Arguing with George William Curtis
I’d never heard of George William Curtis before this past Saturday. A quote of his popped up on my friend’s facebook wall, in what I assume to be a strange way of pepping himself up for the US/Ghana World Cup...
Gender and the Body – How did we get here?
One of my old professors was fond of saying that in his class we take the first several weeks to chuck a whole bunch of balls in the air and we then spend the rest of the semester learning to...
Gender, the home, and how we define “work”
Cross posted at Notes from a Small Place. This post is part of an ongoing series of posts I’m doing regarding issues related to the body, gender, sexuality, and self identity. It will be going online later this week at...
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the Abortion Debate or Why You Should Buy Matt’s Book
In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish he argues that over the past 200 years the emphasis of western justice has shifted from punishing the body to punishing the soul. To support this he cites a number of shifts in...
Three Reasons You Should Watch Mad Men
Matt got us started on the TV/Pop Culture kick, so I figured it’d be OK if I made my own TV recommendation for Mere O readers. Season 4 of AMC’s hit Mad Men will be debuting this July, which means...
Sayers on Work: What about the Sabbath?
Dorothy Sayers says that work is what we were put on earth to do. And, personally, I want to agree with her. But supposing one accepts that definition of work, how then do we understand the Sabbath?
The Sustainability of a Purely Evangelical Identity
Yesterday I got coffee with a friend and our conversation eventually turned to the topic of modern American evangelical identity. My friend voiced frustrations with the arbitrary nature of evangelicalism’s identity with church history. For the most part, evangelicals do...
“Victimization” Studies and the Evangelical Conscience
A bit more background on me: My focus during my undergraduate career was post-colonial African history. Someday I want to go to grad school to continue studying it. Depending on the program I get in, I might be able to...
Lousy Trailers and Sewage-filled Ponds
There were a thousand reasons to hate the small campsite nine friends and I called home for three days last summer. Our “cabin” was more like a trailer. There were four mattresses and ten of us – and making room...