Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
While the official story holds that Ian Fleming named his most famous character after an American ornithologist, local legend tells a different story. In 1942, Fleming spent a few weeks at Camp X near Oshawa where he was taking specialized training (he was leader of a British commando unit). Fleming was staying at a home on Avenue Road, and, every day, on his way to Camp X, he passed a local church, St. James-Bond United Church.
I’ve lost my faith. Once, I believed as most believed. It would be a virtue to own a Ferrari. It would be a sign that the gods had smiled upon me and blessed me with prosperity, or at least with the right to carry huge debt servicing charges. But the central myth that fueled that belief has fallen under the march of modernism.
The so-called Luminous Veil is, for me, a symbol-laden structure. The Luminous Veil is a late addition to the half kilometre length of Toronto’s Prince Edward Viaduct. It was designed to end the viaduct’s reputation as one of North America’s premiere suicide destinations.
The third installment in my impressions of Paris series. This time: the cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
In light of the Charlie Hebdo killings, I thought I’d devote the next few posts to Paris just as a way to hold the people of Paris in mind.
4 June about 3 o’clock someone came to store and stolen holy merchandise. He run away very fast but he put the bicycle on the road I have experience 3 time this year (same man) I forgive again I want to return bicycle but he did not come back I report police station / Police…
I suspect (but can’t be certain) that religion lurks in the background of the Scottish Referendum. Unlike Canada, Scotland has a state church which is called (surprise, surprise) the Church of Scotland.
In 1995, Oliver Sacks published a book titled An Anthropologist On Mars. It’s a collection of “case studies” about people with neurological disorders. The virtue of Sacks’s writing is that it’s accessible to the lay reader: he presents his subjects without technical jargon while preserving the important questions which their conditions raise.
More tomb than room, was what she said.My grandmother fled to the fields,convinced the old farm house held death,a mid-life freak, I guess, though to hear hertell it, planets must have collidedand debris come raining from the skies.Grandfather had quit his farming, severedten acres for himself and sold the rest.I had just been born, maybe…
My ongoing novel research—trying to get inside the head of a Catholic feminist liberationist grad student—has taken me to Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex, first published in 1968, then reissued in 1975 “with a new feminist postchristian introduction by the author.”
I’m writing a novel (tentatively titled Life In The Margins). It’s about sex, murder and systematic theology. Seriously. I’m offering a romp through the world of systematic theology, presenting it unto others as I wish it had been presented unto me.
There’s a war coming. That’s what Brian’s mom said when she gave us some of the cookies she’d baked. We’d been playing in the fort Brian made in his basement, shooting each other in the legs with our BB guns. While we ate our cookies, Brian’s mom told us about the Book of Revelation and how, inside that book, it said there’s a war coming.
When I was five, my dad sat me down in front of an Ouija board and told me to ask it some questions. Whatever I wanted. Anything at all. My dad was a good church-going soul and the son of a theologian, but a five-year-old doesn’t care about apparent inconsistencies.
We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions.
There is a fascinating article by Joanne Hill in this week’s Jerusalem Tribune, a Toronto-based weekly published under the auspices of the B’nai Brith Canada. [Site defunct.] It purports to be an interview of Jonathan Kay as he launches his book, Among The Truthers.