Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a Molotov cocktail. It presents a complex legacy of America’s racial history. The book’s length and experimental prose style make it dizzying. But that’s arguably the point: America has been driven so crazy by its irresolvable racial grudges that the only truthful response to racial problems is dizziness.…
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” So cries Richard III just before he dies, bringing down the Plantagenet line in the late fifteenth century. Shakespeare captured the tragic figure of the deformed and unloved, but power-hungry and ambitious pretender in the five-act tragedy named after its protagonist, King Richard III. Ralph FIennes…
Continue readingShakespeare’s take on the firings at Southern and Albert Mohler
If you do not want taxpayer money to be used by corrupt SBC leaders to entrench themselves even further and engage in their usual swamp nepotism, then let your concerns be known to these people: Nancy Pelosi https://pelosi.house.gov/contact-me/email-me . Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, the highest ranking member of the House of Representatives.…
Continue readingWhom to contact to say NO! to federal financial support to SBC leaders
In a May 7, 2020 post at the ERLC website, Russell Moore showcases a letter he sent to Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell. In this letter Moore pleads for more federal dollars so that religious organizations like the SBC can weather the coronavirus crisis better. He wants charities, charitable nonprofits, and…
Continue readingRemember “we ain’t gonna play Sun City”? How about “we ain’t gonna fund SBC”?
I’ve seen a lot of people posting about the killing of a black man by vigilantes. It seems always that racial strife comes back each time we think we may have moved past it. Each generation alive, it seems, has to experience racial conflict as a new and shocking betrayal when we are youths, then…
I have been freed from the shackles that oppressed me when the Southern Baptist Convention employed, and therefore controlled me. Now I do not have to feel bad about quoting taboo writers anymore. For instance, let’s take Friedrich Nietzsche. When you work in an evangelical college, whenever the topic turns to literature or philosophy, you…
Continue readingTime for some Old Testament wisdom, and a drop of Friedrich Nietzsche
During this quarantine, I happened upon several biographies of Lenin that piqued my interest. Most books about him go on for too long, but some biographers held my attention. The numerology of his life interests me in part because he was born in 1870, and I was born in 1971. Hence he was the same…
Continue readingTo understand our present dilemma, study the life of Lenin
The origins of the United Statesuniversity system. The most depressing thing about being a professor is being part of the United States professoriate. I love teaching, scholarship, ideas, and service. But the professoriate is, unfortunately, an integral cog in the machine that is the American academy. And the American academy is literally a feudal, caste-based…
Continue readingHigher Ed’s been rotten a long time: see what I wrote about it in 2011.
When Fifty Shades of Grey became a hit some years ago, I promised myself never to read the books or see the movie adaptations. I have kept that promise to myself. Having come out of abusive experiences when I was a boy, and having seen parts of the gay world that involved a nauseating overemphasis…
Continue readingSadomasochism as Political Strategy: The Coronamatrix Strikes
By now it’s a little cliché to post images of painter Thomas Cole’s five-part series on the rise and fall of empires. But as the news in America reaches crescendo after crescendo of panic, tragedy, and chaos, this British-born, American painter’s work is more relevant than ever. In the early nineteenth century Cole painted a…
