Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 2, #47]
THE OTHER JOURNAL interviews Barry Moser
On “Racism, Art and the Darkness of Truth”
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=900
The Other Journal (TOJ): I have heard you say that the church taught you to be racist. Can you explain what you mean when you say that?
Barry Moser (BM): I wish I could—I wish I could cite a specific instance where a preacher told the congregation to hate blacks.1 Alas, that never happened. Not that it could not happen; not that it did not happen. It was just that a pious face was put on the ugly face of the hatred, bigotry, and disrespect toward black people in the world where I grew up and where, as a kid, I was a Methodist preacher. That I could go to a black church and be welcomed by the minister and by the congregation stood in sharp contrast with the welcome my black friends would have received had they come to church with me on a Sunday morning. Had that happened, there likely would have been some “strange fruit” hanging from the tree in front of the church. And I do not say that lightly or without considered thought and reflection.
TOJ: In what ways do you think that the Christian church as an institution, and perhaps particularly as an institution in the United States, inherently perpetuates racism? And from your understanding of theology, or Christian practice, how should the church handle the ethnic differences of those who practice faith?
BM: You might as well ask why the Christian church has, for so very long, harbored anti-Semitism. Why do the Protestants so distrust Catholics? In my world, as a child, my family had very nearly as much spleen toward Jews and Catholics as they did toward African-Americans. They feared those things that were foreign to them, and that included pretty near everybody who was not white, Protestant, and from the south. I would venture to say that the Protestant Christian church in the 1940s and 1950s, being made up of people very much like my people, practiced the same sort of myopic and ignorant xenophobia. Ideally, the church should be blind to these kinds of differences.
Read the full interview:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=900
Scot McKnight Interviews Hala Jaber
Author of the recent Memoir of Iraq,
THE FLYING CARPET OF SMALL MIRACLES
http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/11/hala-jabers-magic-carpet.html
Late summer I read Hala Jaber’s gripping memoir of life in Iraq called: The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles: A Woman’s Fight to Save Two Orphans . If you can read this without tearing up, well, you can’t. Hala weaves together her own story, her fight with her own infertility, the devastation in Iraq, her critique of what war does to countries and people and children … and how her coverage of Iraq led her to one family and one child … and the memoir is my “Memoir of the Year.” I wrote to Hala Jaber and asked if she would be interested in an interview. She’s a journalist and she travels back and forth between London and the Middle East, and we are privileged at this blog for Hala Jaber to give us this interview. So, enjoy … and get that book and read it and tell others about it. She tells us things about little Hawra that maybe few others know.
As a memoir, this book read for me like an enchanting and ever-unfolding novel with elegant, clear prose. What advice would you give to writers who want to write a memoir?
Each part of our lives is a story on its own at the end of which we are all unique living novels. Our memoirs reflect our lives, a journey in our lives, or an incident and a chapter of our lives. We recollect each one in our minds as a tale and recount them to others as a story with high and low points when we are talking or describing them. Some of us who decide to write about them do so because we have deemed it important or interesting enough to share with the world. So my view is, if we thought of sharing a part of our lives with the world at large and are asking people to read about our memoirs, then we should at least make it interesting enough in the style of writing we present it to them. Write it simply, honestly and in the fashion that initially made you believe it was interesting enough to share with others.
Read the full interview:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/11/hala-jabers-magic-carpet.html
The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles:
A Woman’s Fight to Save Two Orphans.
Hala Jaber.
Hardcover: Riverhead, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Powells Books Reviews
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_09_19.html
We are told by modern pundits that we live in a time where people have abandoned rationality, as evinced by the proliferation of non-evidence based medical treatments, crystals, astrology, etc. However, Charles Mackay was railing against all these intellectual bugaboos and more back in the mid-1800s. Even then, it was clear they had all been around for a long time. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds came out in two volumes, the first in 1841, and the second in 1852; most in-print editions include both.
The first section of Extraordinary Popular Delusions… is particularly pertinent to our times. Mackay details economic bubbles and pyramid schemes that caused thousands to lose fortunes, and in some cases economies to be brought down. Tulipomania gets a full chapter, recounting a time when otherwise sane people gave their fortunes for single tulip bulbs. The term “bubble” to describe an artificial rise of a market was around in the early 1800s, as Mackay spends a fascinating chapter on an early IPO called “The South-Sea Bubble.” The South-Sea Company was allowed to issue stock valued entirely on what it was expected to do in the future. Claims by company officers of soon-too-be-realized riches caused a rush on the stock, although the company never actually made money. Soon, other claimants began starting their own bubble stocks in hopes of gaining capital for their ventures. Mackay lists 86 of these bubbles that were eventually declared illegal, including schemes to trade in hair, pave the streets of London, horse insurance, and even a wheel of perpetual motion. People collected “bubble cards” that listed the follies of the various enterprises.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_09_19.html
Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds.
Charles Mackay.
Paperback: Three Rivers Press.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
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