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Showing posts from May 7, 2006

Spirit
Curtis White's invitation to resistance

Living the busy blogstress life, your cybertrix is prone to fall behind on her reading, as she did over the course of the last month -- which explains why, today, she offers her devotees a glimmer from a most fascinating essay that appeared in the April issue of Harper's magazine. Curtis White , a professor at Illinois State University, uses the forum to call for, in exceptionally beautiful prose, a movement of civil disobedience that would manifest itself at the most personal and individual level. Yet, in order to make his case, White jumps off from a profound question and then exposes it as one that can only lead to untrue answers: Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture? No one gets off easy in White's treatise (except, perhaps, Henry David Thoreau) as he asks the following: Do Democrats really imagine that they can articulate a compelling moral vision for the United States or for the democratic West without a spiritual foundation? ...[D]o Democrats