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Ivan Chermayeff, poster for American Museum of Natural History, 1984. For Mobil Corp. Via Aiga Design Archives
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Finely engraved frontispiece to William Morris’s ‘News from nowhere’ (the Kelmscott Press edition), a work which combined his socialist utopian ideals with science fiction.William Morris,
News from nowhere, or, An epoch of rest : being some chapters from a Utopian romance.
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892, Alexander Turnbull Library, RPr KELM MORR 1892
a question for David Gushee
My favorite moment in this column by David Gushee comes when he says, “I have been a participant in the effort to encourage Protestant religious conservatives, generally known as fundamentalists and evangelicals, to reconsider their position voluntarily.” Voluntarily, or ...? He sounds like a sheriff in an old Western: Are you gonna come along nice and quiet, or am I gonna hafta rough ya up?
But let’s assume that, contrary to certain appearances, Gushee doesn’t think of himself as an enforcer dispatched by the Powers That Be to bring recalcitrant bigots into line. Let’s set aside his insistence that none of the people on the wrong side of history are honest when they say they genuinely hold theological positions he himself held just a few years ago. (“They are organizing legal defense efforts under the guise of religious liberty.”) Let’s assume that he’s just quite neutrally letting us know what’s coming.
It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions.
Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you. And, in case we didn’t get the point the first time around, he returns to it later:
Openly discriminatory religious schools and parachurch organizations will feel the pinch first. Any entity that requires government accreditation or touches government dollars will be in the immediate line of fire. Some organizations will face the choice either to abandon discriminatory policies or risk potential closure. Others will simply face increasing social marginalization.
A vast host of neutralist, avoidist or de facto discriminatory institutions and individuals will also find that they can no longer finesse the LGBT issue. Space for neutrality or “mild” discrimination will close up as well. So in light of these warnings about what is to come, I have one question for David Gushee: So what?
That is: What, in his view, follows from this state of affairs — for Christians, that is? Odd that he doesn't say. It has been my understanding that Christians consider it a virtue to hold to their convictions in the face of unpopularity and even persecution. ("Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another.... But the one who endures to the end will be saved.")
Of course, you can also be persecuted for holding false views; being persecuted doesn't confer legitimacy. But it certainly isn't a sign of error, or those who have "endured to the end" are of all people most to be pitied. So how is it relevant, in Christian terms, that those who hold certain views will suffer for holding them — that those who hold the view that Gushee has publicly held for around twenty months are powerful enough to punish those who haven't quite caught up with him?
Italy’s Fragile Beauty
Italy’s Fragile Beauty - The New York Times. Earthquakes are not the only threat to Italian beauty. Floods and landslides have become more frequent and destructive, since small farmers stopped tending the hillsides and unscrupulous real estate developers replaced them. Small, winding mountain roads — the umbilical cords of little communities across the country — are expensive to maintain, and some local authorities don’t even try. Depopulation has done the rest. Amatrice had already lost three-quarters of its inhabitants in a century — going from 10,000 to just 2,500. They emigrated, they went to Rome and other cities to find work.
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Welfare Palace Hotel, Rem Koolhaas & Madelon Vriesendorp, 1975
The Hugh Hewitt argument
Vote for Trump because
IF he nominates to the Supreme Court one of the judges that he has put on his shortlist and
IF that judge is confirmed and
IF certain cases happen to come before the Court and
IF the the specific issues that the Court is asked to pass judgment on are the specific issues that conservatives care about and
IF that justice votes in the the way Hewitt expects and
IF at least four other justices agree
THEN certain unpleasantly liberal policies will be averted.
And it is on the grounds of his complete and unshakable faith in the stability of this astonishingly fragile house of cards that he ignores, and wants us all to ignore, everything we know about Trump’s ignorant and belligerent narcissism.
The NPR.org audience has grown dramatically in recent years, to between 25 and 35 million unique visitors each month. But far less than 1% of that audience is commenting, and the number of regular comment participants is even smaller. Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months –– 0.003% of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period.
But such a number also suggests how effectively some of the nastier people in our society have employed comment threads — and Twitter — as their megaphones. So if we’re going to avert an outright tragedy of the online commons, we’ll need to find ways to reduce the influence of those people to a level commensurate with their actual representation in the population. NPR’s closure of comments is a step in the right direction.
You can barely get a hearing anymore unless you plan to burn everything to the ground (as long as Twitter and Snapchat are left unscathed so the revolution can be broadcast). From presidential campaigns to campus politics to the entrepreneurial penchant for “creative destruction,” an almost flippant craving for revolution mobilizes voters, consumers, and even slacktivists who rarely consider just who pays the price for their revolution or that their revolutionary energy feeds on stability.
The soil-collection project is part of a plan to erect the first national memorial to lynching victims, to be built on six acres of vacant land in downtown Montgomery. The project will cost twenty million dollars, and will include a museum at E.J.I. headquarters. It will transform the look, and perhaps the reputation, of Montgomery. A key part of the plan is a dare to the communities in which the lynchings took place. ‘We’re going to name thousands of people who were the victims of lynchings,’ Stevenson told the group before they received their trowels and jars. 'We’re going to create a space where you can walk and spend time and go through that represents these lynchings. But, more than that, we’re going to challenge every county in this country where a lynching took place to come and claim a memorial piece—and to erect it in their county.’