Pastor Calls for More Sex; Celebrity “Rehab”?

I’ve been websurfing a bit this morning, and I can’t limit myself to citing just one article.  So here are a number of especially compelling pieces for you to check out:

1.  Stanley Fish just wrote an interesting piece on academic freedom for the New York Times.  Quick excerpt: “Indeed, to emphasize the “personal” is to mistake the nature of academic freedom, which belongs, Finkin and Post declare, to the enterprise, not to the individual. If academic freedom were “reconceptualized as an individual right,” it would make no sense — why should workers in this enterprise have enlarged rights denied to others? — and support for it “would vanish” because that support, insofar as it exists, is for the project and its promise (the production of new knowledge) and not for those who labor within it. Academics do not have a general liberty, only “the liberty to practice the scholarly profession” and that liberty is hedged about by professional norms and responsibilities.”

2.  The New Yorker covers the strange phenomenon that is luxurious celebrity rehab.  “Rehab” seems to end up looking a lot like “vacation”–or is it just me?  That aside, it is startling to see how painfully these people feel.  They talk about the “Beast,” the force that drives them to use drugs, but they are so far from recognizing the true beast.

3.  Interesting article on the power of Google.  It’s especially interesting to see people like the author, one who “tuned out” from mainstream media and culture in the 60s, embrace the technological revolution of our era.  Colors all those psychedelic pictures from Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane concerts, doesn’t it?  Little did those people know that they would be participating in just a few short decades in the most powerful capitalist market the world has ever seen.  Idealism, you old dog, you die a hard death.

4.  The Times looks into one pastor’s call for “congregational copulation.”  You know, we come off looking pretty weird in this one, and I’m not sure that I would do the same, but how weird are evangelicals, really, in a world that can’t sell anything–chapstick, gum, music, books, you name it–without reference to sex?

I’m not sure what posting will look like this week, but these should tide you over for the time being.