Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
This is the first novel of Laila Lalami and it created something of a splash when it was published two years ago. It is a little book, well–crafted and worth reading. Clearly Lalami has literary aspirations and clearly too she has the potential to write bigger pieces of fiction in the future. I hope the world can give her the space to do that.
In Toronto on May 27, 2007, Marie Bouclin of Sudbury, Ontario will be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by bishop Patricia Fresen of Germany.
In light of the recent publication of John Shelby Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious, I thought it might be fruitful to revisit some of the debates which Spong’s work has provoked.
Published by the University of Toronto Press, this collection of essays and interviews considers pedagogy in the context of higher learning. The University of Toronto”s official motto is “velut arbor aevo,” a snippet from a poem by Horace which suggests the image of a tree filling out and taking root.
As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq.
We are victims of the Chinese curse. We live in interesting times—or at least polarized times. Differing opinions have gravitated to the poles of a left–right axis, first in politics, then bleeding over into our religious discourse until, at least in some public debates, it has become impossible to discern which discursive practice is driving our disputes.
Thanks to pressure from the Catholic League, Manhattan’s Lab Gallery has removed the 90 Kg chocolate sculpture titled “My Sweet Lord” by artist Cosimo Cavallaro.
The April issue of The Walrus ships with a promotional DVD from HarperCollins — an interview with Barbara Gowdy about her new novel, Helpless. In the interview we learn the secret of how an author finds inspiration for writing fiction.
Metatags are declassé. The big search engines haven”t used them for 6 yrs. now. Anybody can put “god, love, jesus” in their metatags while the img src tag points to a jpg of a dwarf in flagrante delicto with a dog.
On Monday, the NY Times published a piece titled “Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules” about Marcus R. Ross who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in paleontology notwithstanding his belief in “early earth creationism.” He wrote about events which occurred (according to him) 65 million years ago but simultaneously asserts that the universe is at most 10,000 years old.
My daughter, now in grade 9, is learning to do linear equations in her math class, then mapping points as Cartesian co–ordinates on graph paper. She’s a reasonably bright 14-year-old, but no math whiz, mostly because she feels no motivation to learn the problems. How do they relate to real-world issues?
Suppose, instead of resolving theological differences through disputations and councils and seminars and symposia, we opted for something a little more robust. What if we asked our theologians to submit to a completely different process—a cage match.
Yesterday, at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, the U.S. Department of Defence revealed a prototype of a heat–beam weapon which it plans to place in the hands of troops by 2010.
My son likes … well, what are some of his interests? Playing table tennis with kids in Japan, & Gears of War on his Xbox (I can’t believe I allowed a Microsoft product into the house), capturing sequences of Halo and making his own movies from them, hunting down the Frag Dolls online.
Percy Saltzman died a week ago at the age of 91. Just about every Canadian of a certain age remembers Percy as our national weatherman, who delivered the forecasts — good or bad — with panache … or was it chutzpah! And there was his signature sign-off — throwing up the chalk and catching it.