Friday night Basket of Links

October 25, 2019

This isn't Texas, and I've not been into high school football for thirty-some years.  

 

 

"Chateaubriand, like his contemporaries, may have imagined he was destined to be remembered for having defended tradition, poeticized religion, and served the nation of France. As it turned out, though, his greatest gift was for translating personhood into prose. His masterpiece was the private life."

 

"Children were his congregation." A nice piece on the TV personality "Mister Rogers," who was an ordained Presbyterian minister and was intentional (though not confessional) about being one in his Public television work.  Perhaps one of the most influential public theologians of the half-century since Reinhold Niebuhr, in fact.  

 

Shakespeare did not know of tea, or coffee, or hot chocolate--all three of these drinks were introduced in England after his death, but not much later in the 17th century.  Informative about the history (actually quite recent history) of some of our favorite drinks.  I can endorse Cowan's Social Life of Coffee, and I know of a couple of fun books about coffee shops in the Ottoman empire, like Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee, and another good book on Coffee Life in Japan.  

 

A nice piece about Diwali, the religious ritual that has multiple names and multiple interpretations across several religious traditions.   Kind of like Easter/Passover. 

 

Ambling about the interwebs, I found this two-years old piece by Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt's self-understanding as Jewish and secular, and her complicated relationship with Israel.  "By insisting that statelessness is the recurrent political disaster of the 20th century (it now takes on new forms in the 21st), Arendt refuses to give a metaphysical cast to ‘bare life’. Indeed, she makes it quite clear in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the ostensible ‘state of nature’ to which displaced and stateless people are reduced is not natural or metaphysical at all, but the name for a specifically political form of destitution." 

 

May you sleep in tomorrow at least as much as I am going to be sleeping in tomorrow.