Tag: sociology
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“White Fragility” – Who’s/Whose Reading?
Should we absolutely totally read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism, or should we avoid it as if our anti-racist lives depended on it? The answer sure seems to depend on who’s doing the reading. How much it has to do with the substance of the text is […]
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Wondering, Not Predicting
Reading a book about economics this morning, I came across this striking paragraph: Some economic historians claim that feudalism was ended by the Black Death, a pandemic that killed up to a third of the population of Europe and Asia in the 1340s. It killed so many labourers that huge tracts of land lay deserted, […]
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How Greek is the Gospel?
How Greek is the Gospel? Presbyterians, and “the Reformed” generally, have “a tradition of an educated pastorate.” Pastors, we think, should be trained in the Biblical languages, and in exegesis, along with theology and pastoral care principles and theory. We call our pastors “Teaching Elders” for a reason. We think pastors should know their stuff. […]
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Orientalism At Last
Reflections on reading Edward W. Said. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Preface by the Author. New York: Vintage, 2003 (originally 1978, Afterword 1994). [An installment of the Read Me Project.] In some sense, Orientalism has been on the Read Me shelf for decades. Everyone has their unread classics – there are English majors […]
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Back from Jesus Camp
Watched Jesus Camp this morning in class, as an exercise in looking for some of the sociological effects of religion, like legitimation and authority, as well as the operation of authenticity claims. The movie raised controversy when it came out about 10 years ago, but from my perspective, it is something like a Rorschach test […]
Matters of Interpretation 