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<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Guess where I was last night?<\/p>\n After the movie, a couple girls asked to take a picture with me and then said, \u201cAre you a student at Georgetown, too?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNope!\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m an adult!\u201d<\/p>\n And this is what adults do:<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In other fictional universe news, I tend to recommend Diane Duane\u2019s\u00a0Young Wizard<\/em> series<\/a> fairly often on this blog (well, at least books 1-6 in the series), so I thought I should tip you all off that Duane is doing a special, half-price sale of the ebook versions of her series<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In other book recommendation news, Rosamund Hodge\u2019s\u00a0Crimson Bound<\/em><\/a> comes out next week (I discussed it a couple weeks ago on my radio show<\/a>). \u00a0In the run-up, she\u2019s been doing some great blog posts. \u00a0Her sister (at DarwinCatholic) has a roundup + a giveaway<\/a>. \u00a0Here\u2019s an excerpt from one I particularly liked<\/a>, on the significance of the elaborate court makeup the main character sometimes wears:<\/p>\n I found that I felt better when I wore makeup. Not just prettier, but like I was more in control of my life. Like I mattered.<\/p>\n I\u2019d always thought of makeup as being something you did because you wanted to look pretty. And I really, really wanted to be pretty, so I really wanted to wear makeup. But what I learned in Oxford is that makeup can also be a way of saying that you matter. It can be a way of saying: I\u00a0deserve<\/em>\u00a0to look pretty. I deserve to be taken care of. I am precious and my body is precious and I deserve to spend time perfecting my mascara technique.<\/p>\n Crimson\u00a0Bound<\/em>\u00a0is a novel that deals a lot with self-hatred. The heroine, Rachelle, killed somebody to save her own life and has never been able to forgive herself for it\u2013because that killing also gave her supernatural badass powers, so she\u2019s still benefitting from it. She feels completely unworthy of being alive, let alone loved or happy or pretty. Her only lifeline is her friendship with Am\u00e9lie, a girl who dreams of being a makeup artist and likes to practice on her.\u00a0 And it\u2019s through Am\u00e9lie\u2019s cosmetics that Rachelle is first able to imagine what it might feel like to be worth loving again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n While we\u2019re discussing new takes on old stories, Noah Millman of\u00a0AmCon<\/em>, has a really interesting review of a\u00a0Hamlet<\/em> that cut the ghost from the play<\/a>:<\/p>\n Now, given that the entire play revolves around Hamlet\u2019s response to the ghost\u2019s information and the ghost\u2019s command, this would seem to be a pretty risky choice. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the promise in it, as a way of simplifying and psychologizing a play that can wander off into the philosophical and theological weeds. Not that those weeds aren\u2019t really interesting \u2013 they most certainly are \u2013 but I find them\u00a0more interesting to study<\/a>\u00a0than they are practical to explore on stage.<\/p>\n If we never see or hear the ghost, and neither do the other characters, then we don\u2019t know whether it is even real, or a figment of Hamlet\u2019s imagination \u2013 or even Hamlet\u2019s excuse for his increasingly wild behavior, a part of his \u201cantic disposition\u201d act (if it is an act). From being a meditation on the inability to act, the play would become a story about the kinds of stories we have to tell ourselves in order to overcome our scruples about revenge. Indeed, Claudius, in such a reading of the play, might not be guilty at all \u2013 at least not of murder \u2013 and Hamlet\u2019s wildness may in fact make a mortal enemy of a man who was entirely sincere in wanting to be a surrogate father. The result might be less Shakespearean \u2013 but it might be more, well, Scandinavian.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a group of activists is forcing others to see a ghost. \u00a0They restaged the murder of a woman accused of burning a Quran<\/a> in the streets where she was killed:<\/p>\n They killed Farkhunda again, but this time there were tears in the crowd rather than cheers.<\/p>\n Men pummeled her with rocks and paving stones, knocked her down, kicked her, ripped her head scarf off, all the while shouting religious slogans and denouncing her as a blasphemer. Blood tangled her hair and made a red mask of her bruised face.<\/p>\n Since it was a re-enactment of\u00a0the real crime<\/a>, the mob of men outside a mosque in central Kabul on Monday skipped some of the specifics \u2014 the parts where the actual attackers had dragged Farkhunda behind a car, or tossed her off a bridge, among other acts. But they did douse the actress Leena Alam, who was playing Farkhunda, in a liquid meant to symbolize gasoline, and buried her in a pile of ashes.<\/p>\n There were even real policemen present, doing what their colleagues had done on March 19 in the same place: standing aside. Some of them, however, were seen to be teary-eyed this time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Pedro Paulo Oliveira Jr. (a name you may recognize from the comments here!) has an essay at\u00a0Ethika Politika<\/em> on what exactly we mean by \u201cneighbor\u201d in \u201clove thy neighbor\u201d<\/a> and how that word has different inflections in other languages:<\/p>\n A cornerstone of Christian doctrine is the commandment to love one another. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the\u00a0mandatum novum do vobis<\/i>\u00a0summarize the nature of\u00a0caritas<\/i>. Jesus begins the Good Samaritan\u2019s parable answering a question:\u00a0Et quis est meus proximus?<\/i>, translated in the USCCB version as: \u201cAnd who is my neighbor?\u201d<\/p>\n Neighbor is used as a translation of the Latin word\u00a0proximus<\/i>, which ispr\u00f3jimo<\/i>\u00a0in Spanish and\u00a0pr\u00f3ximo<\/i>\u00a0in Portuguese. In all romance languages there is another word for neighbor (Spanish:\u00a0vecino<\/i>, Portuguese:\u00a0vizinho<\/i>, French:\u00a0voisin<\/i>) used only to describe the person who lives close to us.<\/p>\n Thus\u00a0proximus<\/i>\u00a0is a word employed to describe not only physical but rather spiritual neighborhood. I\u2019m neither the\u00a0vizinho<\/i>\u00a0of the reader nor his friend, as we don\u2019t have a close relationship, but I could say that the bond created by reading this article makes me his\u00a0proximus<\/i>, at least more\u00a0proximus<\/i>\u00a0than someone who\u2019s never heard about me. This is not to say that the use of \u201cneighbor\u201d as a translation for\u00a0proximus<\/i>\u00a0is a na\u00efve choice; it\u2019s just that by collapsing the spiritual neighborhood with the physical one the language loses punch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, remember how you\u2019re supposed to put on your own air mask before helping your neighbor? \u00a0io9 has an explainer of where the oxygen in your masks comes from<\/a> (I falsely believed it was in big gas canisters somewhere!)<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\n