A holiday collection.
Culture Watch
The Editors 11-01-2002
Alcatraz is Not an Island is a powerful documentary (which airs Nov. 7 on PBS)
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 11-01-2002
When this book was published, the Committee to Protect Journalists had just named the West Bank as "the worst place to be a journalist."
Andrea Jeyaveeran 11-01-2002
I don't usually read memoirs. There are just so many of them out there, and the whole genre seems to have become self-indulgent or uninspired.
Mark Lewis Taylor 11-01-2002
Since Sept. 11, country music stations have blared songs like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." and Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly"
Chris Rice 9-01-2002
Chris Rice, a former columnist for Sojourners, chronicles in Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South his years living in Antioch...
Julienne Gage 9-01-2002
Spokane Indian Sherman Alexie often snaps "that's personal" during interviews, yet the characters in his books and films closely follow his own life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation...
Aaron McCarroll Gallegos 9-01-2002
Leaving out my all-time favorites Carlos Santana and John Coltrane, whom I've written about for Sojourners, here are a few cultural artifacts I'm currently excited about.
Rose Marie Berger 9-01-2002
John H. Timmerman's incisive look at poet Jane Kenyon could use a snappier title because, more than a "literary life," it is a quintessential modern American spiritual journey.
Danny Duncan Collum 9-01-2002
I'm reluctant to mouth off about something like the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in and all that followed. It makes me feel old.
The Editors 7-01-2002
If I Had A...Crayon
Peace is the World Smiling, from Music for Little People. A collection of peace-filled tunes for the little activists in your life. The Music for Little People choir, with help from a few grown-ups, gives songs from poets, storytellers, and musicians—Pete Seeger, Holly Near, and Sweet Honey in the Rock among them—an earnest, precious twist. www.mflp.com
Rich Witnesses
African Saints: Saints, Martyrs, and Holy People from the Continent of Africa, by Frederick Quinn. An invaluable, chock-full resource that expands—necessarily—our Western-weighted list of saints. Quinn, an Episcopal priest, looks at 90 "holy people" who've had a profound impact on Africa during the last 2,000 years; he also includes African prayers, proverbs, and wise sayings. Crossroad Publishing
Danny Duncan Collum 7-01-2002
That sentence is the title of historian Bill Malone's new book about country music (the subtitle is Country Music and the Southern Working Class). Before that, in 1981, it was the title of a hit record by country music neo-traditionalist Ricky Skaggs. In 1951, it was recorded by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. But long before any of this, it was (and still is) a common piece of folk wisdom among lower-class white people, especially in the South.
For many people of other regions or social classes, the saying may sound odd, counter-intuitive, and even un-American. In America, we're often told that "getting above your raisin'"—transcending the circumstances of birth—is the main point of existence. If Abe Lincoln had stayed in the log cabin, who would care? If Elvis had become a sincere but flat-broke folk singer, we wouldn't know his name. Americans don't buy stories about virtuous poor boys who stay poor, and we're offended at the suggestion that there might be something wrong with individual self-realization. The impulse to rise above our origins is buried deep in our national DNA. Immigrants have always come here to escape poverty and persecution and become rich and powerful. The right to perpetual self-invention might as well be enshrined in the Constitution.
The heretical wisdom embodied in "Don't get above your raisin'" suggests that roots, family, communal identity, and solidarity are all more important than individual striving or success. This is a way of thinking that most American intellectuals would associate with "traditional" or "pre-modern" cultures. But Malone, a professor emeritus in history from Tulane University, is also a good old boy from East Texas who knows that the preference for group loyalty and solidarity has lived on in modern America among rural people and blue-collar workers. In Don't Get Above Your Raisin', he argues persuasively that, in the last half of the 20th century, country music, which expressed the daily concerns of white Southern working people, broke out of the Southern region to become the cultural voice of America's white working class.
Teresa Blythe 7-01-2002
The Truth is out there. In these postmodern times, when the very nature of truth is called into question, it has been great to know that someone believes the truth actually exists. As extraordinary FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder keep the faith, so do we.
I want to believe. A poster with this slogan hangs in the X-Files office. Kind of a modern take on what the father of a demon-possessed boy said to Jesus before the healing: "I believe. Help my unbelief." The desire to believe is sometimes the best we can do.
Trust no one. Reminiscent of Jesus' statement to the rich young man, "No one is good but God." The spiritual lesson here is not the imperative to "trust no one," because often on The X-Files trust is crucial to survival. Even though there were plenty of people and entities not to be trusted, the real spiritual lesson from the series is "be careful who you trust."
Government denies knowledge. In X-Files mythology, the government is in cahoots with a powerful secret cabal that hides "the truth" in order to keep the public from becoming panicked or disillusioned. The X-Files exaggerates, but there is a lesson here. Those who joined the civil rights movement to fight government-sanctioned racism, or gave sanctuary to refugees fleeing U.S.-backed insurrections in El Salvador, and who now plead for restraint in the new "war on terrorism" know that government PR cannot be taken at face value.
Roberto Rivera 7-01-2002
My son hates social studies. No matter how much I drill him on the subject, he could care less about James Madison, the Bill of Rights, the abolitionist movement, or even more-contemporary figures like Arthur Ashe. This is more than unfortunate; it's a problem.
That's because he's a fourth grader attending public school in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And at the end of the school year, he and every other fourth grader in Virginia is going to be tested on the subject, with an emphasis on the history of the Old Dominion.
The problem isn't the subject matter; it's the way that it's presented. There's little or no attempt to engage his imagination. Facts alone don't begin to tell the story of why these figures are important and why we should know who they are, much less admire them. I also know that this disconnect between history and the imagination is far from universal. His cousins, who are the same age, don't have this problem. They live in Mexico City, a place where art and history seem inseparable. Because they can see and even touch the history of the place they call home, they are more apt to want to read about it.
It's also true for me. I remember when I first saw a reproduction of Diego Rivera's (no relation) painting of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of peasant and indigenous forces during the Mexican Revolution. Rivera's painting, which conveys both Zapata's peasant origins and his nobility, made me want to learn more about the revolutionary leader and the times that produced him. It grabbed my imagination and the rest of me soon followed, so much so that a reproduction of the work hangs in my home.