Quick drop

April 07, 2022

Just some links! A busy time, as we come to the end of the academic year...

 

Nice review of a book about the nouvelle théologie of de Lubac and Congar and Daniélou and others.  One thought I have after reading just a bit of this book, that jives with other things I have learned of late: we are still in the wake of the Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic church, and movements like the nouvelle théologie are fighting on the side of the (post-Counter-Reformation) angels.  Not everybody is, to be honest.  The ressourcement must continue, for all of us.

 

A pretty interesting piece about the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.  Seems like a level-headed bloke. 

 

It’s an old connection between wealth inequality and despotism, as this piece shows. Then again, Thomas Piketty is optimistic these days.  Huh.

 

Crisis of White Evangelicalism after Trump. And did you see the piece in the NYTimes about right-wing political rallies and Christianity?  As one of the speakers says, it's not about church, but about America--Worth a look.

 

Not a bad account of crucial aspects of Derrida’s thought, couched in the form of a review of a recent biography.

 

American diversification continues apace, despite the GOP’s reactionary panic, and perhaps fueling that panic; here demographer William Frey helps chart how racial and ethnic diversity has changed over the past ten years.

 

Hey, oldest recorded mass killing!  Congrats, or something.

 

I gotta say, I like this guy

 

This is a good piece about the GOP’s current civil war over the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Not a fan of the Neocons, but I’d definitely ship arms to them in this fight.

 

Look, this is an interesting report about the on-line discussions around K-12 education in the US, but one of its most important points is (I think) underplayed, namely this—that discussions about “Critical Race Theory” are substantially more “astro-turfed” by right-wing groups (often non-parental) than other public discussions, thus this:

“An interesting finding about the CRT discussion compared to the other topics in our study is that it involves more than just parents. As we have already highlighted through examples above, many professionals and activists are also part of the conversation. This could be why the conversation skewed older and male when compared to the general education conversation (Figure 7). A much larger percentage of 35-to-44-year-olds and 45-to-54-year-olds were talking about CRT as compared to the general education conversation in our sample. Almost 70 percent of people talking about CRT were male, which is much higher than in the general conversation.”

 

Take care, everyone.