Tensegrities

I find it fascinating how many different interpretations are being made of the film Avatar. Here’s one by noted feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan, who notes that “The movie is a story of white guilt—the white man needs to give up his way and be transformed. But it is also something more. It is a cinematic fable, in real 3-D, of how to remythologize biblical stories and interpret them in subversive ways.”

I know I’ve pointed to this blog before, but it continues to be a wonderful resource on children’s literature as a resource for ministry. It’s also a great use of an assignment for masters’ degree students in Christian ed, who are writing most of these annotations. Hurray for UnionPSCE for hosting and promoting such a resource!

These are cool — a whole set of charts/diagrams that work through The Beatles corpus. I especially like the linking/self-referencing chart.

Clay Shirky has written a “rant about women” that explores his observation that the graduate student women in his program are not as good as the men at being self-promoting:

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

I’ve been thinking along these lines myself, in very personal terms, because for several years now I’ve wanted more ability to influence institutional practices at our place, to make a real difference in our shared culture. My suggestions/advice/even nagging of specific authority figures hasn’t helped. And I have not been invited into any kind of structural leadership.

I have to wonder: have I been too unwilling to push myself forward? If so, what could I do to change that? It’s a difficult puzzle, because there’s a clear price to pay for stepping over specific boundaries of “appropriate” behavior in our place.

Worth returning to and pondering.

Ok, I admit I have enough “new tech lust” in me to want an iPad. But I don’t have any particular need for one, and I already own an iPhone and a MacBookPro. My hunch is that someone else in our family will find a reason — and funds — long before I do. But I’m still fascinated by it, and in addition to the points Eric made a couple of days ago, I think this OpenCulture blog post gets at some of the really interesting pedagogical/epistemological issues.

Worth pondering.

Blessings and prayers to his family, and long may we remember the legacy of Howard Zinn, who took social history seriously.

In following up a different thread in a previous post, I was reminded of the reJesus site – which is a UK based website that has a lot of interesting elements concerning images and films of Jesus.

What a great Apple day today! First, the personal: Eric and Alex released their first free iPhone app through the iTunes store. It’s called SubCalc (for “subcaucus calculator”) and is a handy utility for figuring out the numbers on the walking sub caucus element of our precinct caucuses here in MN — and just in time! (the precinct caucuses are next Tuesday).

Apple also released its new tablet today — Eric has a great piece up about it at his blog.