(Ir)religiosity

I learned yesterday that Howard Zinn, long-time BU professor of history, radical activist, and one of my intellectual heroes, died of a heart attack while visiting family in California at the age of 87.  Oddly enough, I didn’t initially learn of this from Twitter, Facebook or even my Google Reader.  A lone comment on this video I posted a few years ago on Zinn’s political philosophy first alerted me.

It was a wide-eyed reading of  Zinn’s seminal A People’s History of the United States (among some others) that I was first awakened from my own dogmatic slumber and challenged to view history from the perspective of the those on the underside — indeed, the only proper way of reading history is by doing so, by listening to the voice of the other.  Since then I have found Zinn to be an inspiring, dynamic and prophetic figure.  I am proud to be attending the same institution where he spent most of his career and I hope that his legacy will live on through his writings and most of all in his exhortations to organize and renounce the status quo.

Interestingly, I ran across this passage the other night in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution“:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

Indeed.  Many figures come to mind.  Martin King…Gandhi…Oscar Romero…Dorothy Day…Malcom X…César Chavéz…Che Guevara…Jesus.  And, today especially, Howard Zinn.  May we honor his work not by domesticating it but by taking it seriously.

In light of the SOTU yesterday his last short piece of public writing is worth reading.  It is a retrospective on Obama’s first year.

Finally, below is a video from one of Zinn’s most recent projects.

RIP, Howard. Thank you for your life and witness.

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I am taking a free, no-credit reading French course this semester.  The primary text is Karl Sandburg’s French for Reading.  Languages are not my strong suit, so I am hoping to obtain some French texts to begin working through on my own.  I am wondering if anyone might have some suggestions.  Obviously I am not looking for the complexity and difficulty of, say, Derrida (though I hope to get there at some point!).  Something relatively easy and straightforward would be best.  It would be even better if it were related to theological, biblical, or philosophical studies, but I doubt that those areas will be best to start with.

Thoughts?

I had every intention of finishing up my thoughts on Transforming Christian Theology and the series on constructive theology over the holidays.  So much for that.

Early tomorrow morning I will be flying to Havana, Cuba with a group from BU STh for a class on the Gospel and Empire and will be there for 10 days.  I won’t have cell service or internet access so my online thoughts will have to wait until I return.

Immediately following that trip I will be attending local pastor’s licensing school for the New England Conference.  Oh, and then school starts sometime.

So all of that is to say I am alive but will be very busy for the next several weeks.  Who knows how long it will before I have time to blog.