In light of the Walter Scott and Eric Harris killings, along with the #ShutdownA14 protests against police brutality this past week, I’d like to share an excerpt from my essay entitled, “To Establish Justice at The Gates”, which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books earlier this month. How can I be well, when my sister is not well; how can I not be well if my brother has found love? […] in this concept, when...
This piece can now be found on The Los Angeles Review of Books. Click here to go to a new, updated version of the article. Thanks for your support of The Two Cities.
For Lacan, the Real [or God] is that which breaks into our Imaginary and Symbolic constellations. The Real is a rupture. The Real cannot be imagined or symbolized, it does not occupy a place, and yet it takes place. The Real is a crack within our existing political, religious and cultural configurations, a resistance that prevents systems from claiming absolute knowledge. It is a destabilizing event that threatens to disrupt the balance maintained by our...
For the majority of my American Evangelical upbringing , I feel as though I was told that there were two main criteria for what religious leaders around me called “being a believer”: 1) one must have the right beliefs (orthodoxy) and 2) one must live an upstanding moral life (orthopraxy). This understanding of Christianity that frames it as a system of right beliefs is, no doubt, a kind of ideological holdover from the era in...
I’ve always thought of Lust as only having to do with sex. It was always held up for me as the opposite of purity, chastity, virginity. When I think about it now, I realize that this narrow definition has actually become quite a convenient for me as a 21st Century American Christian. In limiting the term to only having to do with sex, I’ve conveniently blinded myself to other areas affected by Lust in my...
Edward Said’s, Orientalism (1978), was a masterpiece for its time because in it, he was able to give frame and structure to a period of history that could be referred to now as “The Age of European Imperialism”. These 500 years birthed the west as we know it, and so it makes sense why Said’s project would focus so exclusively on this small sliver of human history. An issue, though, arises in Said’s postcolonial reading...
During the summer of 1957, a mixed race family immigrated from Holland into the small town of Terra Ceia, North Carolina. The father was Dutch, the mother Indonesian. As they attempted to send their two children to the local Reformed Church school, they were met at the door by local segregationist leaders who considered the children to be colored and therefore unable to attend the all white school. This incident brought the small Reformed Church...
I’m fortunate enough to be doing my graduate work at a small, liberal arts college in Southern California, where, in the middle of January, I get to walk to and from class in temperatures ranging from sixty-five to eighty degrees. In all honesty, if you’re running late or forget a book, this walk can seem to be, in the moment, an annoyance. That being said, when I’m not sweating, trying to make it to teach...
Have the men of our time still a feeling of the meaning of sin? Do they, and do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that “sin” should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life? Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some “sinners” and others “righteous”? For by way of such a division, we...
“This f-ckin’ sucks.” This is the phrase uttered over and over again by the four Navy SEALs pinned down in heavy enemy fire in Afghanistan during the firefight scenes in Peter Berg’s latest film Lone Survivor and it epitomizes the underlying thematic focus of the film. I’m not going to get into what the plot of the movie is because, essentially, I hate it when film reviews do that; if you wanted to read a...
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