Recently in the Religion Category

A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region.

"Of Faith and Kristallnacht," a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among others. 7 p.m., Wednesday, The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Monroeville (412-421-1500).

"The Use of Comic Books in Teaching the Holocaust," a lecture by Beverly Harris-Schenz of the University of Pittsburgh German Department, on teaching the Holocaust to German students. 8 p.m., Thursday, Jewish Community Center (412-421-1500).

"Brundibar," a children's opera originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp, adapted by Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. Friday through next Sunday, CAPA Theater, Downtown (412-456-6666).

--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Here's a surprising statement I found in a news article, quoting a Yale psychology professor.

"Moms vary markedly in their roles as breadwinners from no income at all to really helping dads,"

The language implies that money-making is the father's responsibility, and the best rating on the scale that a woman can achieve is "helping" a man. While I recognize that the professor was very likely speaking in the context of roles within the family unit, presuming that the family includes both a mom and a dad whose achievements can be measured and compared meaningfully, Larry Summers was resoundingly skewered for making an off-the-cuff statement acknowledging the existence of the position that men have a biological advantage over women when it comes to math.

Oh, whoops, I double-checked that quote from the university professor.  That's not what he said. Here's what he REALLY said (emphasis added):

"Dads vary markedly in their roles as caretakers from not there at all to really helping moms," Kazdin said. (MSNBC.com)

Again, I recognize that Kazdin was answering a reporter's questions, speaking without notes or a chance to revise.  But I'm sure that any professor who made the first statement (ghettoizing breadwinning women into the role of spousal "helpers") would have caught some well-deserved flak.

Can you spot the double-standard?

Spill-chuck rares it's ulgy heed.

The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' General Conference, and it referred to the group's "Quorum of Twelve Apostates" rather than "Apostles." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

I'm sitting with my laptop in the hallway, guarding the kids' bedrooms, One has already tried to sneak out to watch for St. Nick (I had to put a stuffed snake along the crack under the door to keep her from peeking... I'm sure she'll fall asleep on the floor, trying to peer under the door), and the other is still stirring in his bed.

A couple hours ago, I had them burn a little energy off by jumping in front of the Christmas tree. (The shot I took of Carolyn last year came out nice, so I thought we'd try again.)

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has cooperated with a game developer to produce a Second Life memorial to Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass," a series of state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots in 1938).

I haven't visited the site yet, but it looks like there's a deliberate attempt to distance the player from the experience, by casting the player in the role of a journalist who investigates a site after the pogroms have taken place.

Involve CEO Drew Stein says the project was a labor of love that Involve executed at cost with contributions mostly from its senior developers and partners. He sees it as an evolution of work that began 15 years ago in museums experimenting wiht large-scale environmental graphics, only now the environment and the graphics are virtual.  The 3D, immersive nature, though, provides a more visceral experience, he says.

"That's one of the things we learned from the kids we worked with a year ago. There's a different sense of reality," agreed Kevlan. "That's one of the things we're hoping for that the folks that come through will not only learn more about history, but absorb it differently. When you go through the streets and see the kiosk or the newspapers hanging on windows, you absorb it. The thing for us is to how to do this without trivializing it or making it feel gamelike. You don't want them to feel like they were there, because they weren't, but that they'll know something more."

Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world.

Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room.

Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal's creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims. --BBC (via)

"The message behind every movie and book, behind every theme park and T-shirt is that our children's world needs Disney," he says.

"So they absolutely must go to see the next Disney movie, which we'll also want to give them on DVD as a birthday present.

"They will be happier if they live the full Disney experience; and thousands of families around the world buy into this deeper message as they flock to Disneyland."

He continues: "This is the new pilgrimage that children desire, a rite of passage into the meaning of life according to Disney.

"Where once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products." -- Telegraph

A few years ago I prepared a "Disney World View" course, but I haven't taught it yet. I'm just blogging this in case I get the chance to offer it again.

And then there was light -- and it was powered by the sun. The Vatican on Wednesday activated a new solar energy system and announced an ambitious plan that could one day make it an alternative energy exporter.

The massive roof of the "Nervi Hall" where popes hold general audiences and concerts are performed, has been covered with 2,400 photovoltaic panels to provide energy for lighting, heat and air conditioning.

After weeks of tests, the system went on line at full throttle hours before Pope Benedict held what officials called the "first ecological general audience in the Vatican." (Reuters)

Great little feature from the Chronicle

Here are some of the things you learn when you participate in a Milton marathon:

1. Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings' archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material. "It's a really cool story, which I wasn't expecting," said Anna Coffey, a sophomore who took part in the reading to get a jump on her homework for a "Great Conversations" core-curriculum course.
2. Milton is not that hard to read out loud. As Mr. DuRocher pointed out in a set of "Guidelines for Reciting" he handed out before the marathon, "Paradise Lost is written in modern English." Compared with Beowulf, Paradise Lost is a walk in the park.
3. Milton is really hard to read out loud. Very few people get words like "puissance" right on the first try. Milton loved a runaway sentence and just about any now-obscure classical or geographical reference he could get his hands on, many of them polysyllabic nightmares. Partway through Book VI, Mr. DuRocher offered advice to the tongue-tied. "Whenever you encounter a word you don't know, that's a word to pronounce with special certainty," he said. "It's probably best to mispronounce demonic names anyway."
4. It's worth it. "It's really a good poem," said Mr. Goodroad. "It's a lot better to hear it than to read it."

On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938, Fritz Ottenheimer was awakened by an explosion that shook
his bed.

Ottenheimer was just 13 then -- a boy living in Konstanz, Germany. And he was a Jew. -- Jennifer Reeger, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Last night, my son and I attended Seton Hill's Kristallnacht memorial service. It's generally a good sign when they start running out of programs and ask people in the audience to share. I've never before seen such a crowd for this program. (I understand the men's and women's basketball teams showed up en masse.)

During the service, I was saddened to hear of the recent death of Jack Sittsamer, a Holocaust survivor whose life was the basis of the play Mazel (which I saw with my son at SHU a few years ago).

If my old shoebox of Meego Star Trek action figures turns up, I'll consider myself very happy. Seton Hill's librarian, David Stanley, reports an even more significant historical find. From the Reeves Library blog.

Kelly Addleman, our public services librarian, received an email from a researcher in Germany who has been making a survey of the illumination appearing in early bibles published by Anton Koberger. Well, it turns out that we have one in our possession. We own a Biblia Latina which was published in 1478. The illuminations are so beautiful that I thought I would share some with you. I am also including a letter that establishes its provenance.

I've cropped part of the letter (apparently written about 60 years ago).  Click the image for a slight enlargement, or see the full original.

From an article I published in 1997, back when I thought I was pretty hot stuff to include postage-stamp-sized video clips on a website. The website also featured a Java simulation of the outdoor pageant that celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi (which is today).

The outdoor theatrical event in the medieval city of York, England, known to its performers and audiences as the "Corpus Christi Play," is a collection of brief religious plays that together represent the story of Christian salvation. The York cycle is one of four that have survived in more or less complete form. The others are known as Chester, Wakefield, (after the cities where they were performed) and N-Town (now identified with no known city, but formerly identified as Townley). The York cycle was performed nearly every year, on the feast of Corpus Christi (Latin for the Body of Christ). The plays were already an established tradition in the late 14th century, and they continued in one form or other (weakened by Protestant censorship) until the mid-to-late 16th century.

According to Bloomberg, the Vatican has announced a new list of "social sins." Consistent with much of the church's social teachings in the modern age, the list is an interesting mix of traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.  It seems to me that 6 and 7 are already contained in 5, but the Bloomberg article didn't link to any further readings  in English.

1. ``Bioethical' violations such as birth control

2. ``Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

From the AP:

Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago.

AP:

A baby Jesus statue here is getting a Global Positioning System for Christmas. The statue, part of a nativity scene, will be equipped with the device after the previous statue went missing, even though it had been bolted down. "I don't anticipate this will ever happen again," said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display, "but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior."

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Patti Dobranski, Tribune-Review

"The secret state police were at the door. They came to arrest my father. On Nov. 9, at 8:30 p.m., I lost my German citizenship. I said 'Let's get out of this hellish country.' I just wanted to go somewhere else."

But Nov. 9, 1938, was more than Blaustein's personal hell. It would become known as "Kristallnacht" or "The Night of Broken Glass," full of screams of despair as the Nazis began their attack on the Jews by burning synagogues and looting homes and businesses. This night would mark the beginning of the end of 6 million Jews across Europe at the hands of the Hitler's Nazis.

The 81-year-old Mt. Lebanon, Allegheny County, resident told his story Tuesday night to a crowd that gathered inside St. Joseph Chapel at Seton Hill University for the 19th annual Kristallnacht Remembrance service sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

I was in the back of the room, where the acoustics were not very good, so I was glad to find this account of Blaustein's speech.

In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention:

In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities' Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with an adviser charged by the administration to actively screen all content), to an educational model (with an adviser that helps guide content but with student editors making nearly all of the decisions), to complete independence. "Whatever the rules are, know what they are," Mattingly advised the students in the audience, stressing the need to know how the rules apply when it comes down to the "moment it's a really bad story -- which at Christian colleges means sex, drugs or donors."

The student paper at Seton Hill follows the educational model. If the paper got into the habit of publishing shoddily-written and poorly-researched attacks on the administration, my role would be to correct the shoddy journalism, rather than adjust the anti-administrative slant. I'd be just as critical of students who turned the paper into a cheerleading section, if they were too timid to go after the hard news stories that might make some groups on campus unhappy. 

Good journalism will sometimes make certain groups unhappy, and those groups can and will complain, which is why I tell my students their research has to hold up under scrutiny. Because Seton Hill is a private institution, articles the Setonian publishes are not protected by the First Amendment.  But as long as a contested story is fair -- for instance, student gripes are presented alongside official responses, and the story does not include libel or a violation of privacy rights -- then a request to remove or censor a story becomes an issue of academic freedom. I cannot teach journalism unless students have the freedom to make their own editorial judgments. On the few occasions when SHU employees have panicked and asked me to intervene and remove or prevent a story, the academic dean has been very supportive of my position.

New York Times:

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo -- despite its "thou shalt kill" credo -- celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Wired teases a bit, so that the ending is actually kind of anti-climactic, but it's a wonderfully geeky puzzle.

From ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the surface of the Earth, the qibla (an Arabic word meaning the direction a Muslim should pray toward Mecca) changes from second to second. During some parts of the space station's orbit, the qibla can move nearly 180 degrees during the course of a single prayer. What's a devout Muslim to do?

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus' letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

[...]

Why does Charlie Brown tear himself into knots over the little red-haired girl? The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be; he must take ownership of his failure. When she is the victim of a bully in the school yard, Charlie Brown's despair threatens to leap right off the comic page. He isn't suffering because he can't help her, but because he could help her, but won't: "Why can't I rush over there and save her? Because I'd get slaughtered, that's why..." When Linus helps her out instead, thereby illustrating his freedom of action, Charlie Brown only becomes more melancholic. --Nathan Radke --Sartre & Peanuts (Philosophy Now)

Of course, Charlie Brown does keep trying to kick the football, so he is not completely immobilized. He is also the manager and pitcher of a hopeless baseball team, but he (and his teammates) keep playing anyway. Radke interprets these incidents as a sign of disconnectedness with the past, and the possibility of change.

Lucy's own psychological problems make her a fairly suspect voice of reason in her role as Charlie Brown's therapist. But in Schroeder's veneration of Beethoven, we do see a largely positive representation of humanist faith.

The filmmakers hope that "Paradise Lost" will prove enticing to Christian audiences. Mr. Hazeldine said he read "several theological tomes" because "I'm adapting Milton, and then Milton's kind of adapting Genesis, and I wanted to make sure that for the faith audience, I guess, that they will see it more as 'The Passion of the Christ' than 'The Last Temptation of Christ' " -- that is, more a reverent treatment of Biblical material than a reconsideration. Both he and Mr. Derrickson said they are Christians, as are Mr. Newman and the script's original writers. Even so, Mr. Newman said the film is not "a Christian endeavor or Christian movie."

But he added that it would be "made with total adherence and respect to any of the three religions' involvement in the story of God, the Devil and the archangels," referring to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. But "it's a war movie at the end of the day," Mr. Newman said.

As a Christian, Mr. Hazeldine said, the project poses "a challenge for people like Scott and I, who have a faith, but we just love movies." He added, "We often find that we are wondering, are we too worldly for the church and too churchy for the world?" --It's God vs. Satan. But What About the Nudity? (NY Times)

I loved this correction notice at the bottom of the page: "A picture on March 4 with an article about a screenplay of 'Paradise Lost' was printed upside down. The rebel angels should have appeared in the lower half of the illustration by Gustave Doré, which was inverted by Art Resource." Somehow, that doesn't seem like a good sign.

Via Kelo the Great.

Sony Corp. apologized Friday to the Church of England for a violent computer game that features a bloody shootout inside an Anglican cathedral. --Jill Lawless --Sony: Sorry for Cathedral Shootout Game (Brietbart)

News emerged over the weekend that Church authorities have complained to Sony about the depiction of Manchester Cathedral in the game. Some reports have stated that the Church may pursue legal action against the company.

But according to Alex Chapman of Campbell Hooper solicitors,"The Church will have an uphill battle in a legal claim against Sony, and indeed it is likely that there is no basis for a claim." --Church will face ''uphill battle'' if suing Sony, says legal expert (Games Industry Biz)

I've been following this story about Resistance: The Fall of Man.

I'm reminded of when sculptor Frederick Hart was surprised to discover that that a copy of a sculpture he had created for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was featured for about 20 minutes in the movie Devil's Advocate, and that the filmmakers had actually animated the sculpture to turn it into what the Anglican church leaders called a distortion of a religious sculpture.

Sony was forced to re-edit the film before they could release it on DVD and video (after agreeing to put disclaimer stickers on the copies of the movie that had already been produced).

The National Cathedral case involved a living artist, who still owned the copyright to a work that was commissioned for a religious purpose. The Manchester Cathedral case probably doesn't involve much recently-produced art, and the leaders object to the fact that the digital re-creation of the church is the setting for a gunfight.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media represent the Manchester case, since it involves a video game. (We've already seen that even the very edgy indie Slamdance Film Festival is not a safe place for envelope-pushing videogames.)

"In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth." --Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)

I had signed up for his course on American Pragmatism, for what would have been my fourth semester in the MA program at the University of Virginia. But I finished my degree after my third semester and withdrew from all my U.Va. classes in order to work full-time.

As a tender young MA student, I found Rorty's philosophy a bit hollow, and his relativism too far along the slippery slope of postmodernism. He was the respondent when Fredric Crews gave a lecture on Christian Humanism. I learned quite a bit about the profession by watching these two learned gentlemen disagree with each other intellectually, yet remain personable and even jovial throughout the evening. I signed up for his course because I thought he would either help me to take the plunge and overcome my fears of postmodernism, or help me more clearly articulate where I disagreed with it.

Now that I have taught courses in aesthetics and critical theory, I wish I had taken that class. Advanced scholars have had far more opportunity to understand and account for their own personal biases than tender young MA students. I have learned that researching critical theory isn't terribly useful when I was only grazing through the literature looking for quotes to support the argument I had already formed even before I started writing the paper.

That is, of course, why I didn't like pragmatism -- it argued that there is no universal truth, there are only useful conventions that society clings to as long as the conventions fulfill a need. That's the kind of statement that shakes one's bedrock beliefs, but in later years I've realized it also clears the way for a fascinating examination of the humanist approach to morality, which is very important when you are asking students from diverse cultural backgrounds to assess issues of morality and universality in a text -- and, by extension, in the real world.

Last year I was a Sunday-school teacher for fourth graders, and I found myself prefacing every doctrinal statement with "The Catholic Church teaches..." and trying to encourage discussions, rather than simply giving them a list of received truths to memorize. I covered the material, of course, and from an orthodox perspective, often asking them to talk with their parents when they brought up touchy subjects like the fate of babies who die before baptism and how seriously they should take artistic representations of heaven and hell. I've never told my own children that they will go to hell if they are disobedient, for example; I have told my five-year-old that until she reaches the age of reason, it's Mommy and Daddy's job to help her listen to her conscience, and that includes punishing her when she gives into temptation. My nine-year-old knows that we have greater expectations for his ability to reason, so that if he and Carolyn make the same mistake in judgment, the consequences for him are more severe.

I might get faster responses from my children if they feared that demons would drag them away if they were disobedient, but that kind of obedience doesn't build character or develop moral intelligence.

On the last day of Sunday School, I was hoping to encourage their desire to learn more about the world, so after I said goodbye, I told them "Never stop asking questions!" Most of them kind of stared at me blankly. When one kid asked, "Why?" they all froze in their seats waiting for me to explain myself. I didn't.

While my wife and I are raising our children in the traditions of our Catholic faith, we are working hard to avoid the "Because I say so" and "Don't ask questions" approach to authority. My son has internalized the Socratic method so much that when he wants to get mouthy and talk back, he does so with rhetorical questions, thus drawing me into a conversation that (he hopes) will buy him time to figure out a way to avoid doing whatever he doesn't want to do. It's not exactly disobedience, but he is testing limits, making me supply good reasons for why he should obey.

Pragmatic? In the short term, it can be stressful and annoying. But I hope that always maintaining a close association between reason, authority, and morality will benefit my children in the long run.

On Sunday, April 15, Westmoreland County residents will remember the victims of Nazism by observing Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Memorial Day. --Interfaith Community to Observe Holocaust Memorial Day (National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education)

I just got back from taking my nine-year-old son to this service, which was very moving.

The service began in the Congregation Emanu-El Israel synagogue, with a moving service that had people in the congregation reading names of victims, resistance fighters, and martyrs (rescuers) of all walks of life.

Next door in a social hall at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, filmmaker Debbie Brukman showed her documentary, "Perla: The Last of the Seven Dwarfs," a fascinating story of a family of Romanian Jewish family of seven siblings, each no taller than 90 cm, who were deported to Auschwitz. They and their family members were kept alive due to the special interest of the infamous Mengele. The last of the seven siblings died in 2001, and the film is built around an interview with her.

I was surprised that this film doesn't seem to have a web presence anywhere, but this article in the Bonita Daily News has good information about the film.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.

It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques."

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'. --Laura Clark --Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims (Daily Mail)

This article (about the UK) gives just enough details to be enraging, but not enough details to invite public action.

A group of Buddhist monks in Malaysia is appealing for help to solve a problem with ants.

Buddhism forbids devotees from harming any living creature.

So the monks are looking for a creative and non-violent solution to deal with the insects, which are biting worshippers. --Malaysian monks face ant dilemma (BBC)

Rosemary, who sent me the link, writes "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" after calling attention to the the last line in the story.

Performing a morality play - especially one penned in the Middle Ages - might not seem too appealing to an average college theater student.

Dr. Terry Brino-Dean, associate professor of theater and director of the Seton Hill University theater program, has come up with a way to give "Everyman" -- a medieval drama that deals with man's fear of dying and his hope for redemption through his actions on earth -- a contemporary twist.

In a theatrical style that college students can relate to, Seton Hill's new adaptation of "Everyman" is a musical with songs by the American folk rock duo The Indigo Girls. The Everyman character is played by five students who tell the story while sitting around a drum circle on a camping trip. --Candy Williams --Seton Hill's 'Everyman' keeps medieval text, adds modern music (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

I attended this show last night with my son, Peter (age 9) who thought it was great. He got the main message -- that your material possessions won't follow you into your grave, so you should pay attention to how you live your life.

Until just now, when I looked it up for this blog entry, I thought that my only knowledge of the Indigo Girls was their rendition of "Iko Iko" in the opening scene of Rain Man, but IMBD says that was actually perforemed by a group called The Belle Stars.

So I guess I actually knew less than nothing about the Indigo Girls.

The production used the full medieval text, with some modernization of archaic terms. I quickly grew to understand the effectiveness of having Everyman's speeches (some of them rather long) broken up and distributed among five actors who share the role throughout the play. Having each actor refer to "I" and "my" rather than "we" and "our" did emphasize the solitary nature of the quest -- each "Everyman" was making a solitary journey, but in keeping with the peer-to-peer culture the play depicted a group of peers experiencing the message in parallel.

During the talk-back session afterwards, I invited Terry to talk some more about his choice to make Everyman into a group, because that seemed to be so much at odds from the message of the play -- that we enter our graves alone, except for our Good Deeds. Having Everyman played by 5 different people who could put their arms around each other and comfort each other seemed to work against that message. (Like a good teacher, he bounced the question back to the audience first, though after a few comments he did note that the play does have both a communal and individual message, and his production chose to emphasize the communal one.)

More if I have time -- too much shouting and pounding. No, I'm not referring to the drum circle that opened the show (which was a lot of fun to watch), I'm referring to the perils of blogging with small kids at home.

(Update, several hours later:)

Also during the talk back session, I noted that the actors who played Death, Good Deeds, and Knowledge did not sound at all like they were speaking rhymed verse. I said something like "I'm an English professor, so I notice these things, and I mean that as a compliment. Those lines are hard to speech."

I was so surprised at the irony of my own slip-of-the-tongue that I said, "Hard to speech? I think I'm going to bail out now."

After that, Terry closed the session, and my son started jumping up and down with glee, pointing at me and saying "This guy killed the discussion! This guy killed the discussion!"

The recent conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran should be viewed by the world as exactly what it was: nothing more than a propaganda effort by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to bolster his own political agenda and image as someone willing -- even if ignorantly -- to confront the United States and Israel.

While Ahmadinejad called his conference a "scientific" inquiry, its participants included a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, other racists and Holocaust deniers from around the world. His inquiry was anything but scientific. It was an abhorrent distortion of history, an abomination and an insult to those who died in the Holocaust and their families and to all educated people. --Peter N. Berkowitz and Fred Zeidman --We must answer Holocaust deniers (Chronicle (Houston))