Bourdieu’s Unfinished Agenda: A “Social Europe”

In honor of the Treaty of Lisbon going into effect this week, here are some thoughts from Pierre Bourdieu on Europe:
“Social history teaches us that there is no social policy without a social movement capable of imposing it and that it was not the market, as some would have us believe today, but the labor [...]

Bourdieu on Aesthetics, Science and the Production of Truth

Okay, so I’ve given up on blogging ’cause it’s a distraction from “real” work and because it’s easier to say short things elsewhere. But I feel compelled to share the brilliance of the following quotes with the world, and they didn’t fit in a status update.
“The love of art, like love itself, even and especially [...]

A Miscellany: Iowa and the New Atheism

I’ve entitled this “a miscellany” to avoid the confusion that I think the judicial ruling on homosexuality in Iowa has anything to do with the New Atheism. That said, I’m quite happy when fundamentalism of any stripe is thwarted, be it Christian (in Iowa) or atheist.
First things first: IOWA?!?!? Who knew???? Okay, it looks like [...]

More Things I Have to Put Up With

The anthropology blog Savage Minds had an amusing post recently about some ridiculously “postmodern” titles for academic papers. To wit, education researcher Paul Smith has published papers with titles like, “an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po – ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post® uv ed DUCAT ion recherché repres©entation” and “Split———ting the ROCK of {speci [ES]al} e.ducat.ion: FLOWers of lang[ue]age in >DIS.” [...]

New Mexican Sanity

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico signed a bill yesterday ending the use of the death penalty in that state. Richardson’s statement has some good reasons even people who support the penalty in theory should be against its current practice. 15 down, 35 to go….

Yoder Comes Alive!!

The great Christian-anarchist website Jesus Radicals has just updated their website and simultaneously blown my freaking mind. Not only do they now have the internet’s best Jacques Ellul collection. Not only do they have previously hard-to-find Yoder articles from the Gospel Herald. But they have 10 minutes of video of Prof. John Howard Yoder rapping [...]

Baila el guaguanco

Okay, I haven’t been posting at all because I’ve been super busy with school/music and really haven’t had anything to say that’s not directly applicable to those two things. But today I feel like communicating with my legion of virtually real readers, so here are two possibly interesting things I’ve done in the past week:
(1) [...]

The Things I Have to Put Up With, Pt 2

Ahh…the French.
Being is equally beyond negation as beyond affirmation. Affirmation is always affirmation of something; that is, the act of affirming is distinguished from the thing affirmed. But if we suppose an affirmation in which the affirmed comes to fulfill the affirming and is confused with it, this affirmation can not be affirmed–owing to too [...]

The Queen is Haunted

Last night I had a show with Diva Abrasiva at Canongate Kirk. The Canongate is where Adam Smith and his mother are buried, and it’s where the Queen goes to church when she’s in Scotland. They even had a “royal pew” roped off in the front. Pretty Cool. Anyway, it’s a massive old church, and [...]

The Things I Have to Put Up With

“Since we know that the need to frequent museums or churches is conditional on frequenting museums and churches, and that assiduous frequentation supposes the need to frequent, it is clear that breaking the circle of the first entry into a church or museum requires a predisposition towards frequentation which, short of a miraculous predestination, can [...]