Photo: don’t know who or where…
9 Jan
Reminds me of this Gérôme painting of Albanian with his dog:
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Memory
8 JanA female gym teacher slapped my ass once after a good volleyball serve in my junior year at Stuyvesant.
I think I said: “Thanks.”
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See Boğaziçi in Erdoğan’s crosshairs
7 Jan
Who wasn’t waiting for this to happen eventually? Hands off, malaka, a school that I consider one of my lesser alma matres, though I only did one summer of Turkish there years ago. Still, it was a cool environment and great people, faculty and student body, and with a tangible sense of pride in itself as playing a key role in the development of modern Turkey’s civil society. I expected an AKP attack at some point –and it was inevitable but also took so long because of the University’s reputation in the West, somewhat parallel to that of the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo, or the struggling American University of Afghanistan in Kabul.. I just hope, the faculty sticks together, because I had also already heard rumors from reliable sources that there was whispering and name-naming going on.
Remember in the early 00’s when we thought we were on the verge of the Theological Seminary on Halke reopening.
From bad to worse…
See all of Lowen’s tweet Mark Lowen Verified account @marklowen
View up the Bosporus from Boğaziçi campus.
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I loved no-Erdoğan Turkey
18 DecDo you remember when we thought this was going to continue being the future of Turkey? ….and then some?
Another one for the Byzantine Ambassador: Why do Catholics care?
12 DecReposted old post:
Friggin’ Frangoi: Vatican Synod
I didn’t even know that the divorced were — and officially still are — banned from communion!!!
Then they wonder why people are alienated…
Why do Catholics even care?
Sorry. I ask this question so much that I risk riding the edges of glibness. But I receive communion without doing half the things I should before — when I can’t — and nearly always after having done things that I shouldn’t have. But/and the Orthodox Church never even really tells me what those things are to begin with. Someone, somewhere may disapprove and more power to them. I act according to my conscience and am pretty sure most others do as well. I never go to confession. And am I supposed to get out of the bed where I’ve spent the night with someone I love more than myself and with every particle of my being — I can’t imagine a more sanctified state to receive the sacrament in, frankly — and drag my ass to church on a Sunday morning and be barred from communion because I’m not married to that person or ’cause I had had a hamburger the day before yesterday?
Why do Catholics care? Why not continue to practice one’s own way as a massive form of underground, silent, civil disobedience (which is essentially how most Orthodox practice their faith anyway — I mean, who’ll know? *) and watch how in one generation the whole craziness will have faded away.
WHY DO CATHOLICS CONTINUE TO TRY AND MAKE THE CHURCH APPROVE OF THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T BE ITS BUSINESS?! Don’t they realize the POWER they’re granting the Church by begging and fighting for it to give them its blessing for certain things. Stop giving it to them. You’re constantly inviting the Church into your lives as a moral arbiter and not as a means of transcendence and connection to the sacred…communion. Stop giving them that power. Take it back. See what they do.
And, of course, it’s American voices at this last council who were most apprehensive about the new, more liberal language.
Andrew Medichini/Associated Press (click)
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* Yes, well, I guess God will know. And if you think that’s the shit He cares about, you’re already on the road to damnation because, as per Wilde, stupidity is the only sin. Don’t even bother.
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One more killer — maybe THE one — from Byzantine Ambassador
12 Dec
Of course the issue is not just to get Frangoi to rethink their Gibbonesque views (or non-views more likely) on the Byzantines, it’s also to get Neo-Greeks themselves to understand them, which might help them, finally, “in a globalised world in which units are reconfiguring around” them, reconstitute the identity project they have been failing tragically at for almost three centuries.
Very cool…
(But, oh, wait, “…kept aloft the lights of antiquity against all the odds…”? I thought Arabs did that… Where’s Mehdi Hassan when you need him?)
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 