The Enlightened Virtuoso: January 2017

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Proud Pastor

I couldn't be prouder of my congregants. A week ago my ladies boarded a bus at our denomination's headquarters in Valley Forge and rode down to Washington D.C. to join the protest. Two of them are featured in this American Baptist Home Mission Societies article:

http://abhms.org/about-us/mission-stories/american-baptists-share-reasons-for-marching-in-d-c/

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The Hegemony of Pop Culture

"They live in the unreal realm of the mega-rich, yet they hide behind a folksy facade, wolfing down pizza at the Oscars and cheering sports teams from V.I.P. boxes... Opera, dance, poetry, and the literary novel are still called 'elitist', despite the fact that the world's real power has little use for them. The old hierarchy of high and low culture has become a sham: pop is the ruling party."

Alex Ross, "The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture", The New Yorker, September 15th 2014.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Adorno on Truth and Suffering

"The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject."

Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Routledge, 2003), p. 17.

Welcome

Dear reader,

Welcome! This blog started off as a personal project meant more for myself than anyone else. In that regard, it has served as a catalog for the resources I tend to enjoy. However, recent circumstances have changed the way I have utilized this medium. For a while I began using it as a public journal, following the example of my personal journal. While it may seem strange, I use my journals as a record of intellectual exposure and growth rather than mediums of creative outpouring. I often post quotes that I have found particularly meaningful. For me, this is a way of documenting what I have been exposed to and how my own thinking has developed. In that sense, my journaling is perhaps a bit unusual. It works for me though and I hope that it may be of interest to you as well.

To some extent, this journal is an experiment with Siegfried Kracauer's note that, "We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life" (Die Angestellten, in Schriften, vol. 1, 252). This blog is obviously public, yet it's not really created for anyone other than myself. If you find something that's of use or value, all the better! It does, after all, serve as one of my research resources and it may serve that purpose for you as well.

Thanks for taking the time to read what I've either recorded or written.