zimmerman trial

Is there a chance for blind justice when the trial is being used as a political kick ball on all sides?

In Sanford, Fla., Zimmerman trial keeps a shaken community on edge

The real problem in the USA is that there appears to be no way depoliticize race.  The media are heavily invested in using controversy as the basis for making money.

On code-switching:

Was Zimmerman trial witness Rachel Jeantel tripped up by her inability to code switch?

For me, it is still true that the medium is the message.  One must take responsibility for the message one delivers.  Wherever one is, one must speak the language of the place to the people of the place.

teaching today

For years I’ve been introducing students in my college-level fine- arts courses to the photographs of Diane Arbus (1923–71)....  Together they form a communion of beings as ethereal as saints, whose lovely, silver-tone relics seem at home under glass.

Projected onto a lecture-room wall, their dearness vanishes. No longer objects to be held and studied like jewelry, the photos assume the scale of billboard graphics, which one might think would heighten their power. Lately, however, my students seem less responsive to Arbus’s pictures than they once were, even if I try nudging them in the direction of honest emotion with a few lines from Grace Bauer’s tribute poem The Eye of the Beholder. Bauer dares my classes in her evocation of Arbus,

Run your hands
across your average face,
your normal body,”And tell me
how you differ from these
miracles that always make you
want to look away.
And see.

More and more, however, my students don’t turn reflexively from Arbus’s anomalies of nature and culture, or show much interest in “seeing” in a way that doesn’t entail keeping at least one eye on the screens of their iPhones. Instead, an icy stupor possesses them, something partly induced by the bullet-point approach to learning they’ve endured since grade school—all prepackaged “data” with little affective content. Sitting beside classmates with Popsicle-colored hair and more angles on filigreeing one’s body parts than even Arbus’s subjects knew of, they balk at the chance to examine art that asks, Who among you is without blemish? and only half buy my claim we’re not doing religion....

I regard the classroom as a hallowed place and require male students to remove their baseball caps upon entering....  Experience tells me that five or ten years down the road they’ll write to say they’d stumbled on the [a certain graphic image] in the pages of some magazine, no older or less terrifying than they remembered him. They’ll recall the hours we shared letting great images and ideas wash over us like baptismal water, a trick to keep our hearts and minds supple against life’s hard edges, our eyes fine-tuned to behold the world as it points beyond itself. - Experience tells me that five or ten years down the road they’ll write to say they’d stumbled on the boy with the grenade in the pages of some magazine, no older or less terrifying than they remembered him. They’ll recall the hours we shared letting great images and ideas wash over us like baptismal water, a trick to keep our hearts and minds supple against life’s hard edges, our eyes fine-tuned to behold the world as it points beyond itself. - Michael E. DeSanctis cw2013Jun1p31

peace / good will

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. - Lk 2:14

Today the NAB has:

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.

I have been meditating on the relationship between peace and good will. One can have good will without being in peace. Certainly one can have good will without being in a time or place of peace.

For good will to be effective, it must be reciprocated. That, in and of itself, is peace; the sharing of good will.

I find that, as I age, peace becomes more important; and more elusive.

I find it unhealthy not to be always seeking peace.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is sadness, joy.

Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

To be understood, as to understand;

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.

It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

- Although the authorship of this prayer, first printed in the early 20th century, remains unclear, it has traditionally been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

Patty and Pat Crowley

from Jim McCrea in post of Margaret O'Brien Steinfels @ commonweal.com

During the 1966 Papal Birth Control Commission, at which Chicago Catholics and co-directors of the Christian Family Movement Patty Crowley & her husband Pat were members, a heated discussion about how the church could save face if it were to allow couples to decide how to limit offspring, Marcelino Zalba, a Spanish Jesuit member of the commission, asked, “What then with the millions we have sent to hell” if the rules are relaxed?

Patty immediately responded in what became perhaps her most memorable quote. “Fr. Zalba,” she said, “do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?”

www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2005d/120905/120905o.php

Andrew Greeley requiescat in pacem

his website

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels @ commonweal.com