Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2602

The Zen Of Shooting Guns

by Chris Bodenner

Everyone Forever Now - "Shooting a Gun" from Everynone on Vimeo.

Recreation - Shopping - Vimeo - Radiolab - Video

Poem For Sunday

by Zoe Pollock

"August Walk" by Rosanna Warren:

The forest fungal, and a seethe of rain.
Indian pipes prod white, crooked fingers up through mulch,
boletus and inky caps glutton in the dank.
Lichen glues coral to moist granite.
We follow cleft hoofprints
of a bull moose, you striding ahead, I lagging;
you reading woods lore--ice-stripped bark, deer-nibble,
last winter's furry, matted fisher-cat spoor; I distracted,
musing. The soil springs at our tread, mossbanks
bristle with spores. Rainlight...

Lies To Cover Up The Truth

by Zoe Pollock

Andrew O'Hehir reviews "A Film Unfinished," a documentary on the partially staged Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942:

You might view "A Film Unfinished" as an exploration of the film-theory idea that movies always embody lies and the truth at the same time. The fact that Nazis compelled well-dressed Jews to walk past dead bodies, over and over again, or forced groups of men and women to strip naked and plunge into the mikvah, or ritual bath, in front of the...

"Straight Man's Burden"

by Zoe Pollock

Jeff Sharlet reports from the front lines of Uganda's political anti-gay persecutions. Sharlet interviews the people behind Uganda's Fellowship movement and its roots in and ties to the American evangelical movement, the Family. It's behind the pay wall but it's pretty scary stuff:

Every year, right before Uganda's Independence Day, the government holds a National Prayer Breakfast modelled on the Family's event in Washington. Americans, among them Republican Senator Jim Inhofe...

Missal Fire

by Zoe Pollock

Get Religion dissects the AP's coverage of the revised Roman Missal, the Catholic prayer book that will feature some new English translations by noting that:

Arguments about sex will stir things up, but if you really want to
touch people at the local level all you really need to do is change
their prayer books and hymnals.

Roman Missal - Catholic Church - English language - Religion and Spirituality - Christianity

Life Of Leisure

by Zoe Pollock

Alex Jung interviews Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life." He makes a pretty convincing case for moving to Germany:

Why do we work so much in the first

There aren't any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans had more leisure time than Europeans back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who...

Nostalgic For A Time That Never Was

 

by Patrick Appel

Deep Glamour interviews Matt Novak, the proprietor of  Paleofuture. Novak:

Nostalgia as a symptom of fear is far too broad of an idea, and frankly I regret saying it so matter of factly. There is an important distinction I feel that we should make between personal nostalgia and societal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia is that smell of your first teddy bear or the feeling of your first kiss. Personal nostalgia is a wonderful part of the human experience. But I feel that...

Memory Wall

by Zoe Pollock

Last weekend I finished Anthony Doerr's recent collection of stories, "Memory Wall." It's a breathtaking book, not only for the range of stories it tells and the near-perfect writing, but for its ability to capture memories and how we spend our entire adult lives reliving them. In one of my favorite passages, near the end of "Afterworld," the grandson of the protagonist takes his newly adopted Chinese sisters to play in the snow for the first time:

Every hour, Robert thinks, all...

The View From Your Window

Montreal, Canada, 9 am

Canada - Montreal - Quebec - Metro Areas - Business and Economy

Attending To Him

by Zoe Pollock

A South African pastor has drawn criticism for preaching AIDS awareness, getting tested in front of his congregation (along with 100 others from his township) and delivering a sermon "Jesus was HIV-positive." In an interview the pastor stands by his sermon:

In many parts of the Bible, God put himself in the position of the
destitute, the sick, the marginalised. When we attend to
those who are sick, we are attending to him. When we ignore people who
are sick, we are ignoring him.

...