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Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Thanksgiving Is a Verb (“So, what can we do to bring balance back to the relationship between community and isolation? Give a shit.”)
Debunked Adage of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I’ve ever had, does money really even matter?
Tim Ross
“Live your own life.” How many times have we heard or said that? But yesterday I was reminded of an exception to that rule, albeit in a nonliteral sense.
When I was picking up a couple books from the library, I realized both were biographies. That in and of itself is not unusual. What got me was that I’m currently reading a biography of a jazz musician and the memoir of an actor and that three of the last nine books I’ve read were memoirs. Evidently,I’m on a biographical binge.
Granted, over the last decade or so there’s been an onslaught of memoirs. And, sadly, I think that has produced two ill effects for bothmemoirs and biographies. First, there are far too many “tell-all” books where it seems a predominant purpose is being salacious enough to draw media attention. Second, as one NYT critic put it, memoirs have bloated by people “writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional.”
No doubt, whether a book falls into either category or both is probably a matter of personal taste. And I’m not claiming that I have better taste than anybody else. It’s simply that over the years I’ve realized that these genres allow me to get a view of and gain insight into life and history from a different, individualized perspective. As Louis L’Amour said, “For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
There’s plenty of lives in these recent memoirs and biographies: an opium addict, a jazz musician, an actor and a Lakota Indian chief, as well as professional baseball, football and hockey players. None of this explains what’s led to the recent binge, but reading about others may make it more easy for you to live your own.
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
Louis Fischer
Bulletin Board
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- I Hope My Father Dies Soon (“I’d like to proactively end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my government says I can’t make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So, for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until he dies.”)
- What a Real War on Christmas Looks Like (“Use whatever metaphor you’d like, but ‘war’ might be slightly melodramatic. And historically insensitive. There has been a war on Christmas before, a very real war that resulted in widespread death and dramatic change to the way people celebrated the holiday.”)
Blog Headlines of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7 of your life
Steven Wright
Although I have other issues with Catholicism, one thing that’s always bothered me about it and virtually all Christian religions is the tendency to pick and choose what tenets to apply. Catholicism often seems far more interested in political issues like contraception, abortion, and gay marriage than what I gathered to be the essence of the New Testament during my time in a Catholic elementary school. The chasm between the book Christians loudly cite and reality is perhaps best seen in the growth of the “prosperity Gospel,” something even Christianity Today calls “[a]n aberrant theology that teaches God rewards faith—and hefty tithing—with financial blessings.”
So my jaw dropped yesterday when I heard about Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium (“Apostolic Exhortation”). Granted, I haven’t read a lot of any papal directives over the last few decades so I could well have missed something from his predecessors. But this Pope seemed to catch on to something that Christianity — at least in America — never seems to treat as a “hot button” issue.
Pope Francis expressed concern about what he calls “an economy of exclusion and inequality.” “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?,” he asked. “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”
The “culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.” He later observed, “The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies.” Absent an attack on structural causes of economic inequality, “no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.”
What concepts! Who would ever think they fit within Christianity? After all, it isn’t like Jesus told people to sell what they have and give the proceeds to the poor (Matt. 19:21; Mark 10:21; Luke 18:22), that a rich man will have a hard time entering heaven (Matt. 19:23), or to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and take care of the sick. (Matt. 25:34-36). (As an aside, Matthew is frequently cited in this area because most Biblical scholars view that gospel as the one most concerned with the ethics of how Christians are supposed to act.)
True, I am probably guilty here of the cherry picking I see Christians doing. And I am equally guilty of preaching but not necessarily practicing. Without doubt, there’s more in the Pope’s “exhortation” that I would disagree with but it’s refreshing to hear this come from the peak of the Catholic hierarchy. Whether it is window dressing or actually produces change is another question.
Nor does true peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their lifestyle while others have to make do as they can.
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, ¶ 218
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Blog Headline of the Week
Batshit Craziness of the Week
- A Tampa man was convicted of felony animal cruelty this week for killing and eating his dog (although the jury didn’t know about him dining on the animal)
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you.
Terry Pratchett
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Disclaimer 
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