try to praise the mutilated world

(you must praise the mutilated world.)

[Last weekend, my brother and I had a conversation about Jodi O’Brien’s experience with Marquette, and I told him that if he wrote up his thoughts, I’d be happy to put them here. Now that he has, I’m even happier to: they’re well-considered, focused, and well expressed, which is why you should read this. But mostly you should read it because it’s important.

The following is a guest blog by Conor Mahoney:]

The Marquette University Faculty Handbook states:

(a) The teacher is entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of results, subject to the adequate performance of his/her other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

When I think of the purpose of a university, I often think it is two-fold: to teach students to think intellectually and intelligently and to be an institution of ongoing learning and research. At least, as a student at a Jesuit school, it is my understanding that the intellectual practice of research is integral to not only obtaining a good education but to the fundamental beliefs on which education is built. Time and again, we learn the lessons of Galileo’s struggle and the Church’s persecution of him as a result of his beliefs. We are taught that the lack of scientific freedom at the time was a tragedy. But does the line stop with the hard sciences? Is academic freedom less important in sociology, political science, and anthropology? Are they subjects we can study, but without deserving the same respect and freedom in findings the “hard” sciences, with their scientific method and fancy tools, command?

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“He told me “Being sustainable is living like you give a damn about the future.”

from Wendy Joan’s Eat Media op-ed, “Sustainable Journalism and the Next Generation of Writers”

I like this piece, but this statement is wrong. Being sustainable is simpler to measure and more complicated to do: it’s just fucking surviving for a long time.* Valuing sustainability is living like you give a damn about the future—tomorrow, next week, next year, and next decade.

*The trick is that it means surviving beyond tomorrow, which means you can’t use up all the stuff you’re gonna need next week. So often we treat survival (I’m thinking of the “think of the business interests!” politicians here) as a just-make-it-another-day thing, but surviving doesn’t have an end date, so it doesn’t count as surviving if we all die out in 50 years or keep losing people to climate-change-related natural disasters.

“Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.” Douglas Adams

from a week or two ago.

from a week or two ago.

RE: this:

1. Jodi O’Brien is a brilliant, challenging, and damn good professor, thinker, and person. She is funny, no-nonsense, compassionate, and memorable.

2. In class, she pointed out that “gay marriage” as it’s currently discussed gives her major pause, not because the privileges of marriage shouldn’t be extended to gay people or because of theological reasons, but because it might be a shame to extend the limitations of heteronormative marriage into the gay community through the legal structures that have shaped “straight” marriage. For instance, she pointed out, many relationships within the gay community are more complicated and pluralistic, creating support systems and family structures that are caring and functional for more than two people. If marriage is a flawed system, she asked, are we sure we just want to make it bigger? Couldn’t we back up a little and make it better in the process—make it possible to think about families and relationships as wider, more inclusive units?

3. In her class, I learned these terms: heteronormativity. gender performance. These are words that organize my thinking.

4. In my six years of Jesuit schooling, I gained a lot of respect for the Jesuits I knew—and I heard this prayer many, many times over the school loudspeaker during morning prayer:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

The Jesuits liked this one: it reflected (for highschoolers’ consumption) the principles of Ignatian discernment, while also handily supporting “social justice” and mildly attempting to quell the Quixotic zeal of the listening adolescents.

5. The Jesuits I’ve known were not afraid of the Church, not afraid to speak out and say what they believed was right according to their own examination of faith and their own understanding of God.

6. Hey, Jesuits, you’re dropping the ball: this is one you can change, if you only have the courage and the wisdom. This, here: this is that social justice you were talking about.


Marquette Withdraws Job Offer To Lesbian Dean Candidate Jodi O'Brien

I took Jodi O’Brien’s Sexual Politics class in my last quarter at Seattle U. We covered basic feminism, sex work, gay marriage, and more—but mostly, she demanded that we deal with gender theory. In that class, I had to think about what it meant to be female, to be feminine, to be a person in a heteronormative world. She made us think about the concept and the realities of sex work, about the ideal and the limitations of gay marriage. She made us buy lesbian pulp fiction. She told us that nothing kills an academic career faster than romance.

She wasn’t closeted, and she straightforwardly challenged our concepts of gender and family and sex. She was, without a doubt, one of the best professors I’ve had, and her class shaped how I think about gender about everything.


last weekend

last weekend


via atfrageelay

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile…

(via Frageelaytwit)

reblogged from atfrageelay

“I first wrote a popular short free ebook about this seven years ago and the problem hasn’t gone away. So much for the power of the idea.”

Seth Godin, in a moment of stunning narcissism and historical blindness.

I’ve thought this before, reading Dickens on poverty—Alcott on gender—Douglass on racism—but not particularly when reading Seth Godin on marketing. “I wrote about this seven years ago…the problem hasn’t gone away. So much for the power of the idea.” What spectacular lack of perspective.