I’ve just returned from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where I was working with Claudio Carvales, a professor of worship, and his students in a course called Creating Rituals in Community: The Work of Mourning The Earth. Together they design rituals in class, then enact them publicly in James Chapel. Recently, they confessed to…
Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy
An Incantatory Riff for a Global Medicine Show Prior to publication, this was a script for oral performance. Publication required the decorum, the civilizing influence, of those speed bumps we call paragraph breaks. Even though the original script was not written as poetry, it looked like poetry on the page. It looked that way to…
Disarming Boys
Originally published in The Canopy Review 01 (2019): 10-26. Excerpts read at the Langston Hughes House, Harlem, September 23, 2019. World War II rages as my parents rivet B-24 bombers at Consolidated Aircraft. Home from the graveyard shift, Dad’s teaching me to box. Knees knocked, I’m punching back. Later, he’s equipped me with a toy…
Reading Gestures
From left, Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. raise their hands to answer a question Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019, during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by ABC at Texas Southern University in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) If you read gestures, as ritual…
-
Recent Posts
Search
Categories
- aging, childhood, adolescence
- apocalypse
- arms, guns, weapons
- art & image
- art, artists
- bicycling
- blacksmithing
- body
- body language
- books
- ceremony
- child, children, childhood,
- creative nonfiction
- creativity
- culture, history
- death, mortality, the dead
- dialogues
- disease
- ecology, environment
- economy, work
- education
- essays, articles
- ethics
- ethnicity, racism, multiculturalism
- family
- film
- food, meals, eating
- funeral, commemoration
- funerals, cemeteries
- future
- gender, sexuality
- gesture, posture
- healing
- humor
- ideology
- illness
- imagination, creativity
- interviews
- justice
- land
- literature
- media, technology
- memoir
- memories
- metaphor, symbol
- moving, mobility
- music
- musings
- nature and ritual
- passage
- peace, conflict, war
- people, actors, agents, identity
- performance, play, entertainment
- photography
- pilgrimage
- place
- poetry
- politics
- posture
- questions
- religion, spirituality
- rites of passage
- ritual, festival
- science
- sculpture
- space, territory
- sports
- story & essay
- theory
- things, objects
- time, history
- travel
- truth
- video & audio
- violence
- walking, processing, marching
- water
- weddings
- worldview, ontology
-
Recent Posts