Culture

Culture

Identifying With God: Jay-Z’s Power to Profit

By

Rappers often credit God in their liner notes, acceptance speeches, and raps. They brag about being God’s sons and daughters. Some Five Percenter rappers have even claimed to be God, but few mainstream rappers have done so with the gusto of Jay-Z, also known by the nickname Jay-Hova, after the Judeo-Christian God. 

Read More
Culture

Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

By

The top films for 2010—especially those up for this Sunday’s awards—leave most of the species-specific questions behind. Instead this year’s crop reflects anxieties (as well as promises) about who we are and who we might be becoming in and as humans, in our own skins—never mind the “prawns” or “Na’vi.” Questions provoked by this year’s films include those concerning the nature of our selves in connection and collision with our families, our larger social institutional entanglements, and our own bodies. The other key theme, effecting each of the others, had to do with the ways new media technology is inserting itself into our intimate lives, and changing our identities, both public and private.

Read More
Culture

Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath

By

As National Day of Unplugging looms (it begins a week from today) I hope we all can agree that taking time away from the frenzy of everyday life is a good thing. And pausing to reflect on the role of technology in our lives is important at a time when social technologies in particular are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life with effects that we are just beginning to describe and understand. But I do have to wonder if the keen, even if not hostile, focus on technology as such misses the phenomenological, relational, and spiritual mark just a bit.  

Read More
Culture

Will San Francisco Ban Circumcision?

By

The San Francisco Campaign against circumcision has allied itself with “Intact America.” Its activists have dubbed themselves “intactavists.” In San Francisco’s annual Gay Pride Parade a group representing BANG, the Bay Area iNtactivst Group, makes their point in a vivid manner: they don puffy penis costumes and carry a poster of an indignant-looking infant asking, “You want to cut off what?”

Read More
Culture

Arcade Fire and the Suburban Soul

By

Has there ever been a major pop group more concerned with exploring personal anxieties, aspirations, and narratives through music defined so fundamentally by religious themes? The turmoil and paranoia of the last decade—wars, attacks, economic crashes, myriad color-coded fears—run through Arcade Fire’s three full-length records. The newest effort induces a look back to previous decades, when suburbia seemed to offer placidity and refuge from the wilderness downtown.

Read More
Culture

You Are Not Your Star Sign

By

A few weeks ago the stars were realigned. The Archimedes’ Lever of this cosmic shift was, of all places, in Minnesota, where a newspaper published an article quoting an astronomer on an issue involving the accumulated result of long, slow gravitational pull. These comments went viral online at something close to the speed of light, leading to reevaluation of the Zodiac, panic among horoscope followers, assorted tweets defending or regretting tattoo selections, and some attempts at explanation from astrologists as to their systems of making sense of human existence through claims about the pull of the stars. 

Read More