Category Archives: American Politics

Spiritual Sisterhood across States (and by sister I mean any non-patriarchal thinkers welcome)

Posted on by

dna  https://www.google.com/search?q=heretical+thought&oq=heretical+thought&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j69i60l3j0.2381j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 IdeaImpact.org’s project “Spiritual Sisterhood across States” 
welcomes you.  Until I get conversant with Zoom and lick this COVID-19 fully, we hope to begin with 12ish participants to whom we have extended invitations. Our initial topic will be how we are all coping in light of this isolating, alienating pandemic. We could all benefit from 45 minutes of discussing and sharing once a week/month/whatever helps. Think book club, only this will be a virtual coping club.

While we are not all girls and women, we are all sisters in openness. Spiritual Sisterhood Across States is for all those who are authentic and honest, and seek to understand or are searching for the nexus of their own epistemology/ontology, or what Socrates called “Know Thy Self.”  In common theoretical lingo — try situated-ness.

Spiritual Sisterhood Across States could well appeal to atheists, agnostics, or those who study or find fascinating all the different religious traditions over time (three dominant world religions, such as mainline and non-mainline Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and of course Zen, Atheism and Agnosticism).  This spiritual sisterhood is inclusive of all peoples in all ethical, spiritual, and religious traditions across all continents.

We are excluding those who believe in harming any group or category of peoples, forms of life, fauna and flora.

We’ve sent out the first round of invitations to those we think might be interested initially.  We hope to expand, though we must figure out logistics to do that.

And by all means, please do not think this is limited to girls or women or trans — it’s those who practice some form of the Society of Ethical Culture’s “Deeds before Creeds” ethics that are inclusive of all bodies (or peoples), no matter how many different intersecting, overlapping identities they embody or could embody.

To that end, a current picture, space, email and phone number will be required to guarantee that our space remains open and safe.  There will be zero tolerance of people, ideas or thoughts who profess white supremacy, white nationalism, other nationalisms, misogyny, institutional sexism, sexism, racism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-atheism as well as anti-agnosticism.

Good Deeds over Creeds is accepting of all peoples, all genders, all sexualities and non-sexualities, races, ethnicities — excluding white supremacists, supremacists, misogynists, sexists, racists, nativists, xenophobes, homophobes, abilists, and any other artificial human hierarchies or institutionalizations. (Note: auto-correct keeps changing “othering” to “mothering” haha). Also it is not limited to academics.

So if you’re interested in joining once we get Zoom up and working for break out groups, please identify your “hood,” culture, tradition, religion, set of ethics, or what you most call the intersection of your ontology/epistemology over time or from an experiential perspective.  Drop me an email with the subject line “Spiritual Sisterhood Across States” at ruthobriencunygc@gmail.com.

To throw myself out there first, here is a short selection of ideas and thoughts from people, in books and in institutions or programs that I have read, edited, written, or heard. They greatly influenced my own ontology/epistemology nexus, helping me better “know” myself.

 

Martha Fineman, Emory Law


_4484822

The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Joan Wallach Scott, Politics of the Veil

The Public Square Book Series,PUP, Jeff Madrick, The Case for Big Government

The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Andrei Codescru, The PostHuman Dada Guide, Tzara and Lenin Play Chess

The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

Writing Politics Specialization Founded

Ruth O’Brien, author and editor, Voices from the Edge, edited, OUP

1st book In Heretical Thought Book Series ~
Book Series Editor, Ruth O’Brien, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Jill Lepore, The Whites of their Eyes, the Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History

Baby, I’m Back

Posted on by

Been quiet for quiet some time. Out of deference to the President? No. Out of respect to this nation, he, Trump, Trumped, No. Borised?  Blond locks unite?  No?  White locks and blond locks unite?  

More mundane than that. Getting lots of my own work done.

Sure, I’m editing books and we’ve got some FABULOUS ones coming down the pike. Indeed, I’m behind in presenting Max Tomba’s Insurgent Universality, which came out just this fall.

Sure, I’m getting my own book written — 385 years of heretical women — my direct descendants or relatives, starting with Penelope who is not only scalped, impaled, left for dead, rescued, all on Sandy Hook where my sons learned their colonial history 400 years later. Then, she is sold or traded back to the Dutch, and marries her second Englishman (her first was scalped beside her and had the audacity to die in Jersey), and the fun begins — she’s one of the original 400 New Yorkers, and she’s got quiet a presence and even gets sued — when few women (certainly not the English) had standing. Good for her. Then, after cultivating the most land in Gravesend with her “man”, bearing two digits worth of children, they decide to skedaddle back to Jersey, when the English invade (again) where again she seeks shelter with the matrilineal, matriarhical, all around good gal tribe that helped her, helps her and her brood and crew, where again as a fam. they cultivate the most land … (Key here is not that they “own” the most as property is theft, or that’s what Penelope’s sisters taught her. To be continued….

No. I’ve been busy practicing my performances — I like to call them 1bottom or 1 body commotions with consequence. A sit down strike against those who bar PwD passage, or access, or acccommodation. It’s so common it’s almost trite.

 

Two old white men with white hair, but no beards.

Posted on by

Duh! Gotta give the GOP credit — at least they go for the gold.  Who knew?

Oops, forgot:  We did.

They are misogynist, antisocial, criminal. Just look at the Queen’s predicament, which is not to be confused with Larry David’s.

 

Jane Caputi – Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene

Posted on by

9780190902711 Blog (and Book) by Jane Caputi

Reading up on the Anthropocene for Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, I encountered repeated pat phrases about humans (really Man in Wynter’s sense) now being “the dominant force of change on the planet.” Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen even averred: “It’s no longer us against “Nature.” Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”

The COVID-19 virus is laughing all the way to the emergency room. Nature/Earth, the formidable and indomitable force whom I understand as the “Mutha’” is the actual decider. She/They is disrespected, foundationally, in the Anthropocenic world that Man is trying to (re)make in his own image. Climate change, extinctions, pandemics; these are neither the wrath of a mythic punitive deity or a rape-avenging femme fatale. All those empty shelves in the grocery story serve as a vivid metaphor for what really going on — the withdrawal of the “Mutha’” – the force/source upon whom all of us depend for absolutely everything.

SCAMs, SLAMs, and SLIMs

Posted on by

What’s a SLIM?  I had trouble remembering it from yesterday’s post to today.  Does the “I” stand for intersectional, I asked my SLIM husband (who is slim, btw, so perhaps my muse)?  Or is it interdependent?  It’s different from a SLAM or SCAM, the former being better than the latter, since with a liberal there’s at least some chance he’ll get the message someday, whereas a conservative is just hopeless.

Being an added plus or “and” person (improvising extemporaneously, though happy to re- and even re-re-improvise), I realize it’s gotta be “interdependent.”  After all, we live in an interdependent world, with no left or right, no true or untrue, or even lies, since everything is, after all, persuadable, so we can’t pick sides.  Take a look at the billion dollars that Dad, otherwise known as President Donald J. Trump to all of us but Jared Kushner, earmarked after allegedly learning the ropes from Jared (or is it the other way around?).

It’s a topsy-turvy world.  The president who spent arguably the least of his own money and still opted out of public funding for the presidency has now earmarked the most (of other people’s money) to convince his followers (his fist-throwing, enter-the-fray followers) to keep up the false narrative.  

All this is to say, it’s not topsy-turvy but tricky, and tricky means we’ve all gotta learn how to be interdependent, not intersectional (which has too much to do with ID-entity or the being of our being or existence), when we’re all simply socially situated in a society that includes the polity and the market.  So here’s two cheers for the interdependents who can trust each other for good, and not for bad, let alone being led down a path full of tricks, or even worse a telos.  #