A cold and wet day where I am.  Hope you are warm and dry, wherever you are.

Interesting fragments of an analysis of what’s going on in higher ed right now.

This is way cool: a chart of the "major" languages spoken in the world.  It's not too restricted in its sense of major.

The invasion of Iwo Jima began on February 19, 1945, 75 years ago today.  Recently rediscovered film footage gives a vivid depiction of the battle and its aftermath.

A brief piece about African-American spirituals and their history.  It doesn't say much, but if you want more, particularly on music and evil in this tradition, check out James Cone's The Spirituals and the Blues, or Cheryl Kirk-Duggan's Exorcising Evil, or even Jon Michael Spencer's Blues and Evil.

This is interesting about American history and the full reckoning with that history that is coming:

We are going to need a bigger project, of the kind that Martin Luther King Jr. laid out in 1963. By focusing on the horrors inflicted on Native Americans, by arguing for the unprecedented nature of removal, King was doing more than adding yet another oppressed group to history’s pantheon of victims. Rather, he was reaching for a holistic understanding of how racism is historically reproduced down the generations.

“We elevated” the war against Native Americans “into a noble crusade,” King said, founding our national identity on Indian killing. Imperial expansion became a way of life, one that reinforced deep-seated pathologies and provided mythic justification for a volatile, racialized individualism. Imperial expansion led to alienation, social isolation, free-floating aggression, and fantasies that life was an endless game of cowboys and Indians, played out in all the nation’s endless wars. King, who by this time considered himself a socialist, hoped to build a movement that would achieve the “mass application of equality to jobs, housing, education, and social mobility.” He was acutely aware of the structural barriers to that goal. But he was also attuned to the psychic barriers that blocked full social equality.

One weird, but good? thing to think about is this: American history is pretty well recorded; it goes back four hundred or so years; there is only so much to say about it.  And we ought to say it all, and begin to try to figure out what to do with what must be said.  

And when I think about things like that, I think about Rabbi Hillel's three questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?

And then I think of Paul:  

For [God] says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”  Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation!

In America, we still struggle to accept the task of trying tell the truth, and trying to listen to it being told to us.  But it is our task.

Amen.  And mercy to you, as severe as you can accept it, wherever you are.