Beyond Caprice
In the film Almost Famous, Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays a fictionalized version of the American music journalist Lester Bangs. The film centers on a teenaged kid traveling with a popular rock band, and he's an aspiring music journalist himself. Towards the end of the film, Bangs' character is giving his protégé some advice, hoping to give him context for a problem he's facing. In his monologue, he offers, "We are uncool. Women will always be...
Firewall of Church and State
Jesus was Jewish, and during the era in which he lived, the center of the Jewish world was the Temple in Jerusalem where the Jews went to worship. The Jews had lived there for almost a thousand years, without too much hassle from their neighbors. The original Temple built by Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and most of the population of the city was killed. The Temple was later rebuilt. A couple hundred years...
The Supposed Threat of Feminism
"The slave seeks only to be free, but he does not hope to acquire the estate of his master." -The Gospel of Philip (a non-canonical Christian gospel) I'm currently reading A History of U.S. Feminisms, by Rory Dicker, which is a short introduction to feminist movement in the last 200 years, broken up into the three waves. It's one of the best and most approachable books I've found for anyone coming to the subject matter...
Extreme Makeover: Neural Edition
A few days ago I was having a conversation about the process of selling a house. I'm not a homeowner, but I was curious: if you're going to make cosmetic improvements before putting it on the market, in the hopes you can get a higher selling price, where does it make the most sense to invest? (While it depends on the property, the general answer is kitchen and bathrooms.) The discussion came around to those...
Seek Understanding
I mentioned a couple of months ago that I set out to read a book a day in 2016. I've fallen woefully short of this nigh-impossible goal so far, but my real aim has been to spend as much of my free time reading as I can manage. It has served well to help me manage my time, and keep me away from things that I might otherwise let distract me. I am trying to approach works of...
Detroit and White Flight
During World War II, there was a massive influx of black people into the city of Detroit. This occurred because the city (which earned the nickname "the Arsenal of Democracy") had become a booming production center for supplies for the war effort overseas. The labor force needed supplementing, and there were plenty of minority workers who easily filled these roles. After the war ended, so did the existence of these jobs. The multitudes of people...
This Life Versus The Next
You often hear the complaint that people of various religious stripes forsake this life because they are so focused on a life that supposedly comes after this one. They don't make the most of their time on earth because they feel that they'll enter the life that truly matters after they die. This is usually attributed to weakness; people who are incapable of handling the sorrows or pain of this world can easily escape it...
Judgment
"It's judgment that defeats us." -Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse NowThis line from the film resonated with me intensely the first time I saw it many years ago. What it truly meant in the context of the film was lost on me at the time; I was far too young to appreciate what it contributed to the movie's narrative. With wiser eyes, I'll have to watch it again. But this quote stood alone as containing some important...
Uncertain
The question occurs to me more often on days when I'm immersed in an environment of younger people. Amongst high schoolers and college students, talking about their passions and the marks they intend to leave on the world, my perspective on myself comes into focus, and I see that I'm markedly different than most of them.In getting a little older, I haven't lost my enthusiasm for life; this happens to a lot of people as...
First-World Problems
There's a common phrase, which gained widespread use on the Internet, that people use when they're complaining about a problem: first-world problems. It's used by the speaker to concede that what they're complaining about is only a problem when considered in a given context, and where the context itself indicates that the problem itself is trivial. Having to wait in line for a long time at the grocery store is a first-world problem, since it's not...