This architectural jam takes a minute to warm up:
Welcome to Fontevraud from Francis Cutter & Vincent Nguyen on Vimeo.
Fontevraud Abbey is a religious building hosting a cultural centre and situated in the Loire Valley (France), an Unesco World Heritage Site. Today the Fontevraud Abbey invite young artists (here dancer & motion designers ) to reappropriate this historical place through their discipline.
Krista Conger reports on the murky ethics surrounding unapproved stem cell "clinics" overseas:
This tension between patients who believe they have the right to undergo any procedure they hope will help them and the government agencies and scientists who wish to bar practitioners from providing unproven treatments is not going to be easily resolved, in part because “right” answers in cases like these are hard to come by. What seems clear-cut on paper — experimental treatments shouldn’t be marketed for large amounts of money to desperate patients — can be upended in the presence of a person with a life-threatening illness whose personal risk-versus-benefit equation is so different from your own.
Ebert's TED talk is worth a listen:
Tony Woodlief cherishes his boys:
They are sweet and they are good and mostly I pray I don’t mess that up. I used to have grand plans about teaching them how to use chain saws and shotguns, about showing them how to think and speak and be good men who do good and important things. More and more I hope on being able to protect what is already good in them, and hope, further, that some of it rubs off on me.
Chris Blattman jots down his thoughts after a week of parenting. Money quote:
You love her even if she cries from 11pm to 3am and then promptly covers you in liquid poo.
Many readers saw religious parallels in The Giving Tree. One writes:
I've been closely following the discussion and don't think I've heard this point made yet: The story is not about the boy, and it's not about parenthood. It's about God and God's unconditional, boundless, reckless, irrational love. It's a modern day Prodigal Son parable.
My wonderful old theology professor, Father Michael Himes, makes this point beautifully in discussing that wonderful parable. He speaks of how many people see the prodigal son as the protagonist, and read the story as fable with the moral of "don't act like this son, and seek forgiveness if you do." But if you listen the parable as Jesus's audience would have heard it, it becomes clear how much that reading misses the mark.
The younger son, who's entitled to no share of his father's inheritance (the oldest son got it all back then), has the audacity to ask for "his share" of his inheritance – before his father is even dead. (To the audience of the day, it's a request that one would expect any respectable father to smack the kid on the head and send him back out to the fields.) Yet the father doesn't – he divides the property evenly. (The listener smacks his head – What is this father doing? Is he crazy?)
The son heads off, spends the money on wine and the women, and eventually falls on hard times, and then sees that he could have it better even as his father's slave. So he plans a speech to give to his father, and comes slinking home – not truly seeking forgiveness but seeking to improve his lot by asking his father again for far more than he deserves. (The listener shakes his head – The son's in for it now. Surely the father will send him away or beat him, or worse.) But the father, who by all rights should consider his son dead to him, is all but waiting by the window, and rushes out to the road to greet his son the moment he sees him coming. (The audience gasps – The man is certifiable. He's letting this boy walk all over him!)
But there is no turning away. No stern words. No apology demanded. The son can't even finish his prepared speech before the father has embraced the son, kissed him, demanded his finest robe for the son. The father even calls for a celebration, and kills the fatted calf. (The audience can take it no longer and erupts. This is insane. How could he do this for a son so undeserving?)
Meanwhile, the good son comes in from toiling in the fields and voices the audience's thoughts: "I've been the good son. I deserve your love – he doesn't. Have you lost your mind? How could you love him after all he's done? How is this justice? How is this fair?" And the father doesn't disagree and doesn't say it's fair. Instead, he responds with undying, unrelenting, irrational love: "Of course I love you. But I love him too, despite it all. He was was lost and has been found."
Jesus is talking about a God who loves in ways that we can't fathom, whose love transcends all notions of fairness – who loves us no matter what. Just like the tree does. We, the readers, have all the reactions to the Giving Tree that Christ's listeners had to that parable. The tree keeps giving in ways that you and I never would – beyond any human measure.
Another writes:
The story is about the despiritualizing effects of consumer culture and indulging our base, acquisitive impulses. It's not a matter of "selfishness" vis-a-vis our altruistic caregivers; it's about coming to terms with the reality that all of the material riches on God's green Earth won't ultimately fulfill one's deepest, existential longings.
Another:
I've observed in local evangelical circles that The Giving Tree is almost required reading for children. The clear message I've gotten is that the tree is Jesus, as he unhesitatingly gave every particle of himself, in advance, to a patently undeserving and ungrateful humankind.
There's a natural guilt, possibly subliminal, that any child would feel on associating with the human in this story, as other readers have noted. Does this guilt inspire humility and a resolve to be more than we have been? Or does it make the story come off as hideous and exploitative? It reminds me of the polarized reactions to Gibson's "The Passion". Nobody was neutral on the subject.
There's nothing that clearly indicates whether this is what Silverstein had in mind, and the analogy is sketchy at best; the tree asks nothing of the boy, and the little bastard doesn't show much resembling repentance or surrender, unless a general world-weariness qualifies. But logic and details matter little here. The evangelicals get teary-eyed even referencing the book, taking on the same distant, reverent glow as when remembering the Savior's sacrifice.
Another:
The tree obviously represents the concept of Christian Love. When they slap you in the face, offer them the other cheek. When they forsake you, send your only son to suffer and die to remove their sins. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for ones friends.
At my Jesuit High School, we were constantly reminded of the Saint Ignatius’ credo, “The happiest people in the world are those who live for others. " The gospels are replete with the message: to truly follow Christ, you must give of yourself until there is nothing left to give. Only then have you truly grasped God’s message for us, relayed in the life and teachings of his only son our Lord Jesus.
Parental love, as described eloquently by your readers, is the truest example of Christian Love. As a new parent, I finally grasp that nothing equates to the love and sacrifice a parent would give for his or her child. It is why the image of God the Father sending his only Son to die on a cross for our sins is such a powerful one.
Today, the Bible can be perverted into any justification one wants, from justifying war, to justifying selfishness, to decrying those of God’s children whom He made homosexual. However, in The Giving Tree, you have the perfect parable for the message of Jesus in the Gospels. We are all given the option in life. We can live Jesus’ example of love and sacrifice, or be selfish.I still pick up The Giving Tree from time to time to remind myself of the struggle I had as a youth with the concept of Christian Love, and the struggle that I have daily with truly living as Jesus demanded.
Another references an old hymn:
Jesus Christ the Apple Tree (also known as Apple Tree) is a poem written by an unknown New Englander in the 18th century. It has been set to music by a number of composers, including Jeremiah Ingalls (1764–1838) and Elizabeth Poston (1905–1987).
The song may be an allusion to both the apple tree in Songs 2:3 which has been interpreted as a metaphor representing Christ, and to Jesus' description of his life as a tree of life in Luke 13:18-19 and elsewhere in the New Testament including Revelation 22:1-2. Apple trees were commonly grown in early New England and there was an old English tradition of wassailing or wishing health to apple trees on Christmas eve.
The song is now performed by choirs around the world, especially during the Christmas season as a Christmas carol.
Allison Hoffman contrasts two versions of the Passover prayerbook – one for American GIs during WWII and another classic, the Maxwell House Haggadah:
A onetime advertising manager for the Yiddish Forward, [Mad Man Joseph] Jacobs set up an agency in 1919 that specialized in marketing to the large and rapidly assimilating Jewish population. One of his earliest clients was Maxwell House coffee. To allay concerns that coffee might be a grain and therefore forbidden to drink on Passover, Jacobs got a rabbi to certify it as kosher for Passover in 1923, but it took another decade before he had a better idea: sponsorship. The first Maxwell House Haggadah was published in 1932 and was free with purchase of a can of Maxwell House.
Pete Brook chronicles the journey of a former Navy man who was severely beaten eleven years ago for cross-dressing. To reenter the world, Mark Hogancamp built Marwencol, a Nazi-besieged, World War II era town in his backyard, complete with action figure versions of his friends:
For more than a decade, 1/6 scale dolls have played out existential and therapeutic stories of love and war, friendship and enmity, heroism and cowardice, and desire and restraint. In some cases, the stories of Marwencol mirror reality, sometimes they’re purely fantasy; usually they blur the two.
A documentary on Hogancamp airs on PBS' Independedent Lens on April 26th.
Caspar Melville reviews Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey:
What is it about consciousness, this “magical” ability to perceive and exult in beauty, meaning and a sense of awe, that confers an evolutionary advantage? [Humphrey's] answer is simply that this magical show in our own heads which enchants the world is what makes life worth living: “For a phenomenally conscious creature, simply being there is a cause for celebration.”
Consciousness infuses us with the belief that we are more than mere flesh, that we matter, that we might have a life after death, that we have a “soul”. All of these are illusions – the magic of his title – but they have real effects, by making us want to live. As for religion? In his book he argues, “Long before religion could begin to get a foothold in human culture human beings must already have been living in soul land.” “Yes,” he tells me, “I suggest that organised religion is parasitic on spirituality, and in fact acts as a restraint on it.”
Yes, it is the best translation ever made. And it's good that an atheist can appreciate it, even if his main interest is literary. Here's his assessment of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians:
“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Yes he read that at his father's funeral.
As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative “ifs” and its closing advice — always italicized in my mind since first I heard it — to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts.
I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s “Contemporary English Version,” which I picked up at an evangelical “Promise Keepers” rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: “Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.”
Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me.
Well: perhaps an unusually precocious 16-year-old boy. I never grew up on this, alas – it was far too Protestant. I did get a daily draft of the Book Of Common Prayer, another masterpiece, at my Protestant secondary school. And its cadences still linger in my unconscious.
"The Last Neanderthal's Love Song" by Caleb Crain:
O ancestors! Please hear my cry.
I'm eighteen summers old.
I need a wife, but evolution's
Left me in the cold.I'm the last Neanderthal.
I have some woman friends—
Nice-looking, others tell me—but
They're Homo sapiens.
Continued here. Photo by Flickr user Erich Ferdinand:
[T]his was taken at the original place of the first findings of the neanderthal men… to be found at: www.neanderthal.de [T]he red/white poles in the background mark the place where the bones were found
The Dish 