35 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2019
  2. May 2019
  3. Mar 2019
    1. contributors

      idea: perhaps it might be useful to do a sort of lit critique on this topic, looking at how the scholarship on digital religion CREATES the very term

    1. Printing made it possible to put vernacular translations of the Bible into the hands of lay people and required the church to ponder the implications of this change.

      further democratization (i.e., less control of message) when sending materials out for anyone to read

  4. Sep 2018
    1. claims that all religions ultimately lead to the same Truth

      Why is this problematic? See an example of this type of argument in the news here.

    1. Years of Republican rule in North Carolina left the state vulnerable to the predictable impacts of a storm like Florence.

      same story!

  5. May 2017
  6. Nov 2016
    1. Beyond privilege and embodying “the greatness of America,” the assumption is that White men are smart, hard working, moral, and righteous fuels the idea that if the White men are not living the American Dream the system must be broken. For everyone else, failure is a sign of individual failure, cultural failure, and communal shortcomings but if White men ain’t winning, the game is rigged.

      yes

  7. Oct 2016
    1. Clinton is a centrist liberal, not a socialist or a social democrat. She is a liberal feminist, not a socialist feminist. She is a foreign policy hawk, but within a bipartisan mainstream. She is an insider and an experienced operative in an oligopolistic two-party system, and not a radical or participatory democrat. These are the reasons she is the Presidential candidate of a major political party in the US, which is not Sweden! It is true, on every one of these dimensions she comes up short when judged from the left. On every one of these dimensions of politics and policy, she deserves criticism. This was true before, it is true now, and it will be true if she wins the White House.34 But this does not make her an evil or an irredeemably corruption person, and it does not make her a political enemy.

      This is a simple, but powerful summary

  8. Aug 2016
    1. 10 Thousand People” national anthem and tai chi even

      Interesting. Attempting to forcing community and loyalty through ritual. This may sound weird, but do we see this in the US? Any recent examples? (I can think of one that happened with Gabby Douglas at the Olympics)

  9. Jun 2016
    1. No C.E.O. wants to be the next Ed Shultz, and ever since the 2005 law immunized gunmakers against lawsuits they have little incentive to develop new ways of reducing accidents or misuse.

      Perhaps, I don't know, a basic regard for human life could be an incentive?

  10. May 2016
    1. This would seem to be supported by the growth of conservative Christians questioning long-held assumptions about the natural relationship between the U.S. and Christianity: Russell Moore, for example, acknowledging that the “Christian America” for which many on the right are nostalgic was never Christian in the sense people like himself and Dreher want. This is why you’ve seen what you might call the “orthodoxification” of conservative Christianity in the U.S.—the strong turn among their intellectuals toward Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the larger focus on the “modern project” as potentially corrupt as a whole, the general transition to what feels like a more European style of reaction than the typical anti-intellectual, pro-capitalist American kind.

      Catie seems to be straddling these two

    1. digital humanities methods

      ?

    2. lounge

      Honest question: Does every project have to be collaborative or part of a "lab." In my experience, reading, writing, and thinking have been largely solo acts. Of course collaboration and conversation have been necessary to growth and learning. But at some point I had to spend hours reading and thinking on my own before I could participate in the sophisticated conversations and projects.

    3. I’d say the same thing about someone studying 18th- and 19th-century literature, or TV. Time spent in a letterpress shop or in the studio would be invaluable.

      Is she talking about DH students only, or about any humanist?

    4. But just like you wouldn’t question why not every institution chooses to fund a top-notch art history program, or German department, it’s no surprise that some schools have built amazing DH programs and others haven’t.

      But unlike German or Art History, "digital" products and skills are much more explicitly and immediately valued, obligating everyone to know how to use them, spend money on them, etc. It's not as "optional" as she makes it sound.

    1. has been the subject of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel: a breathless pro-industry volume whose contempt for non-data-driven and -industry-centered scholarship is as palpable as its political disengagement.

      Damn

    2. computational tools should qualify as a replacement for scholarly writing: an idea that runs counter to the culture not only of English departments but also of Computer Science departments, which have never handed out PhDs for competence in programming alone. Versions of this principle — the idea that technical support is the cutting edge of the humanities — continue to surface. For example, in the characteristic assertion that, “One day, creating [and] maintaining platforms to enable the dissemination of [and] engagement with scholarly content will ‘count’ as scholarship.” Carried to its logical conclusion, such a declaration would entail that the workers in IT departments of corporations such as Elsevier and Google are engaged in humanities scholarship. Often, the contribution of computational projects to scholarly knowledge has been slight — and some Digital Humanities advocates have been at pains to defend their frequent inability to explain the point of much digital humanist activity. For example, Tom Scheinfeldt, Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Connecticut, played for time: “Eventually digital humanities must […] answer questions. But yet?” Outside Digital Humanities, of course, even an undergraduate dissertation needs a question to answer if it is to be taken seriously. The implication is that in Digital Humanities, computer use is an end in itself.

      This paragraph is helpful whether one agrees with their narrative of development or not

    3. Cantor paints Hirsch and Bowers as representing a “diversity” that trumps gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, but to scholars who champion those values, they look like two sides of the same coin.

      ?

    4. To understand the politics of the Digital Humanities, it is necessary to understand the context from which it emerged. One crucial point of origin, rarely remarked in discussions of the subject, is in the literary studies subfield known as “textual studies.” This subfield has two broadly defined forms. In one approach, usually known as “book history,” scholars study the material history of texts, the people who have made and read them, and the meanings ascribed to them. As with other forms of social history, this is an interpretative activity that can be carried out to affirm received ideas about the world or to challenge them. A second approach to textual studies, usually known as “textual criticism” or “textual scholarship,” concentrates on the production of new editions of old texts. While this can be done in such a way as to challenge received ideas, a more typical approach is to produce an “authoritative” edition supposed to embody the value of the original work. In the textual scholarship approach known as the New Bibliography, that “authority” was equated with authorial intention, so New Bibliographers sought to give literary texts the forms their authors apparently meant them to have.

      assumes one origin: literature

    5. about the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing,

      Agree?

  11. Apr 2016
    1. Nevertheless, it opens up the possibility of the co-existence of people who are not lukewarm about their faith, yet don’t see a reason to rush out and start fighting with other

      that sounds nice, but people's beliefs have real political consequences

    2. So you get an absurd overreliance on certain kinds of explanations and interventions. People think that all psychological problems can be cured by changing body chemistry, taking some Prozac, and so on

      that's not to say that modern medicine is useless, but i get what he's going for

    3. This is what underlies a great deal of the Romantic period — of Romantic poetry, and so on. I mean, some Enlightenment boosters think that this means totally looking backward. In reality most of the great Romantic poets were taking some very important features of the Enlightenment, but they were also saying something about loss. Now, we can argue a lot about what are the gains and what are the losses. We won’t agree on that. But this is the only sensible way of talking. The idea that it’s all uphill or downhill is so incredibly implausible in virtue of the nature of human beings and their cultures, that these positions should just be thrown out before we start talking. And yet they are actually very common positions

      so he would be critical of "make america great again"

    1. He argues against the view that secularity in society is caused by the rise of science and reason.

      He is certainly not the first to critique this narrative

    2. secularism is not simply the absence of religion, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as an historical construction.

      implications for "rights" and for the legal definition of religion

    1. His status as a self-professed "socialist" made some sense in the context of Burlington municipal politics decades ago, but it's a general election liability (which becomes a liability for electability-minded primary voters) and relatively little to do with his actual policy stances, which fit comfortably with the left wing of American liberalism.
    1. formal invitation

      For a more critical reading of this speech, see this piece from Black Girl Dangerous: "Women have been trying to get men to care about oppression of women since…always."

  12. Mar 2016
    1. In the same letter that scolds Eudora Welty for her treatment of the "topical" in her fiction, O'Connor absolves herself from the same wrongdoing, saying that she "got away with it in 'Everything that Rises Must Converge' but only because [she said] a plague on everybody's house as far as the race business goes" (Habit 537). This is an oft-quoted passage, and many critics seem to be content with the comment it makes about the story. But others have been troubled by what O'Connor says here. It seems that to universalize a problem like this, to say that the race issue is one in which all parties (bigot, angry black woman, and liberal) are equally culpable and punishable, is to simplify the matter shockingly. Indeed, the worth of the story seems to be that it doesn't let anybody off easily, that it doesn't try to reduce race struggles to their basic, surface, political appearances. However, there are some problems with the fact that the story doesn't privilege any particular position, but rather chooses to attack all such positions. The problem inherent here is one that is clearly expressed in Irving Howe's 1965 review of Everything That Rises Must Converge. About the title story, Howe comments that "Everything becomes subject to ironic discount except the principle of irony itself" (qtd. in Johnson 17). Johnson elaborates on Howe's point: Howe, then, would not agree with O'Connor's own defense of her story and its all-around condemnation of the characters as an excuse for her use of the topical: it is a strategy of avoidance, not engagement, and it is a strategy that does not question its own ideology. (17)

      include everything that rises and this "attitude of avoidance"