nobody but the baby

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Christians For Comprehensive Immigration Reform

I can't come up with a single reason why any thinking Christian would not get on board with this effort.

Check it out here.

CCIR is a coalition of Christian organizations, churches, and leaders from across the theological and political spectrum, united in support of comprehensive U.S. immigration reform. We are working together to see fair and humane immigration reform enacted in Congress this year because we share a set of common moral and theological principles that compel us to love, care for, and seek justice for the stranger among us.

We call for an end to the unproductive, divisive, and fear-driven anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media, which has often castigated all immigrants, regardless of citizenship status, and derailed attempts at true reform. As Christian leaders who share the biblical values named below, we commit to fostering civil dialogue on immigration in our churches and in our communities. We call on President Barack Obama to provide the leadership necessary to move from the hateful rhetoric that has often characterized this national debate to action that will fix our broken immigration system. We look forward to working alongside the president to lead a new national conversation on immigration policy that reflects the best of our moral and civic values.

We stand together in calling on President Obama and Congress to make humane and holistic immigration reform a top priority in 2009.

"Fictions on the Ground": Tony Judt on Settlements

I have recently taken great pleasure in reading Tony Judt's book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century. Perceptive, witty, clear-eyed, and careful, his essays are doorways into intellectual and social worlds that he rightly argues have been too quickly forgotten in our mini-epoch bracketed by the Berlin Wall and Boyle's Law. 

Judt published an article in the New York Times this week on the thuggish criminality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and America's irreducible role in supporting them. It is a short piece, and better not excerpted. Read it here.

Take Me To The Water (DTD-13)

Whenever Dust To Digital puts out a new release, you should rejoice. They are unfailingly great. Sometimes, as in the case of Goodbye, Babylon, they are among the finest collections of music that you will ever purchase, bar none.

Last week, the latest DTD release, Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950 hit the shelves. It does not disappoint. A couple of reviews have noted that this is like Volume 7 of Goodbye, Babylon. As your attorney, I advise you to check it out right away. Watch the video below or find out more here. 

Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

robyn mary hutchinson // umm mohammed

Ms Hutchinson did not become a Muslim and go to Afghanistan because she wanted to blow up Americans or Jews. She went because she was searching for the perfect Islamic state, something she thought the Taliban might offer her. Ms Neighbour interviewed Ms Hutchinson once or twice a week over a period of 18 months. She found no evidence that she engaged in terrorism; nor, it seems, did the Australian authorities.

Ms Hutchinson escaped from Afghanistan with her children after the American-led invasion in October 2002. She returned to Sydney where she is watched closely by Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, and, Ms Neighbour writes, has become “a virtual prisoner in her home”. It appears that Ms Hutchinson is being punished for her religious views and her associations.

The above paragraphs are the conclusion of a review in The Economist of The Mother of Mohammed: An Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad by Sally Neighbor. The interesting part for me is the inherent trouble with the pursuits of utopia, as well as Western fears of such.

Read the whole thing here.

Amen Break

Awesome video about the future history of six seconds of funk. All who knew a nineties junglist should definitely inquire.

Cornel West in Rolling Stone

Click here to read a Rolling Stone feature article by Jeff Sharlet on Cornel West, a man that I am blessed to have as a professor. 

jay bennett RIP

i believe darius rucker has done something cool.

hold on (ten below and falling)

Down by the riverside motel, Its 10 below and falling // 

By a 99 cent store she closed her eyes and started swaying //

But its so hard to dance that way, when its cold and theres no music //

Well your old hometown is so far away but inside your head theres a record playing //

a song called //

Hold on, hold on, you really got to hold on //

Take my hand, I'm standing right here and just hold on. //

listen here

the round home

kathy has been away for a couple of weeks on a Love146 trip, traveling to the philippines for the opening of "the round home," the new Love146 safehome.

it is pretty awesome. check out the videos below.