Category: Posts from the Before Times
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Edit
It seems improbable to me that Danny Fisher has a day job given how frequently he posts things to the internets (including Lethal Weapons clips to my Facebook posts). Earlier today, he posted this to Twitter. “New Amazon terms amount to ‘assisted suicide’ for book industry, experts claim.” http://t.co/frfvX549TY — Rev. Danny Fisher (@RevDannyFisher) June…
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Numbers
Wilson is right (as is Silk) that the Washington Post map is wrong. I don’t think we should throw it away, though. Or, at the very least, I don’t think we should thumb our noses at it and say “their methodology is flawed, to hell with it.” Rather, and I say this as a teacher,…
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Writing
Inspired by another “not that kind of doctor,” I have decided that this will be a summer of writing. And accountability. Hold me to it, internet hive mind. To wit. I’ve officially got a book under contract. It’s not the book I thought I’d be writing this summer, but, hey, it’s a book. And I’m…
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Jesus
So it’s okay to say a prayer before a government meeting. This was not news to me. I am not surprised. First, this is a quick and dirty post about why I’m not a fan of quick and dirty writing. Daniel Burke, religion writer for CNN, declares that today’s US Supreme Court “ruling upsets #Hindus…
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Failure
I’m writing a book. Well, I’m actually writing two books, sort of, but I’m not ready to talk about any of that right now. Mostly, I want to talk about failure. In the process of looking through notes of projects past for one of these books I’m working on, I came across the second revision…
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Harumph
The internet is outraged. There’s always something. Perhaps it’s a celebrity that has said something sexist. Or a minor public intellectual who’s made a bad joke or used a racist slur. I don’t know. But I do know this: first and most importantly, it’s okay it be pissed off and to call people out on…
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Chart
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk to a group of BCA folks about Buddhism in the United States that is not Jodo Shinshu. An easy task, sure. No. Wait. Not an easy task. There is a dizzying diversity and variety of Buddhist tradition in the US; assuming it can…
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Non-ethnic
Everyone is ethnic. Let’s start there. The Angry Asian Buddhist’s most recent post critiques another blogger’s use of the word “ethnic.” In many discourses about race and ethnicity, the use of the term is in juxtaposition to some “non-ethnic” category, though rarely is this made explicit. In this case, the blogger in question explicitly uses…
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Flight
On a plane over Nebraska earlier this week, I wrote a really good post. It started on an idea somewhere between Fred Phelps and Meiji-era Japanese Buddhist socialists. It was about ethics. And karma. It was deep and philosophical and profound and you would have loved it. I deleted it accidentally, and Fred died, and it…
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Imaginary
So there’s this thing called Medium, and I thought I’d use it to see if it’s a good, well, medium. I’ve posted a couple of things there, and I’m not planning on deleting them or anything, but I’m not planning on writing anything else there. A lot of what I’ve seen up on Medium (or,…