now. Even our Republicans are Democrats.” Hella sweet.
February 8, 2007 at 10:48 pm (Wordiness)
This weekend I’m going to watch the Vagina Monologues at Cal Berkeley, with my boyfriend and some of my other best friends. We will be joining in a fine tradition of participating in this mini-movement for a vagina-friendly world. I performed in and coordinated the Vagina Monologues at my college, Lewis$Clark College, for two years, so I know the script so well it has steeped into my consciousness and my very interpretation of life experiences. I find myself quoting lines without knowing it, with no one around me getting the reference. I have some concerns about the play’s rather moderate feminism - it isn’t the end-all of feminism, by a long shot - and I wish that we had more strident, comprehensive public faces of our movement to supplement it, but for what it sets out to do, it is a blessing to a violent world.
But some folks remain a bit confused about the need for this movement. Apparently, according to the Daily Kos, at least one theatre has received complaints about the decency of the play’s title, and changed the advertised name to “The Hoohaa Monologues.” (I do not have to make this up.)
This raises three thoughts for me. First, if you are producing a copyrighted play, don’t you have to keep the legal name of the play intact?
Second, I am reminded of the flack we got at my alma mater when we put the play on. Like many college students, we would advertise our event in chalk writing on the sidewalks, and we would wake up the next morning to find the word ‘Vagina’ smudged out, leaving an invitation to ‘The … Monologues.’ People still came, and the chalk vandals proved exactly why the play was needed.
Third, how sad is it that the word vagina is what’s freaking people out? I know I am blessed with an ardently feminist community to enbubble me, but vagina seems kinda dated and patriarchal! The word cunt is much more comprehensive of a term for the whole of the female sexual anatomy that requires sensual stimulation, not just the portion of it that comes in contact with the male organ; vagina is inherently patriarchal, with its etymology coming from the word for ’sheath (for a sword).’ Even the Vagina Monologues themselves include a brief reclaiming of the cunt.
But apparently we still need to get folks from hoohaa to vagina, before we can get beyond vagina to cunt. What a world. It’s no surprise that what we can’t even talk about openly and accurately and nonsexistly, we don’t treat with respect bodily, either - as the many victims of sexual assault, STDs, and the sex industry could tell us better than I.
The Vagina Monologues remain an important step in the world’s feminist journey, as long as we keeping putting one <dog> in front of the other, keep our <peepers> on the prize, and remember to hold each others’ <mitts> as we go.
February 8, 2007 at 4:47 pm (Worldliness)
Forgive the pun.
The BBC online news today sets the stage for the two top (in my mind) candidates for the Democratic primary for president in 2008. The candidates are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The stage is Chicago, the city of hot air that has been home to both of them.
This week, the air is a little colder than usual, not only because of the subzero temperatures but because of the Bears’ crushing Super Bowl defeat to uppity neighbor Indianapolis (they are from the Midwest; they are forgiven).
| I love these lions. |
The primary election campaigning is heating up, though, even as Obama quits lighting up, and what interests me is that the divide between the two Chicago candidates is not just being made by race and gender, but by age/experience. The assumption is that younger is hotter and better - even to override the value of experience that a more experienced candidate might offer: “Hillary Clinton lacks some of Mr Obama’s magic. For one thing, she has been around a lot longer. Her campaign is not a blushing debut but a well-thought makeover.“ Like the waitress quoted in the BBC article, I’m not sure that these categorizations are enough to base my vote on; I need to know the policies they promote, the content of their campaigns, the visions they will be vehicles for.
The message from articles like this seems to be that, while we logically know someone with more party wisdom and longer commitment to politics, we just can’t help ourselves but be swept away by this younger, dashing-er, hipper candidate; the suspense will continue because only time will tell which one we-the-promiscuous-’players’ choose for the long haul. In this way, the media coverage of the primary battle falls into the motif of (genderqueer) marital faithfulness, dually reinforcing the tropes that elections and infidelity are more about form than substance - more about the persons’ categorizable qualities than tricky things like their thoughts, personalities, actions, or beliefs. It’s a strange basis for an election, and one I hope most voters see through.
February 3, 2007 at 6:18 am (Worldliness)
Check out my great boyfriend’s great video. (David Batstone is not my boyfriend. The one behind the camera is my boyfriend. He’s even cuter than Mr. Batstone.)
February 3, 2007 at 2:04 am (Worldliness)
You may have read lately about the UN’s report that methane gas is more of a problem in terms of impacting global climate change than even that favorite nemesis, CO2: “According to a new report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport.”
(see the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization site for the report, at http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html)
So there’s a lot of harmful methane out there adding to the global greenhouse gas emissions. So where does all the methane come from? Some comes from organisms on the ocean floor who are releasing more methane as the oceans warm, and more than that comes from livestock raised for people to eat them. So what could be possibly do with this information about the global warming caused by the livestock raised to become our meat? We could not eat the meat.
Common Dreams, the news website for political progressives, sums it up succinctly: “The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.”
(See Common Dreams for the full article, at
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0120-20.htm)
If you want to help slow global climate change, you can start eating a more vegetarian or vegan diet. (You’ll be in good company.)
……………..
So, because we read the news, we now know meat-eating helps cause global climate change. What other environmental lessons do our national news sources offer us? How about the dangers of meat-eating for species diversity?
The Christian Science Monitor (1 February 2007) confirms the alarms sent out by Defenders of Wildlife: that ‘Gray wolves may lose protected status’ if they are taken off the list of the Endangered Species Act because of their population’s bounce back to healthier numbers in the continental United States. The CSM describes the history thusly: “After a century of shooting, trapping, and poisoning that had just about wiped them out in order to protest livestock and game animals, wolves gained protection under the federal Endangers Species Act in 1974.”
Now, some folks are pushing the federal government to take the gray wolves off the ESA list, to expose them to the threats that looser state legislation would allow. Idaho Governor CL Otter, quoted in the CSM, sounds like he’s one of the eagerest to see the wolves unprotected: “ ‘I’m prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wild myself.’ ” He is actually hoping for the Idaho wolf population to be (violently) reduced from its current 650 to a mere 150 wolves. This might make my family in Idaho happy: they’ve been stacking up wolf carcasses on the distant outskirts of their property up in the valley for years.
While blood thirst cannot be ruled out as one motivation for these folks to want to slaughter wolves, we must also consider a more humane impetus for their dislike of wolves: that they want to protect their populations of livestock from predators. Fewer wolves, fewer lost livestock, greater profits for ranchers.
This raises another potential avenue of solution to this ‘problem’ of wolf vs. man: stop raising livestock. Wheat and corn and pine trees are not at risk of predation by wolves. We could leave the wolves alone if we did not insist on placing tempting, tasty treats in the middle of their territories. We would have more land to grow more sustainable, more efficient food sources for the growing global population. And we would have no motivation to graze livestock in wolf territory if we consumers did not eat meat. The ranchers would have to transition into raising vegetarian harvests, while consumers transitioned into an economy that fed us the products of those vegetarian harvests. But if we really wanted another, more sustainable solution to the conflict between ranchers and wolves, between economies and wilderness, we might try looking back a few steps from the point of conflict, to the sources way back up the food chain.
Is it ironic that non-human meat-eaters are threatened because human meat-eaters demand the same food-flesh? Do non-human predators always get a worse rap from humans, because the carnivores among us are jealous?
……………..
Admittedly, I am an evangelical vegetarian, and you, dear readers, might accuse me of reading my gospel of vegetarianism out of a few too many sources. But I think this is an instructive lesson in meaning-making, and in scientific analysis. Yes, I bring to this conversation my bias in favor of not killing animals to eat their flesh, but that bias allows me to imagine a different cause for this problem than the folks inside the debate – an influence outside the small setting the debate is narrated in.
What is science, then, but the search for causes that we can’t readily see? - causes that might free us from the mental ruts that make us assume that the explanations others have handed us must work for us, too? What is science, then, but the integration of diverse individual viewpoints/experiences, through imagination, into constructive theories that can more and more poignantly describe our world in order to outline for us the most effective, life-giving modes of working in the world?
In the end, I don’t really care if each of us follows my wild trains of logic justifying my attempts to relate my pet issue into every current events discussion that comes along. [Likewise, I don’t care if all of us call ourselves Christian.] All I care about is stopping the violence against our Earth community. [So what I do care about is that we do what’s right.] Likewise, what I do care about is that we don’t eat the meat.
And this still does not mean I’m going to become a Seventh-day Adventist.
