He's finally here

Bo the dog, that's who.

I know, I know.

But this was one of the first blogs to suggest a Portuguese Water Dog, so there.

Doxy weighed in a while back, worried that the breed would become too popular, and I can well understand this. Doxy's Jasper, on whom I have a big crush, is a Portie. Maybe Jasper will have something to say.

The dog arrived at the White House several days ago, but I was in one of my 16-hour work days and didn't hear about him till this morning's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."

Here's a site with some video.

A note on the reactions to the death of John Updike (R.I.P.)

This isn't really about John Updike, may he rest in peace, but about the descriptions of John Updike on the radio.

I found myself yelling at the radio this morning. Yes, me, yelling at my blessed NPR shows in the car on the short drive to work.

Updike was a great writer, no doubt about it, and an art critic and thinker and many other things. So this isn't a dissing of Updike.

What is getting to me is how everyone is speaking of him as a writer about (the United States of) America, American post-war life, the American middle.

Excuse me?!

Updike wrote about white American post-war life.

Of course, he wrote about other things too. I have had his novel about a fictional African country, The Coup, on my shelf for years and have been meaning to read it, and I will read it in memory of him. Updike was, as one critic said, kaleidoscopic.

But Rabbit is not (the U.S. of) America.

Is Rabbit a part of it? Of course. A significant part of it? Of course. The whole story? No. "Representative" (of the whole story)? No.

We are so (as the kids would say) not out of the era of white privilege.

If we're going to name the fact that people are chroniclers of Jewish life or Black life in these United States, then let's name the fact that people are chroniclers of White or White Protestant life in the United States. (Or, for that matter, of the U.S. white middle class, or of middle-class Northern men.)

Either that or I want the obits for Toni Morrison (long may she live and continue to write) to say as much as the obits for Updike that she wrote the Great American Novel.

'Cause if you think that slavery and its aftermath or love and work in Harlem or the U.S. South have not been as American as apple pie and as the life of suburban white businessmen, you are still thinking of white America as normative --as the rule, the standard, the "normal"-- and the rest of these United States as the exception or the other.

White privilege is not just present in what we do or in what happens to us, but in how we think and how we speak. *

Think about it.

*See, for instance, re: the American novel, item 7 in the list on the document at the "white privilege" link above.

A Pete Seeger P.S. - with video and all the words!

Enjoy.

h/t to truthout

"We Are One" online

HBO rebroadcast of this afternoon's "We Are One" event at the Lincoln Memorial (an American liturgy if I ever saw one) is supposed to be free on HBO, but it isn't on my TV. You can watch it online, as I am right now. (Tom Hanks has just read the words of Lincoln. Marisa Tomei is on right now.) And here comes my man James Taylor. Watch here. You can watch anytime. This is also good if you are not in the U.S.

Enjoy.

+Gene Robinson's prayer wasn't included in the broadcast, but you can read it here.

Speaking of Senator Ted and Ms. Victoria and the dogs...

*****Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) returned to work in the Senate Monday after spending the past six months battling brain cancer back home.
***** A smiling, upbeat Kennedy made his second public appearance on Capitol Hill since he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was accompanied by his wife and two dogs, and attended a meeting in the same Russell Office Building room where two of his brothers declared their presidential candidacies.
***** "I feel fine," said the 76-year-old senator whose only other appearance came on July 9, when he cast the decisive vote on Medicare legislation.
***** Through video conferences from his Massachussetts home and a series of discussions with other senators, Kennedy has been laying the groundwork for a healthcare push early next year with the incoming Obama administration. On Monday, he wasted little time addressing the topic, the signature issue of his 45-year legislative career.

Read the rest of the story here in The Hill. Tip of the winter cloche (periwinkle blue, if you must know, 100% wool and made in Canada) to truthout.

Yes, lots on animals, bits of news items, and not a lot of deep thought from me these days. Bear with me. I'm just keeping my head above water. I will emerge.

Life with the old liberals, revisited

The title of this post comes from here. I remembered it because once again I am here on a Friday night, watching Bill Moyers with my parents.

Moyers has an excellent show this week (I'm sure it will be archived within a few days and you can watch it on the website) with guests Patricia Williams (of "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" fame) and Eric Foner (author of a noted book on Reconstruction --which I gather not everyone in the field likes-- and a new book on Lincoln). Interesting interview with Foner here. Announcement of Williams's MacArthur Fellowship here.

I am in the Boston area for the weekend to celebrate my father's 90th birthday (tomorrow - he is thus one day younger than Billy Graham) and the big news, besides the birthday, is that my mother now has wireless and I can blog from my parents' living room. Oh dear. (But my time belongs to my parents while I am here, so I suspect this will be it for blogging.)

Moyers also interviewed Kevin Phillips, whom I had never heard before.

He also paid tribute to Studs Terkel and John Leonard, both of whom died in the last week.

Watch those Moyers interviews. Really.

North Carolina is a blue state

Not by much, but officialdom has finally called the election.

I'm a little confused about why the AP called the election and not the NC State Board of Elections. Is the Associated Press suddenly the arbiter? Were they sick of waiting and therefore eager to announce? The state board still has "unofficial" results.

Click map to enlarge and see details.

Yes, we can

Elizabeth Dole is out of the Senate

The North Carolina presidential results are not yet in. It's very tight so far, with a slight lead for McCain.

But Elizabeth Dole, incumbent Senator, a Republican, is definitely out. Kay Hagan, her Democratic opponent, has won.

Hagan is a Presbyterian elder. Dole, in one last set of ugly campaign tactics, called her "godless" and used a voice that was not Hagan to do so.

It's a night to celebrate with friends, but after four intense days in Chicago and before the usual 16 hour Wednesday work day, I chose to be at home tonight. I just phoned a dear friend in the Midwest who has been living with multiple illnesses and physical and mental challenges and not much money and almost died a couple of times in the last few years, and told her Obama had won. At first she could hardly believe it. She is part Irish, part Jewish, and part African American. I told her "You have lived to see this." She was the first person I called.

I am not sure I will be able to sleep.

Ohio!

Obama has won Ohio. He's over the top!

Voting as secular sacrament

We vote in order to change the country, to exercise our rights, to make our voices heard and a hundred other clichés as shopworn as they are true. But we also vote because it places us in direct fellowship with other citizens; we vote because it is a secular sacrament, an act of civic solidarity. Because it is the ultimate declaration that we are, indeed, all in this together.

From the final paragraph of this editorial in The Nation. Hat tip: truthout.

Walt Whitman on Election Day

From today's Boston Globe, by Robert Pinsky:

WALT WHITMAN'S poem celebrating Election Day calls our "quadrennial choosing" a more spectacular and powerful show than national scenic marvels such as Yosemite, Niagara Falls or the "spasmic geyserloops" of Yellowstone.

The poem is not wet or glibly sunny. Whitman chooses to speak of voting day not as beautiful or sacred but as "powerful." He compares it not to forest glades or meadows but to the fluid, dynamic energy of rivers, geysers and waterfalls and to the immense scale of mountains and prairies.

The close Cleveland-Blaine election of 1884 included personal attacks, nasty rhetoric, and religious prejudices ("Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" was a slogan). Whitman includes the imperfection with phrases like "good or ill" and "the darker odds, the dross."

The underground pressures that propel "seismic geyserloops," the "paradox and conflict" like a snowstorm of passionate opinions or "stormy gusts" - Whitman marvels at those tremendous forces. He doesn't praise the electoral process with adjectives or justify it with arguments; instead, he commends the day by invoking the past. The journeys of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln were powered by this turbulent, often defective energy, says Whitman. We can look back on his observation, over a century ago, and feel encouraged.

ROBERT PINSKY

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor Mississippi's stream:

This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen - the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd - sea-board and inland - Texas to Maine - the Prairie States - Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West - the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling - (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's): the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity - welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify - while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

Robert Pinsky, a former US poet laureate, is the author of "Gulf Music: Poems." Walt Whitman, 1819-1892, was a renowned American poet.

I heard Robert Pinsky read the poem and speak about it on "Here and Now" (great Election Day show, by the way, have a listen, to segments or to the whole show) while driving back from the local Get Out the Vote for Obama meeting-place. Thank you, National Public Radio.

More later or tomorrow on this morning's canvassing experience.

Election Day morning

Chicago was unusually warm and clear. Here in the Southland, we awoke to grey, chilly, wet weather. One of the trees in the yard to the side of my house, at the border of my neighbor's yard, is tipped in golden yellow, the leaves closest to the trunk still green. The leaves and branches are moving: there is also wind today. The fig tree outside the window of my study is nearly bare.

I am still tired from the conference and the trip, but it was good to be in my own bed last night.

Today in the cool weather I will wear a wool sweater knit for my father when he was a Marine in World War II, probably when he returned from the Marshall Islands with a wound in his foot and was in hospital in Hawaii. My father is taller and bigger than I but the sweater has shrunk from washings over the years and just fits me. The wool is tight and warm, a very dark navy blue with a small turtleneck. There is still a bit of the Red Cross label on the neck. A woman whose name we will never know knit this sweater, and perhaps others, for men she would never meet. My father recovered well and has, if I remember correctly, a 10% disability. His automobile license plate has a purple heart on it. He is proud of his service in the war. He has also been, for years, a supporter of peace, speaking out against our current wars in the local high school and giving the young 'uns his "war is hell" speech. In a memoir he wrote nearly two decades ago, he writes that you never forget the smell of death.

Father of Acts of Hope turns 90 this coming weekend, and Godde willing, I will be up in Boston with him and Mother of Acts of Hope, celebrating quietly. Today my parents are voting. My brother is watching the election from overseas. In less than an hour I will go to my neighborhood Get Out the Vote gathering, at 9 a.m. in someone's home, under the leadership of a young Obama-Biden campaign staffer, wearing my father's sweater, knit by a Red Cross volunteer whose name we will never know.

Election Day.

Brought to you by your daily ¡Sí, se puede!

Activated till the polls close on November 4.

Election Day: perspective from the Prayer Book

From this morning's online Daily Office, one of the collects:

God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For the whole human family, we pray.

Back in Greensboro, Election Eve

Intense conference (but good, very good), smooth flight back from Chicago, turning in soon. On the 9 a.m. Get Out The Vote shift tomorrow.

As I expected, Miss Maya Pavlova gave me The Speech when I got home. She has now eaten one and a half helpings of Newman's Own dry cat food (the cat sitter only came once a day, through yesterday) and when I turned on the Daily Show a few minutes ago and stood watching it in the living room, Her Grace jumped from the floor onto my shoulders. I kid you not.

More when I can. (It may be a while.) Vote.

Two wonderful men

One live, one gone to the ancestors.

The live one is Gustavo Gutiérrez, whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak today.

The deceased one is Studs Terkel, who I hear died yesterday, and here we are in his city of Chicago.

I will write more about both of these men, but probably not while I am at the conference, which predictably is busy. I am taking some introvert time tonight between receptions and after the second one (for which I am about to leave) but otherwise this is a people-intense experience and a workout for the brain.

I opened my big mouth at the Society for the Study of Anglicanism meeting and now someone wants me to write an article.

That's the update. Blessings, all. Happy Feast of All Saints.

P.S. Yes, we can.

A day late but not too late: No on 8

P.S. Missed the blogswarm yesterday, since it was my 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. work day, but dear Californians, please vote no on 8. Let people love each other, for goodness' sake.

And preserve their human and civil rights.

Here's a link to Fran's post and another to Paul's.

Second City bound

Remember last November? The American Academy of Religion (AAR), just before its split from the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (rumor has it the two Annual Meetings are going to get back together, but I digress), was at the two societies' joint conference, just before Thanksgiving, in San Diego. I was a little wacked out from jet lag and culture shock, having just returned from another conference in Belgium with a side trip to Paris, or maybe Belgium was the side trip and Paris was the main course; they were both wonderful.

At the San Diego meeting my colleague Eric and I were interviewing candidates, sixteen of them as I recall, for the soon to be vacant position in our department (and eventually, in the spring, hired Parveen, our new colleague who arrived two and a half months ago) and the conference was half consumed with that work. It was tiring. I also was a respondent to a paper and attended a few other sessions besides the one at which I was a respondent. It's like going to school for three days, except that last year I couldn't do as much learning as usual due to our being "in a search," as they say in academe. I did manage to have a meal or two with friends.

This fall the two professional societies are meeting separately and at different times in November, and I am only going to one of those conferences, the AAR one, which is in Chicago this year. It begins this weekend. I head for Chicago later today, after my late afternoon class, because I have a pre-conference meeting tomorrow and also because I want to make sure I get to the Art Institute, which is very close to the hotel. Girl with no social life and a big culture deficit finally gets a break.

It's especially nice to see some of my friends and colleagues from the West Coast. I'll be seeing some from California and Oregon this year, and also some folks from the U.K. and a colleague from Mexico I haven't seen in years.

My publisher is throwing me a little party Sunday night in honor of the book's release; Chicago folks or people with Chicago peeps (ahoy Dennis) write me at widsauthor at earthlink dot net, and I can have Amanda The Publicist contact them with the info.

Monday morning I am presenting a paper (my first one at the AAR, I have only given responses to other people's papers thus far, the competition can be stiff to get a paper accepted) in the morning. Have I finished writing it yet? Of course not. The title of the paper is pretty sexy, but if I write it here MadPriest will mock me (he had a field day with this last year) so perhaps I'll just write it in the Comments section below.

In the afternoon I am presiding at a session where other people are giving papers. It's not as glamorous as it sounds: I get to be the timekeeper and hold up little signs saying "TWO MINUTES" and I facilitate the discussion after everyone has presented.

Then I fly back to Greensboro, and Godde and the airlines willing, get in not too late, get a good night's sleep, and get up Election Day and volunteer for the Obama campaign until it's time to teach my afternoon class. Yes we can.

5 days.

Brought to you by your daily ¡Sí, se puede!

Activated till the polls close on November 4.


Photo: Camel and Rider, Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.), China, 1st half of 8th century. Permanent Collection, Art Institute, Chicago.

This bears repeating: yes, we can.

An oldish video by now (over a million hits on YouTube), but it's a good day for a replay.

Here.

Thanks to my friend Paul, the Byzigenous Buddhapalian, for the reminder, and for being a man who does not shy away from tears.


6 days.

Brought to you by your daily ¡Sí, se puede!

Activated till the polls close on November 4.

Making a book, cont'd (and Chicago party reminder)

Lest you think all we do here is self-promotion, let me note that we also promote our family and our friends. And our favorite presidential candidate. All in one day, in this case.

We are, however, back in the land of shameless self-promotion -- or rather, book promotion.

When we last checked in with the new paperback edition of When in Doubt, Sing (a.k.a. WIDS), we got a look at the inside of the book, i.e. the printed pages. Now we get a look at the cover. And at the whole book, though it is still in process. Click on photos to enlarge and see detail.

The press is in Indiana, as are the publishing offices. Ave Maria Press (under whose imprint, Sorin Books, WIDS is being published) has its roots in the Ave Maria magazine, begun by the same Holy Cross priest, Edward Sorin, who founded the University of Notre Dame. Sorin, in an unusual move for his day, handed over the reins to Sister Angela Gilespie, a nurse veteran of the Civil War, who ran the magazine for many years.

This is binderyman Mike Doll.

Bonus photo (with Mike in the background) for people who like machines and mechanical things.

Tom the Publisher writes:

It's a real book! At least we have a few samples. By the end of the day the whole run should be complete. The first step is to fill (and refill) the pockets with the 15 32-page signatures [note from Jane: a signature is a stack of pages] of the book. (It's a big book!) Then the signatures are gathered together and wrapped in the cover. Heat is applied to secure the glue. Then the book blocks are stacked on pallets awaiting the final step, which is to trim the excess from three sides of the book.

This is Amanda Williams, otherwise known as Publicist of Acts of Hope and Amanda the Publicist. She visits this blog now and again, and she is organizing the Chicago book party. See below on this post for info on the party.

Great photo of Amanda the Publicist with WIDS.

Where, oh where, is a photo of Publisher of Acts of Hope? Once again, thanks to Ave Maria Press Publisher and President Tom Grady, who is modestly hiding off-camera, but who is bringing you this series of pictures, and the book.

When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life

by Jane Redmont

Coming November 1, All Saints' Day!

As previously noted on this blog, there are contact people for sales, promotion and author appearances. See here.

Reminder: There will be a book party at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Chicago, next Sunday night. That's November 3. Contact us if you live in Chicagoland or are planning to be in town for the AAR and you want to come. It's a wine and cheese sort of thing. With books, of course, and yours truly, and Amanda the Publicist (Tom the Publisher has a family commitment and cannot be there) and friends from hither and yon.

Contact Amanda Williams, Publicist at 800-282-1865 x206 or Awilli21 at nd dot edu.

You can also write me at widsauthor at earthlink dot net.

Yes, there will be a party in Greensboro, later in the fall or early winter, and probably something in Boston, too. Any excuse for a party is good.

The book is up on Amazon.com (with a discount!), but you can also support your local independent bookstore and order it from there.

I hope the book is helpful to you. I wrote it to help people to pray. I welcome your feedback. And yes, I do travel and give talks and facilitate retreats.

Here endeth the promotion message.

Photos: Ave Maria Press. Click on photos to enlarge.