Clipmarks | enbar's 'post:facebook(clip)' clips

Anti-NSDAP propaganda posters by John Heartfield

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:46:21 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: One of the great modernist collage artists of the thirties and forties. Heartfield was born in Germany and devoted his energy to propagandizing against the Nazis. He eventually fled to London and continued his work there. Source: http://snipr.com/3jq8r

Clip Source: yubnub.org

Tags: history, art, propaganda, germany, wwii, image, fascism, war, post:facebook(clip)

Sweet Honey in the Rock on the true meaning of spirituals

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:46:44 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: I love this quotation. It's spoken in the middle of a live gospel performance by Sweet Honey in the Rock, performed in a church in 1980.

Clip Source: nbr.tumblr.com

“ It’s good news when you reject things as they are, when you lay down the world as it is, and you take on the responsibility of shaping your own way, that’s good news. Everybody talking about spirituals, and they say, Oh Lord, black folk singing about going to heaven. No, this lesson is for you, tonight, November the eighth, 1980, in All Souls Church. Lay down the world, pick up my cross — and they don’t say it’s good times, they say good news. It’s hard times when you decide to pick up your own cross. You gone catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it. But when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross, that’s what? Ain’t that good news?

— Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Good News,” from Breaths (Flying Fish, 1988).

Tags: music, christianity, religion, mp3, africna_american, gospel, theology, social_justice, post:facebook(clip)

Maurice Bloch: religion is a consequence of imagination

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:28:00 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Maurice Bloch produces what sounds on first glance like a neo-Durkheimian theory of religion with a foundation in cognitive psychology. I need to look more closely at this.

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Religion a figment of human imagination

00:01 28 April 2008

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

Tags: religion, social_science, anthropology, research, theory, !toread, post:facebook(clip)

Ziauddin Sardar on the Quilliam Foundation for ex-jihadis

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:27:08 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Sardar, whose writing I am only a little bit familiar with, is highly critical of any "lionizing" of former members of Islamic extremist groups, since it implicitly devalues the commitment to peace and pluralism exhibited by most "ordinary" Muslims.

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

To lionise former extremists feeds anti-Muslim prejudice

It is a mistake to fete these repentant members of Islamist cults. They are part of the problem, not the solution

- Ziauddin Sardar, writer and broadcaster
- The Guardian,
- Thursday April 24 2008

In the here and now, it's not the repentant sinners we should celebrate but "the 99 righteous persons who need no repentance", those unmentioned Muslims who refused to be seduced by the dark side. I know I am going to upset many of my Muslim friends who are quite ecstatic about the foundation. After all, as its website declares, Quilliam "rejects foreign ideologies of Islamism and jihadism" and upholds "Islam as a pluralistic, diverse tradition that can heal the pathology of Islamist extremism". What could be wrong with such a message?

The embrace of former extremists is a slap in the face for Muslims who have worked tirelessly to build a British Muslim identity and foster inclusion by constructive community activity.

Tags: opinion, religion, islam, violence, pluralism, uk, international, commentary, post:facebook(clip)

Montaigne's skepticism: Apologie of Sebond, 1580

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:08:22 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Montaigne's famous defense of Raymond Sebond, the proponent of natural theology, in which he lays out a profoundly, even shockingly skeptical view of human knowledge.

Clip Source: www.uoregon.edu

Montaigne's Essays: Book II.

CHAPTER XII: AN APOLOGIE OF RAYMOND SEBOND

Thus can nothing be certainely established, nor of the one nor of the other; both the judgeing and the judged being in continuall alteration and motion. We have no communication with being; for every humane nature is ever in the middle betwee ne being borne and dying; giving nothing of it selfe but an obscure apparence and shadow, and an uncertaine and weake opinion. And if perhaps you fix your thought to take its being, it would be even as if one should go about to graspe the water: for, how much the more he shal close and presse that which by its owne nature is ever gliding, so much the more he shall loose what he would hold and fasten. Thus, seeing all things are subject to passe from one change to another, reason, which therein seeketh a reall subsistence, findes her selfe deceived as unable to apprehend any thing subsistent and permanent:

Tags: religion, history, christianity, philosophy, primary_source, reformation, france, post:facebook(clip)

Illustrations of the "Harrowing of Hell"

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:57:17 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Happy Good Friday, everybody. Here are a few interesting historical images of the "harrowing of Hell" tradition drawn from various Christian iconographic sources.

Clip Source: www.patzinakia.ro

ILLUSTRATIONS

Anastasis

Tags: religion, christianity, image, history, primary_source, rels333, post:facebook(clip), post:tumblr(source)

Three of my favorite second-century martyrs: Polycarp, Ignatius, Perpetua

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:45:46 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Here's what I'm having students read this week, just in case you're wondering what a true tenured radical does.

Clip Source: www.newadvent.org

The Martyrdom of Polycarp

And as the flame blazed forth in great fury, we, to whom it was given to witness it, beheld a great miracle, and have been preserved that we might report to others what then took place. For the fire, shaping itself into the form of an arch, like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, encompassed as by a circle the body of the martyr. And he appeared within not like flesh which is burnt, but as bread that is baked, or as gold and silver glowing in a furnace.

Clip Source: www.newadvent.org

The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans

Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.

Clip Source: www.fordham.edu

Medieval Sourcebook:
St.Perpetua: The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity 203

And I awoke; and I understood that I should fight, not with beasts but against the devil; but I knew that mine was the victory.

Tags: religion, christianity, history, primary_source, violence, post:twitter, post:facebook(clip)

UK educator decries domination of education by management-oriented language

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:26:57 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: An Oxford professor examines the gradual takeover of all policy writing on education by the language of business management: "efficiency," "providers," "audits," "performance indicators," etc. This kind of thinking, he says, has gradually obscured any legitimate answer to the question of what education is really supposed to accomplish.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Lesson one: no Orwellian language

An insightful speaker raised a massive cheer from the audience at an education conference this week.

He urged everyone to stop talking about "delivery" in education and to return to talking about "teaching".

The speaker was Professor Richard Pring, of Oxford University, and he was not just being fussy about the use of language.

His point was that education has been taken over by an "Orwellian language" which has started to control the way we think and act.

Professor Pring is the lead author of a report, published this week by the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, which looks at how the aims and values of education have come to be "dominated by the language of management".

So when judging schools and universities we now talk about "performance indicators" as a substitute for assessing the quality of their teaching.

Yet this matters because the language we use shapes the answers to the question: "what is education for?"

Tags: education, pedagogy, teaching, schools, uk, news, via:twitter, post:facebook(clip), language

A woman needs a man like a fish needs...

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:05:18 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Ha ha.

Clip Source: www.sinfest.net

2008-02-06: The Fish and the Bicycle

| |

Tags: gender, comics, funny, humor, random_sh!t, via:utterz, post:facebook(clip)

Haeckel's "Art Forms in Nature" (1899) on the web

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:06:33 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: An incredible collection of illustrations of strange and beautiful shapes taken from nature: microscopic organisms, fungi, sea animals, etc. Hard to describe, but worth a look.

Clip Source: caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de


	Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904 HTML-Version herausgegeben von Kurt Stüber, 1999 Vollständige elektronische Faksimile-Ausgabe. Index aller 100 Tafeln Dieses Buch ist ein Teil von Kurt Stübers online-Library.

Tags: random_sh!t, cool, art, science, history, image, post:facebook(clip)

R.I.P. Tom Lantos (D-CA), Congress's only Holocaust survivor

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 04:13:09 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Lantos will be familiar to anyone who's seen Spielberg's Holocaust documentary, "Last Days," as well as anyone who's followed human-rights debates in Congress over the past thirty years. His death (from esophageal cancer, at age 80) is a real loss.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Representative Tom Lantos Dies at 80

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rep. Tom Lantos, who escaped the Nazis and grew up to become a forceful voice for human rights all over the world, has died. He was 80.

Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Tom Lantos in 2007.

The California Democrat, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, died early Monday at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, said his spokeswoman, Lynne Weil. He disclosed last month that he had cancer of the esophagus.

''It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,'' Lantos said upon announcing his retirement last month.

Tags: post:facebook(clip), obituary, news, u.s.-news, congress, politics

Abraham Lincoln on religion

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:46:16 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Two lesser-known pieces of writing from Lincoln that give some hints about his religious beliefs. Lincoln was notoriously cagey about his religious commitments -- he never attended church regluarly, nor did he ever make a public proclamation of faith.

Clip Source: showcase.netins.net

Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity

To the Voters of the Seventh Congressional District.

Clip Source: showcase.netins.net

Meditation on the Divine Will

Washington, D.C.
September, 1862

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

Tags: religion, christianity, history, america, primary_source, post:facebook(clip)

Atheists, have a little respect, please

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:13:12 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Okay, this isn't exactly subtle, but I couldn't help finding it funny anyhow. Especially after Bill Maher, after once again laughing at the strangeness of Christian doctrine, is accused by Bill Donohue of not "respect[ing] the right of most Americans to believe in God" (http://snipr.com/1z044).

Clip Source: friendlyatheist.com

Tags: religion, comic, cartoon, funny, atheism, humor, post:facebook(clip)

"Fogcatchers": a new source for potable water

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:22:52 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: In remote Chilean villages where fresh water is often scarce and contaminated, a simple new technology -- mesh sheets strung between posts -- captures condensation from coastal fog, providing an abundant and reliable source of cheap drinking water.

Clip Source: www.idrc.ca

Tapping Into Fog

The frugal use of expensive water trucked in from distant wells was a way of life in the parched desert village of Chungungo, Chile — located in one of the driest parts of the world. In addition to being costly, the water was often contaminated, contributing to poor sanitation, ill health, and low food production.

Today, a simple technology collects water from fog, supplying villagers with two or three times more water than they once used and at a lower cost.

With IDRC funding, Chilean and Canadian scientists fashioned an inexpensive, sustainable water supply system by stretching polypropylene mesh between two posts -- like an oversized volleyball net. Precious water droplets form on the mesh as the fog passes through it. The droplets then run down into gutters that feed a reservoir and network of pipes in Chungungo.

Tags: water, sustainability, south_america, international, news, technology, post:tumblr, post:facebook(clip)

Mise-en-abyme: definition and discussion (fr)

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:41:39 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: I recently came across someone using this expression in conversation, so I had to look it up.

Clip Source: www.ditl.info

ABÎME ; MISE EN ABYME / Abyss ; Mirror text

COMMENTAIRE / Analysis

La mise en abyme désigne la relation de similitude qu'entretient tout élément, tout fragment avec l'œuvre qui l'inclut, principe souvent décrit de façon imagée comme un effet de miroir. Cet emboîtement s'apparente à une auto-citation.

Le concept, qui s'est imposé à grande échelle depuis sa prise en charge par le Nouveau Roman, appartient à la vaste problématique de la réflexivité (autoreprésentation, autoréférence) et est un des outils de base de la métafiction, cette écriture littéraire qui intériorise un commentaire sur son écriture mais aussi sur sa lecture (ou sur sa représentation dans le cas du métathéâtre).

André Gide illustre son emprunt à l'héraldique par un exemple littéraire principal, la scène des comédiens dans Hamlet (II, 3), une scène de théâtre dans le théâtre, et par des exemples picturaux, quand apparaissent dans les tableaux des jeux de miroirs reflétant la scène déjà représentée.

Tags: language, literature, weird, random_sh!t, post:facebook(clip)