Biblical marriage

Quite possibly if you are interested in this issue, you've seen something like this. But Juan Cole's summary of what the Bible says about marriage is to the point: But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally...

What would Thomas Jefferson have said?

Today I took the time to watch Pres. Obama's eulogy all the way through. It certainly will go down as one of the great American speeches. On the other hand, it felt odd to have the Emperor lecturing us on theology of Grace. If he had been talking about the evils of icons, just at...

Violence prevention through public health methods

For a long time I've thought that public health perspectives and strategies were valuable in dealing with social problems -- or should be. Here's an excerpt in Salon from a book by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips, which discusses Gary Slutkin's informed implementation of that idea. He returned to the United States and soon found himself asking, “What next?” He started hearing...

Eric Foner on the special status of South Carolina

Salon was smart enough to interview Eric Foner, the leading historian of Reconstruction in the post-US-Civil-War era. A sample. One-hundred-and-fifty years later, we still have a problem in this country coming to terms with the existence of slavery. There’s no museum of the history...

Social revolution in Egypt?

According to Foreign Policy, the generation that revolted against Mubarak hasn't given up on demanding personal liber...

Random historical observations

The weekend before last I had two interesting historical experiences. I attended as I often do a local Windsor event called Art in the Park. Not a lot of art as such, but plenty of crafts, and located in one of the city's most prominent parks – the grounds of the mansion built by Windsor's most famous distiller and smuggler of whiskey into the prohibition era United States.Wandering...

Grateful for her fine fair discount, Tess cooperates

Did Britain produce a more evocative rock album in the early 70s than Selling England by the Pound? Today CBC radio talked to a man who wrote a book about being a shepherd in England at the moment, how his way of life is in some ways the opposite of modernity, with even the flocks he looks after being the product of hundreds of years of human and sheep cultural development. He...

Gotta have Medieval Robots (UPenn Press)!

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art The first comprehensive work of scholarship on European automata of the Middle Ages, Medieval Robots systematically and chronologically works through themes such as the transition from the magical to the mechanical and the liminal status of robots between art and nature, familiar and foreign. Well researched and...