Toni Morrison's Jazz in tune
Culture Watch
Aaron McCarroll Gallegos 8-01-1992
In the past several years, the two largest Spanish-language television networks in the United States, Telemundo and Univision, have faced protests from Latinos..
Karen Lattea 6-01-1992
Gerald G. May's new book, The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, $16.95, cloth) has the capacity to rekindle hope in wary hearts—real hope, rooted in honesty and faith, not in retreat from reality or creative conformity. But it takes a certain willingness to read these pages, for May's blended background of psychiatry and spiritual guidance enables him to challenge our deepest insecurities and disillusionment even as he nurtures our courage and dreams.
The Awakened Heart offers a spirituality that calls us to listen more to our hearts and less to our heads, to place more priority on love than on efficiency in our lives. May recognizes the "gentle warfare" between love and efficiency, saying, "The enemy is that which would stifle your love: your fear of being hurt, the addictions that restrict your passion, and the efficiency worship of the world that makes you doubt the value of love."
Addiction in May's lexicon is an expansive term. Building on his last work, Addiction and Grace (Harper, 1988, $9.95, paper), May writes, "Attachment nails the energy of our passion to someone or something, producing a state of addiction." He suggests that asking ourselves "freedom questions" is necessary for discerning how much we've allowed addiction to enter into our loves. "The difference is between attachment binding desire," he writes, "and commitment honoring desire." The "Freedom and Intention" chapter concludes with a very encouraging discussion of prayer—a turning toward the "source of love" in which complete freedom exists.
Bob Hulteen 6-01-1992
Every New Year's Eve people use the calendar change as an opportunity to reflect on their life and to consider their prospects. The upcoming change of decade and century, and even millennium, is giving society a common milestone to evaluate the past and to take stock of the future.
More Than Just "Christian Megatrends"
Tom Sine, author of the 1981 Mustard Seed Conspiracy, continues his observation of social, scientific, and spiritual trends in his recently released Wild Hope (Word Publishing, 1991, $12.99, paper). Sine issues a wake-up call to the Christian community, notifying us of the alarming technological changes society is in store for.
Sine surveys a number of topics—the environment, robotics and artificial intelligence, biological adaptation, changing economic power centers—charting both nearly realizable technologies and seemingly unimaginable innovations.
Idolatry in the form of technological, scientific, or economic progress is central to the future dangers. And while Sine notes the "captivity of the Christian mind," he often gives the activities of Christian institutions much credence as signs of hope. He calls for a renewed sense of Christian responsibility, so that the church becomes "captured by the Wild Hope of God's vision for the future."
Brenda Carr 6-01-1992
Jamaican-Canadian Lillian Allen's dub poetry album Revolutionary Tea Party is dedicated to her daughter Anta and her "little friend"—"the future who stand up!" This album and her Conditions Critical are both about standing up to oppressive principalities and powers with laughter and dignity, with love and anger. Together they are a double whammy of resistance and affirmation. Both recordings won Canadian Juno Awards for best reggae/calypso albums of their respective years.
While they are not hot off the press, they continue to fire up new possibilities for cultural resistance through the innovative collaboration of voice, music, and technology. Those who draw strength and hope from popular culture with a justice vision will find much to celebrate here.
Lillian Allen said in an interview, "Anything that victimizes humanity would be fair game for my poetry." Inviting others to join in struggle, her poems and music confront an array of intersecting justice issues. "Dis Ya Mumma Earth" follows in the black church tradition of preaching oratory. Allen calls her congregation to "Get up! Stand up!/Shout en masse/Wail in the wilderness/Our will...will be/Peace, justice, equality/Join hands in liberation dance/Freedom chants/We are our only weapon for peace."
Dub poetry is kin to a variety of African and Caribbean-influenced oral and musical forms including spirituals, gospel hymns, slave work songs, call and response preacher-congregation exchanges, freedom speeches, dialect poetry, story-telling, reggae, and rap, to name a few. It derives specifically from the Jamaican DJ practice of dubbing improvised lyrics over a prerecorded reggae track on which the vocals have been dubbed out and the instrumental tracks altered for emphasis.
Danny Duncan Collum 6-01-1992
Pat Buchanan's terror campaign in the Republican primaries has weakened and disoriented George Bush, and I can't say I'm sorry. It has also forced debate about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) back into the headlines--on the most skewed and reactionary of terms. Never mind that Buchanan's homophobic NEA attack ads were themselves the sleaziest things seen on broadcast TV in this decade. The issue is back out in the arena.
Bush reacted by firing NEA chief John Frohnmayer. His party chairman, Richard Bond, suggested publicly that the government should "get out of this business" of deciding "what is art."
By the time you read this, Buchanan may well have been laid quietly to rest--and the NEA issue with him--for this year. But given Buchanan's success, it is almost certain to return for as long as we have a public arts agency.
Art subsidies do involve some decisions about what is art. But they also involve judgments about what art is necessary or worthy, and, perhaps most important, about who decides. It's a complicated and problematic issue, and one that requires more than 30 second's (or even one page's) worth of thinking. But here goes...
Andrea Ayvazian 6-01-1992
Our individual and collective inability (or at least reluctance) to discuss the issue of racism openly and frankly—and to struggle actively with it with colleagues, family members, parishioners, and friends—keeps the cycle of oppression repeated and reinforced. Joseph Barndt's Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America will be greeted with gratitude and relief by anyone who has tried to wrestle with the issue of racism in a personal relationship or a professional setting.
Barndt—a pastor in New York City and co-director of Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church and society—has been working on issues of racial justice for decades. In Dismantling Racism, he has boiled down years of experience, insight, and wisdom into a clear, readable, no-nonsense, and honest volume.
Barndt's overall analysis is superb. He addresses the social, political, and economic realities in this country with such simplicity and clarity that reading this book is like looking through a camera lens at a vista that at first appears blurry but is suddenly, dramatically, brought into focus.
In the first chapter, Barndt discusses what he calls the "continuing evil of racism"—how the roots of racism are "embedded and intertwined in the life and history of the United States." A dynamic tension is created between the despair and disappointment of the past and a sense of hope for the future.
Kevin Charles Peterson 6-01-1992
Throughout the greater part of this century, the political and military leadership of Western nations seemed convinced that expansionary-minded totalitarian governments posed the most serious threat to American and European democracy. Favored freedoms—the right to vote, to dissent, to pursue one's economic self-interest, and to choose one's lifestyle—were believed to be in constant jeopardy from the regimes of such leaders as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao.
The members of that feared foursome are now all dead. The Soviet Union is no longer one entity. And China, despite the remonstrations of its twentysomething intelligentsia, is currently being wooed by President Bush and the NATO (or New World) cabal. To be sure, the reunification of Germany and open dialogue with the former Soviets and China hardly presage an era of utopian relaxation. Yet the lifting of animosities attending international relations provides ample opportunity to eye an even more formidable threat to freedom on the domestic front. The enemy is now within; and it is television.
In his book Television and the Crisis of Democracy, philosopher Douglas Kellner examines the historical and present-day relationship between democracy and the television industry, delivering a five-chapter study divided into two separate but equally important parts. Part one of the book delivers a well-constructed post-Frankfurt School theoretical analysis that explores the destructive and regressive (and even totalitarian) role television plays in contemporary society. The second part offers its readers a succinct blueprint of the medium's potentials and "alternative" uses.
Anthony A. Parker 6-01-1992
Mississippi Masala is neither great nor completely bad. It sort of trundles along at a nice, comfortable, and familiar pace. And that's the problem with Mississippi Masala. The viewer has been down this road before. There is a lot going on in this film: love, lust, broken taboos, humor, and poignancy. Unfortunately, none of these themes are developed to any reasonable or believable extent.
Mississippi Masala is a love story between Demetrius (Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington), a young black man born, raised, and tired of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Mina (newcomer Sarita Choudhury), a younger Indian woman whose family lives and works in a hotel run by an extended family of Indians. They meet quite by accident, fall in lust, and ostensibly in love, break all the cultural and regional taboos, and run away together to parts unknown to do whatever they are going to do (the film doesn't say).
If you haven't guessed it already, I was not impressed with this movie. At least I was not impressed with the young Afro-Asian lovers. The Afro-American aspects of the film--relationships among Demetrius' family, Southern black ways of being, etc.--didn't move me because I know them, lived them, and have seen them before on film. But what did intrigue me was the relationship between Mina's father Jay (Roshan Seth) and his homeland, Uganda.
Jay is an Indian, but only because his parents were Indian. He was born, raised, and educated in Uganda. His closest friend, Okelo, is a black African. Jay has built a reputation as a lawyer defending blacks throughout the country. He and his wife, Kinnu, who is Indian, and a very young Mina are "living large" in Kampala among the "natives." But that comes to an abrupt halt in 1972 when now long-deposed dictator Idi Amin comes to power and decrees that all Indians living in Uganda must leave within 90 days.
Aaron McCarroll Gallegos 6-01-1992
"What kind of person would write an autobiography?" a good and humble friend asked me when he heard that I was planning on reviewing Niall O'Brien's Revolution From the Heart (Orbis Books, 1991). At first I responded similarly to the book, thinking that it would be another tale of the trials and tribulations of a Western missionary among the poor of the Third World. But having been taken in by O'Brien's gripping struggle to be church in the midst of incredible injustices suffered by the Filipino poor, I thank him for offering this gift to us.
The first missionary's account I ever read--Adoniram Judson's classic from Burma--convinced me to go to Asia one day and preach the word. Revolution From the Heart compels me to stay at home and work for justice.
For most of us, it is this sort of spiritual autobiography, not a theological treatise, that sparks a conversion in our lives. O'Brien's book is a veritable manual on the Word becoming flesh.
Revolution From the Heart recounts the Columban priest's work to found and develop base Christian communities on the island of Negros, struggling with the Filipino peasants to confront the violence of the landowners on one side and that of the National People's Army on the other.
O'Brien arrived in the Philippines from Ireland in 1964. The book tells the tale of the heroic acts and miraculous works that were necessary to help transform the colonial Philippine church into a living, breathing testimony of the Second Vatican Council that was just coming to an end in Rome. Revolution From the Heart offers an important example of basic Christian communities in a radically different context than the Latin American one most of us are more familiar with.
Judy Coode 6-01-1992
In her newest book, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (University of Illinois Press, 1992), Duke University professor Anne Firor Scott carefully investigates and discusses one of our society's most overlooked and underrated assets, the female voluntary group.
Most of the groups Scott mentions (including benevolent societies established in coastal towns in the 1790s, mid-1800s temperance unions, and community improvement groups of the early 20th century) had some common features: Often the wives and daughters of the communities' most powerful middle- and upper-middle-class men banded together out of a sense of "Christian duty" (though a few non-religiously oriented groups existed) to change their society as they saw fit.
By the mid-1800s the emphasis on benevolence toward individuals had shifted to a more community-focused vision. Many women volunteers, having begun to educate themselves through their organizations, started to work for an end to slavery and for women's suffrage. (The debate over which issue was of greater importance was sometimes heated and ugly.) Later women added concern for labor laws and policies regarding housing and education to their agenda.
The groups did have some problems. They tended to be classist, and integration with groups of activist black women was largely unsuccessful. Also, most of the religious-oriented groups were Protestant; Jewish and Catholic women had their own small organizations, with interaction infrequent.
Bob Hulteen 10-01-1991
As the debate on political correctness rages, we will examine the literature that fuels this discussion.
Danny Duncan Collum 12-01-1989
One of my buddies from college is a poet. He also writes advertising copy.
Danny Duncan Collum 11-01-1989
As the folks at Mazda are always reminding us, the 1980s-going-on-'90s are really the 1950s.