“Here’s the problem with ‘maybe’: It means different things to different people. And something always gets lost in translation . . . ,” writes Elizabeth Bernstein in The Many Powers of Maybe . “‘It seems to be about ambivalence, but it is really about power and boundaries,’ says Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago. ‘Person A who says, ‘Yeah, maybe,’ essentially puts recipient B on hold. B is powerless’.”
A Charismatic pastor in South Africa has started a controversy by saying in a sermon that “Jesus was HIV-positive” as a way of emphasizing Jesus’ concern for the marginalized. “”The best gift we can give to people who are HIV-positive is to help de-stigmatise Aids and create an environment where they know God is not against them, he’s not ashamed of them,” he said.
Art critic and First Things writer Maureen Mullarkey reminds us of an insightful essay published last year on the art of Obama worship . ”Obama’s messianism was a carefully crafted human pseudo-event,” she writes. “Last night’s body count confirmed the gradual awakening of the electorate to the difference between a hero and a celebrity.”
Salon.com’s Laura Miller urges readers not to write a novel in National Write a Novel Month (which is November). “NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary.”
Forbes columnist Joel Kotkin argues that in yesterday’s election “middle-class Americans smacked down their putative new ruling class of highly educated urbanistas and college town denizens.”
On the other hand, New Republic writer John Judis argues that the election showed that “the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.”
Finally, just out, the latest issue of the Youth Worker Journal , published by the Ivy Jungle Network.
And a classic essay by the historian Christopher Dawson on Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind . “We are all more or less bourgeois and our civilization is bourgeois from top to bottom,” he writes, and “there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization and between the mind of the bourgeois and the mind of Christ.”
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