race 29
Christopher Nolan: Anglo-American Apologist
Pattinson captured the appeal of Christopher Nolan’s movies: “You can either really, really dig into it, find so many different threads to pull, or you can appreciate it as a…
No Justice, No Peace? René Girard and Endless Rivalries
The rivalry we’re experiencing goes deeper than symptoms, political principles, and even the need for responsive, wise leaders. Indeed, it may bypass principles and wisdom altogether. But to explain it,…
A Pathway to Peace: Hope in The Need to Be Whole
Berry, with an insistence that defies despair, is still carrying out his calling. He notes the discouraging odds his kind has faced not just now but in the past. Imperial…
Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry’s New Book on Race
These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry…
Practicing Authentic Conversation
If I attempt to follow Berry’s underwater route too closely, I’m afraid I will drown. Rather than try to summarize it, then, I will instead distill from it a set…
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in…
Defining Race: A Review of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America
In their newest incarnation, American racial preferences are advertised to the public as compensating for prior pro-white discrimination and promoting racial diversity. Problems of definition persist under the new order…
Forgetting vs. Overcoming: Nietzche on Abuses of History and the 1619 Project
The 1619 Project states that its purpose is to remember the history of slavery and racism that American schools have sometimes tried to forget. But mostly it teaches students the…
Diversity, Race, and Radical Hospitality in a Bible-based Community
We academics unfortunately often fall into the trap of pride (particularly of the self-involved, self-satisfying, institutional kind), and hence a humbling such as this conference delivered was probably much needed.…
Seeing the Midwest New: A Review of The Everlasting People
It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s “penitent Midwest regionalism” is first of…
Opting Out of the Outrage Machine: A Review of Bad News
My least-favorite bumper sticker of all time reads, "If you're not outraged you're not paying attention." As a remedy for this sort of dopamine-fueled attitude, the author suggests that we…
The Contradictions within My Students’ Request for Diverse Curricula
The imagined student’s intentions are honorable: to promote racial justice. But when the conversation begins, she has already set herself against the teacher and the course. The task of the…
“Magically Turning White”: A Family Story of Slavery, Racism, and Redemption
Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and…
Teaching Banned Books: Huck Finn
The censorship of slavery no longer dictates Huck’s morality. Unlike Tom, Huck has begun to question his society’s standards, to weigh and consider what is just and right, and I…
Atticus, Scout, and the Gift of Children: On Reading To Kill a Mockingbird with my Daughter in 2020
This is the humbling gift our children offer. If we seek to shape their character, at some point in the journey we’ll find ourselves backed into a corner, faced with…
Jacques Barzun’s 1937 Critique of Race-Thinking
On the heels of a consequential election, and the accompanying commentary demonstrating the continued pervasiveness of race-thinking, Barzun’s message of honoring each human individual’s value while recognizing our shared common…
Embattled: The Story of the O’Hanlon Fresco
Mill Valley, CA. As our country struggles to come to terms with its racist past—and present—a controversy surrounding a 1934 mural at the University of Kentucky mirrors the racial tensions…
Marilynne Robinson’s Jack and the Need to be Forgiven
Much of the novel reads like this sentence—the internal struggle of someone who wants—not forgiveness, nor salvation, really, but rather to not need to be forgiven, to not require salvation…
Baldwin, Buckley, and Berry on Racism and the World Order
Drawing from both Baldwin and Berry allows us to see that the racist and imperial policies of the past continue to do immense social, economic, cultural, and ecological damage around…
“And the Word Was Made Flesh”: Placing Ethnicity in the Gospels and Making Conservative Politics Humane
It is a recognition of the beauty and goodness of ethnic diversity combined with a message of universal love and mercy that should be at the heart of a true…
The Local Barber
I recently visited a barber in my Virginian hometown whom I had not patronized in more than a year (I’d taken to getting my haircuts during lunch breaks at my…
“Blackest Land, Whitest People”
From here in my long-time Midwestern location, these lots are unshakeable reminders of a place in Texas where a shameful darkness once surrounded a part of my childhood.
Leo Durocher: The All-American Contradiction
The coming of October, and of the World Series as culmination, invites reflection on yet another season in which the home run (and the strikeout) became the centerpiece of the…
“Anything Less than Ownership is Unacceptable!”
Many Americans do not need a data visualization to see that their places, especially their cities, are sharply divided along racial lines. Even so, the Weldon Cooper Center’s “Racial Dot…
