On being the people of God in a particular place.
Culture Watch
Gareth Higgins 8-01-2010
It’s ironic that the explosive, high-budget thrill rides understand so little about their own themes.
Becky Garrison 7-01-2010
Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes all the Difference, by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. Harper One.
Rose Marie Berger 7-01-2010
The Complete Psalms, by Pamela Greenberg. Bloomsbury USA. Joyful Noise, edited by Robert Strong. Autumn House Press.
Gareth Higgins 7-01-2010
Documentary films have the potential to both show us the world and change it.
Elizabeth Palmberg 7-01-2010
- How did you begin your work as a lawyer and activist? I think it was my vocation. In my own life, my parents said sometimes, “Women can’t do that, and men can.” I answered all the time, “Why do you think that women can’t do that?” When I got the opportunity to begin work as a lawyer, I was focusing on women’s law. In Congo, the culture said women couldn’t inherit land. We have a great law—but the implementation, that is the problem. I began assisting women pro bono in the east, in Goma.
Margaret Regan 7-01-2010
In March 2008, several fast-food employees found themselves on the wrong side of U.S. immigration policies.
Gareth Higgins 6-01-2010
The multiplex stabbing is the consequence of a dehumanized culture that defaults to sarcasm and nurtures angry condemnation.
Kimberly B. George, Letha Dawson Scanzoni 6-01-2010
Cross-generational blogging about faith and feminism.
Liane Rozzell 6-01-2010
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. The New Press.
Kate Bowman-Johnston 5-01-2010
When Kevin Barbieux became homeless in 1982, he was new to Nashville. At first, he relates in an e-mail interview, he spent his days hovering around a rescue mission. Then, as he met other homeless people who introduced him to the city’s attractions, he began to explore. He took long walks by the Cumberland River, visited the Tennessee State Museum—and found himself browsing the stacks of the downtown library.
“I wasn’t much of a reader, so I didn’t spent much time [there] initially,” Barbieux writes. “But I did have an interest in photography and art, so once I discovered those books I was at the library for hours at a time. ... The 750s and 770s [were] where I spent my time.”
For Barbieux, these Dewey Decimal numbers were not the vestiges of a dusty, archaic organizational system that few people today use, let alone commit to memory. Beginning with coffee-table art books, the library became a setting of vital importance and a main stop on the road to changing his life.
When public computers came on the scene, Barbieux used them, along with print resources, to research and produce an educational newsletter about homelessness. The library’s fledgling Internet service connected him with others doing the same, such as the publishers of Seattle’s Real Change newspaper. He began to do photography, eventually showing some of his work—which featured what he calls “an eye for inspiration in the mundane”—in galleries. And in August 2002, Barbieux tried his hand at blogging, then a relatively new phenomenon. His blog, The Homeless Guy, which he updated at the library, became an Internet sensation, and donations through the site gave him the funds he needed to get off the street for a time. Thanks to his newfound notoriety, he was also asked to join the mayor’s task force on ending homelessness in Nashville.
Kate Bowman-Johnston 5-01-2010
It's said that the best children’s literature appeals to the child in the adult and the adult in the child. Below, books for kids of all ages—and grown-ups who are young at heart—that simultaneously inform, challenge, and delight.
Picture Books for Young Children
Preschool to Grade 3
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, by Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Betsy Lewin. Farmer Brown’s Holsteins presente! When the farmer won’t meet their demands for a warmer barn, the cows go on strike and rally other animals to bargain for better conditions. With goofy illustrations and plot details, the book is far from a heavy-handed treatise on union organizing, but children still take away the importance of speaking up for themselves and others. Simon & Schuster
He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. The only words in this picture book are the lyrics to the titular spiritual, but Nelson’s lush illustrations make them sing. Beginning and ending with his place in the vast universe, the book follows a young boy as he flies a kite with his family, enjoys a rainstorm, and imagines life in distant lands. Dial Books
Silent Music, written and illustrated by James Rumford. As bombs fall on Baghdad in 2003, Ali finds comfort in soccer, pop music—and Arabic calligraphy. His pen strokes are embedded in the earthy collage style of the illustrations, with script adorning the background and details of garments. Drawing inspiration from a 13th-century calligrapher who made his art during another invasion, Ali observes that, in contrast to the word “war,” the pen “stubbornly resists me when I make the difficult waves and slanted staff of salam—peace.” Roaring Brook Press