The introduction to Melissa Raphael's 2000 book Introducting Thealogy naturally talks a lot about the body and the embodiment of experience, by contrast with the disembodied abstractions of traditional religions for which the body and especially the female body are profane: "the female body is sacred; it incarnates the Goddess to such a degree that ( Read more... )

"To say that the world is entirely comprised of combinations of one hundred or so elements does not in any way deny the infinite multiplicity of all the things in the world, nor does it produce a set of bloodless generalizations. This is because the manifest, diverse phenomena of the world have been reduced to a lowest common denominator, which ( Read more... )

I finished reading The Great Mirror of Male Love, a 1687 book by Ihara Saikaku. It's about the fashionable "way of boy love", in which an adult man took an adolescent as his lover. Many of the stories are about samurai, so as you might imagine there are plenty of duels to the death. One young man, unable to get rid of a proud suitor who won't take ( Read more... )

This is a series of comments I made recently on Facebook which I wanted to share (lucky old you!). The context is the Daily Telegraph's recent "Slouchhats and Slackers" front page regarding the Disability Support Pension ( Read more... )

"Wardaghan has made my loneliness complete ( Read more... )

The other day I remarked (and take anything I saw with a grain of salt, as I'm hardly an expert) that strict hierarchy is a major difference between Korean and Western society. On the other hand, of course, the West has plenty of social hierarchy of its own. English doesn't have formal and informal speech levels or an elaborate system of honorifics ( Read more... )

While sitting around in the ER a few weeks ago, waiting for my swollen tootsies to be triaged (a harmless if alarming medication side effect, as it turned out), I did a little triage of my own - reading some of Kitsch (edited by Gillo Dorfles - translated from the Italian by person or persons unknown). Skip it? Keep it? Extract its knowledgy ( Read more... )

"This study's findings suggest that the [Invisible Pink Unicorn] critique of religion is mostly misdirected. The belief commitments of religious people usually have less to do with beliefs than commitments, as evidenced by the overwhelming lack of theological understanding that characterizes a typical congregation. Stephen Prothero [in Religious ( Read more... )

Amongst the clutter, an old clipping on Y2K and the "genres of anxiety" - SF, horror, and crime - and this remark, from critic John Clute: "Symbols, of course, are not 'real'. But they shape the minds that create them. The Millennium is an active, potent symbol generated by a species that has gained the power to make its symbols work for it." Think ( Read more... )

Moving means glancing at everything you own, which in my case includes a Punch cartoon from 1970 of Don Quixote remarking to Sancho Panza, "We must wait for a wind - I do not wish to stand accused of unprovoked aggression."