So, I've decided to set out to accomplish a rather daunting task: read 100 classic books. I'm requesting a Kindle for Christmas, so hopefully its portability and convenience will aid in the achievement of this goal.
As I've browsed around the internet, I've found quite a few different lists. I'm having a hard time choosing between them. I would love to receive suggestions on which one I should follow. Here are a few I've found, but there are many more out there.
• Penguin Classics
• Newsweek
• Modern Library
• Radcliffe Publishing Course
Monday, November 23, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Compromises limit abortion accessibility
Originally published in the Nov. 9 issue of the Daily Beacon, this column I wrote discusses the potential limited accessibility to abortions caused by the House's Nov. 7 passage of the health care reform bill:
I feel sick about the concessions abortion-rights Democrats made in order to pass the health care bill through the House Saturday night.
Forced to choose between a public option and readily available abortions, pending passage through the Senate, this bill may successfully limit women’s access to affordable abortions.
It’s shameful that there was little to no coverage of this abortion amendment, which passed 240-194, prior to the passage of the bill as a whole. Most articles available as of Sunday morning touted the passage of this bill as a great success and relegated the issue and implications of the abortion amendment to the last few lines of a larger story about the bill’s “historic” passage. (The New York Times did create a nice graphic and map showing the geographical spread of support and dissent for the amendment, which shows us Tennesseans that only one of our representatives voted against the abortion amendment: Steven Cohen, Democratic representative from Tennessee’s ninth district.)
Luckily, in perusing the Internet Saturday night, I came across Meredith Simons’ Nov. 7 doubleX.com blog entry entitled “A Critique of the Stupak Amendment: Choose Between Health Care and Abortion.” Published at 10:07 p.m., just before the bill itself was passed, Simons warned, “Remember those conservatives who don’t want the government interfering in health care plans? Right, well, it turns out what they meant was they don’t want the government interfering in health care plans, except when it comes to abortion. At that point, the government can interfere to its heart’s content.”
This is obviously a controversial topic, and I can understand anti-abortion supporters’ conviction that the government should not fund a procedure they deem morally reprehensible, to the point of considering it murder. Such a concern is, of course, a justifiable reason for the addition of the amendment.
The language of the bill (H.R. 3962) is fairly neutral, promising “no preemption of state laws regarding abortion,” “no effect on federal laws regarding abortion” and “no effect on federal civil rights laws” in section 258. Section 259 demands that any “federal agency or program and any state or local government that receives federal financial assistance under this act” cannot discriminate against any “health care entity (who) does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of or refer for abortions.”
This seems harmless enough, right? Wrong.
“To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be an understatement of a lifetime,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) during floor debate. It “will be the greatest restriction of a women’s right to choose” passed by Congress “in our career,” according to a Nov. 7 Bloomberg.com article.
The bill will theoretically allow women to purchase a “rider” for their government-sponsored health insurance that would provide them with coverage for abortion procedures. We all know who this kind of provision favors — those who can afford to buy private health insurance anyway, not the poor and underprivileged, those who desperately need access to affordable abortions.
Such a plan will actually limit the coverage of “low- and middle-income women who qualify for government subsidies, along with the legions of women who will buy insurance on the exchange because they are either self-employed or employed by small businesses.” They “won’t be able to get plans that automatically include abortion coverage,” Simons writes.
Even worse, a Sept. 30 New York Times editorial claims this “rider” option is actually a charade, “an unworkable approach given that almost no one expects to need an abortion, few women would buy the rider and, therefore, few insurance companies would even offer it.”
Simons reiterates this point: “Businesses don’t like to sell products that don’t have a market, and the market for something like an abortion rider — essentially a plan for an unplanned pregnancy — is notoriously slim.”
By allowing this concession and effectively restricting the availability of abortions to those who can afford to pay for the procedure out of pocket, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has successfully limited the rights of women, pending the passage of a similar bill through the Senate.
According to a Nov. 8 New York Times article entitled “Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling,” “Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. ‘Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,’ DeLauro said. ‘This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.’”
I feel sick about the concessions abortion-rights Democrats made in order to pass the health care bill through the House Saturday night.
Forced to choose between a public option and readily available abortions, pending passage through the Senate, this bill may successfully limit women’s access to affordable abortions.
It’s shameful that there was little to no coverage of this abortion amendment, which passed 240-194, prior to the passage of the bill as a whole. Most articles available as of Sunday morning touted the passage of this bill as a great success and relegated the issue and implications of the abortion amendment to the last few lines of a larger story about the bill’s “historic” passage. (The New York Times did create a nice graphic and map showing the geographical spread of support and dissent for the amendment, which shows us Tennesseans that only one of our representatives voted against the abortion amendment: Steven Cohen, Democratic representative from Tennessee’s ninth district.)
Luckily, in perusing the Internet Saturday night, I came across Meredith Simons’ Nov. 7 doubleX.com blog entry entitled “A Critique of the Stupak Amendment: Choose Between Health Care and Abortion.” Published at 10:07 p.m., just before the bill itself was passed, Simons warned, “Remember those conservatives who don’t want the government interfering in health care plans? Right, well, it turns out what they meant was they don’t want the government interfering in health care plans, except when it comes to abortion. At that point, the government can interfere to its heart’s content.”
This is obviously a controversial topic, and I can understand anti-abortion supporters’ conviction that the government should not fund a procedure they deem morally reprehensible, to the point of considering it murder. Such a concern is, of course, a justifiable reason for the addition of the amendment.
The language of the bill (H.R. 3962) is fairly neutral, promising “no preemption of state laws regarding abortion,” “no effect on federal laws regarding abortion” and “no effect on federal civil rights laws” in section 258. Section 259 demands that any “federal agency or program and any state or local government that receives federal financial assistance under this act” cannot discriminate against any “health care entity (who) does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of or refer for abortions.”
This seems harmless enough, right? Wrong.
“To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be an understatement of a lifetime,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) during floor debate. It “will be the greatest restriction of a women’s right to choose” passed by Congress “in our career,” according to a Nov. 7 Bloomberg.com article.
The bill will theoretically allow women to purchase a “rider” for their government-sponsored health insurance that would provide them with coverage for abortion procedures. We all know who this kind of provision favors — those who can afford to buy private health insurance anyway, not the poor and underprivileged, those who desperately need access to affordable abortions.
Such a plan will actually limit the coverage of “low- and middle-income women who qualify for government subsidies, along with the legions of women who will buy insurance on the exchange because they are either self-employed or employed by small businesses.” They “won’t be able to get plans that automatically include abortion coverage,” Simons writes.
Even worse, a Sept. 30 New York Times editorial claims this “rider” option is actually a charade, “an unworkable approach given that almost no one expects to need an abortion, few women would buy the rider and, therefore, few insurance companies would even offer it.”
Simons reiterates this point: “Businesses don’t like to sell products that don’t have a market, and the market for something like an abortion rider — essentially a plan for an unplanned pregnancy — is notoriously slim.”
By allowing this concession and effectively restricting the availability of abortions to those who can afford to pay for the procedure out of pocket, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has successfully limited the rights of women, pending the passage of a similar bill through the Senate.
According to a Nov. 8 New York Times article entitled “Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling,” “Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. ‘Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,’ DeLauro said. ‘This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.’”
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Halloween's Tangled Religious Roots
Check out my Daily Beacon feature story on the religious origins of Halloween.
Here are the first few lines:
Marked primarily by costumes and candy in our culture, Halloween, seemingly in contrast to the way it is practiced now, has its roots in religious festivals, first from a pagan feast and later an infusion of pagan and Christian traditions.
Some of today’s practices carry over from the holiday’s ancient roots. Halloween’s religious overtones have evolved throughout the years, in some cases as a result of the dominant religion of the time and later in reaction to the seeming contradiction of celebrating a holiday with pagan roots within the context of Christianity.
Read the rest here.
Here are the first few lines:
Marked primarily by costumes and candy in our culture, Halloween, seemingly in contrast to the way it is practiced now, has its roots in religious festivals, first from a pagan feast and later an infusion of pagan and Christian traditions.
Some of today’s practices carry over from the holiday’s ancient roots. Halloween’s religious overtones have evolved throughout the years, in some cases as a result of the dominant religion of the time and later in reaction to the seeming contradiction of celebrating a holiday with pagan roots within the context of Christianity.
Read the rest here.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Veiling of Women in Early Christianity
My New Testament professor discussed this article in class today. It explains a possible reason for why women were required to wear veils in the Corinthian church established by Paul. Apparently the same word means both "veil" and "testicle."
Veil as Testicle in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians
Veil as Testicle in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Three of the Seven Plays (in Seven Days)
I'm traveling to NYC in December with a group of UT students and a professor, and we'll be seeing seven plays in seven days. I'm excited to see these on- and off-Broadway plays, as well as to visit lots of museums and see NYC around Christmastime.
Here are the three plays that I already know we'll be seeing:
1. Superior Donuts
2. In The Next Room
3. Next to Normal
Here are the three plays that I already know we'll be seeing:
1. Superior Donuts
2. In The Next Room
3. Next to Normal
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Saints' Lives ♥
"Of all the genres that survive from the Middle Ages, only the lives of the saints, arguably the richest in terms of extant records, are still treated by literary historians as documents for source studies (Quellenkritik) and little else. The genre has until recently fallen through the net of scholarly research, avoided by the historians because it lacks 'documentary' evidential status and by the literary historians because saints' lives are rarely works of art.
We live, moreover, in a pluralist age ruled by a post-Marxian secular materialism, in an age when fear of the avenging angel of the Lord has been replaced by fear of microorganisms. We have replaced the awe-full reverence for the Almighty with a minute examination of the specific. Microbes have replaced devils. Our literary language has followed this transference of belief. The leading theorists of the last twenty years, in both literary criticism and historiography, share two important methodological premises inherited from the logical-positivists: a skepticism of metaphysical inquiry and a disbelief in the ontological status of language. From this methodological vantage point, they argue that narrative is unable to reflect any reality other than its own. Their major premise which decisively veers from the mainstream of Western philosophical argument is that language—which they define as a rule-based system of mutually intelligible signs—cannot represent reality, for reality is itself a random series of unrelated discontinuities (i.e., is not rule-based). Language is a closed encoding system, and if it reveals anything about a 'reality' outside itself, that 'reality' is a fictive one. It is some considerable distance from this position to that wherein language is a vehicle for representing not only the 'things' of the material world but also the numinous presence (e.g., the scriptural λόγος). Augustine, Gregory, Bokenham or—even the proverbial medieval man on the street—all would affirm the ability of language and narrative to represent not only this world but the divine as well."
—Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography (1988)
We live, moreover, in a pluralist age ruled by a post-Marxian secular materialism, in an age when fear of the avenging angel of the Lord has been replaced by fear of microorganisms. We have replaced the awe-full reverence for the Almighty with a minute examination of the specific. Microbes have replaced devils. Our literary language has followed this transference of belief. The leading theorists of the last twenty years, in both literary criticism and historiography, share two important methodological premises inherited from the logical-positivists: a skepticism of metaphysical inquiry and a disbelief in the ontological status of language. From this methodological vantage point, they argue that narrative is unable to reflect any reality other than its own. Their major premise which decisively veers from the mainstream of Western philosophical argument is that language—which they define as a rule-based system of mutually intelligible signs—cannot represent reality, for reality is itself a random series of unrelated discontinuities (i.e., is not rule-based). Language is a closed encoding system, and if it reveals anything about a 'reality' outside itself, that 'reality' is a fictive one. It is some considerable distance from this position to that wherein language is a vehicle for representing not only the 'things' of the material world but also the numinous presence (e.g., the scriptural λόγος). Augustine, Gregory, Bokenham or—even the proverbial medieval man on the street—all would affirm the ability of language and narrative to represent not only this world but the divine as well."
—Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography (1988)
Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson's album
Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson recently released a collaborative album, Break Up.
Listen to my favorite song from the album, Shampoo..
Listen to my favorite song from the album, Shampoo..
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