Arbitrary Marks

The Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University has posted a podcast by Mark Blum that should be interesting for Unitarian Universalists and Buddhist practitioners (and especially those who consider themselves in both camps).
I’m about three-quarters through the lecture, which I listened to during my delay at the Austin airport yesterday. Blum’s main thesis is that [...]

I’m reading Nussbaum’s book, Liberty of Conscience, which is a journey through the history of how the Founders and early America interpreted constitutional law regarding religious freedom. So far, I’ve really enjoyed it and it’s been helping me understand the various positions (originalism, textualism, etc) regarding the Constitution.
This morning, though, I read this section in [...]

So I’ve been reading Pat Califa’s Sex Changes and came across a section that deals with the history of transgender people in native tribes. Califa is leery of generalizations about the purportedly “liberated” values among Native American society, as one example. He’s* also concerned about the assumption (that Leslie Feinberg makes) that matriarchal property transmission and food production meant a time of women’s rights.

Here are a few points worth considering when looking at the berdaches and other “third-gender” persons and women’s status in indigenous societies:

Among the many books I pick up during my bus commutes, I’ve been slowly working on Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and just recently finished Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. One of the questions that has concerned me, personally and philosophically, is how to understand the role of history and cultural assumptions in how we [...]

Crisis begins with a view of the White House and the strains of "Dixie" playing in the background. The film covers June 10, 1963, and JFK’s decisions, with his brother RFK (then attorney general) regarding the two students (Vivian Malone and James Hood) entering the University of Alabama, against the will of Governor George [...]

In the last post, I said I was "aghast" that the white Democrats used self-defense as justification for their actions against black voters. According to Albert Bandura, however, I shouldn’t be surprised–that’s the way most inhumanities are perpetrated. In his article about just this phenomenon, moral disengagement in perpetrating inhumanities, Bandura uses psychological [...]

Below is a summary of the events in Mississippi and Louisiana from 1874 to 1876 that lead to Adelbert Ames giving up the governorship and the Republican party losing the south. After reading this timeline in Lemann’s book, which is fleshed out considerably with narratives of the confrontations, I was aghast. Whites in the South [...]

At lunch break today I finished Redemption by Nicholas Lemann. I closed the book and sat in silence for a few minutes. Along with A Briefer History of Time, this narrative has been slowly changing the way I view my world, and the closing chapter was a stunner.
What I’d like to do in [...]

Summarizing or responding critically to Anthony Pinn’s Varieties of African-American Religious Experience is a difficult task.  Pinn covers the religions traditions of Vodou, Yoruba/ Santeria, the Nation of Islam and humanism in less than 200 pages.  His book spans centuries of history and travels across large stretches of geography.
I’ll restrict my critical comments to his final [...]

Discussion of “Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction” in terms of analytic philosophy and epistemology.