Culture

The Latest on Empathy in the Court

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President Obama has reportedly dropped the word “empathy” from his speeches about the Supreme Court, likely in response to conservatives’ claims that empathy has no place in our justice system. How strange. The president is expected to end each speech with a religious invocation: “God bless America.” But he gets smeared for seeking to infuse our public institutions with empathy, one of the most spiritual human impulses. Since my post last week about this issue, the empathy debate has continued to boil on, and has even taken a few unexpected turns.

Culture

Stardust and Neil Gaiman

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I saw Stardust again last night, and if you want a stunningly good fantasy movie and you missed it the first time, see it. I read my first Neil Gaiman novels last year (American Gods and Neverwhere) and we saw and loved Coraline recently: one of the year’s must see movies. I hadn’t realized Stardust was made from a Gaiman novel, and when that came up in the credits this time and I now recognized his name, it explained to me how a movie that has so many trappings of fantasy froth could actually be a decent, intelligent, totally enjoyable movie. It’s Gaiman, I said to my son, that explains it, and he agreed. Stardust is a light and humorous as Coraline is dark, but both have heart and soul.

Culture

Dowd's plagiarism

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Maureen Dowd’s excuse about her plagiarism in yesterday’s op-ed was very weak–not the kind of thing she would accept from anyone else. It’s only because she is so ungenerous in print that readers like me are prone to a little schadenfreude on seeing her plead for a generous interpretation for herself. She gave Biden short shrift for plagiarism back in the day. More here. I read Dowd because she does often play the role of the child who says the emperor has no clothes, and she is often acute, and because she is an equal opportunity eviscerator: I don’t only want to hear the people I dislike trashed, it’s too easy to live in a bubble on the internet, hearing only opinions you agree with.

Culture

Deep in my heart, I do believe…

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Thank goodness for Pete Seeger. He’s 90 today. The popularity of “We Shall Overcome” owes as much to Seeger as anyone: I’d forgotten that until going to a moving service full of Seeger’s songs at the Oakland UU Church today. “No one can prove a damn thing, but I think that singing together gives people some kind of holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists or whoever.

Culture

What is Sacredness?

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“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.” You can rely on Ursula le Guin. Her work ties the personal with the political as engagingly as any I know and way better than most.

Culture

Colbert Confusion

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When my son told me that a high school senior he met on a college visit a couple of years back thought that Colbert was a conservative, my mind boggled. Could someone be so out of it not to realize that Colbert’s uber-conservative persona was a way of satirizing conservatism in a conservative-ascendant era? I put the boy down as an aberration. Now it turns out lots of conservatives think Colbert’s jokes are really on liberals. Apparently watching Colbert just confirms you in your prejudices, or so says a new study.

Culture

Pain and Beauty

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It’s so hard to explain what we are looking for in terms of art for the magazine. In general, I feel “realism” in any of the arts has come to mean painful realities, the things we would rather cover over, the rapes and violence and harshness, the dirt and poverty. I’d love to see uses of the term that referred to love, empathy, beauty, recovery. Those are real too. They happen.

Culture

Art you can believe in

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I just learned about a magazine that could really help us at Tikkun. We are always in need of good art that in some way embodies a spiritual critique of society or vision of what could be, and it’s surprisingly difficult to find it. I tried expressing that need here (a pdf download under “Art Submissions”). Now I find that Image magazine has been doing something like this for twenty years. The editor, Gregory Wolfe, explains how they started it:
As we surveyed the cultural landscape, we noted the irony that large numbers of both secularists and religious believers shared an identical notion: great art and literature inspired by faith could no longer be created.