[New Vision, via AllAfrica.com] “Public schools have a central role in molding the character of children,” says Martin Lwanga, arguing that Uganda cannot remove religion from school curricula.
[NY Times] PBS’ “The Jewish People: A Story of Survival” documentary “condenses four millenniums of atrocity into 60 minutes, allotting the pogroms the amount of time it takes to dust a coffee table.” Though it doesn’t deal entirely in victimology, “Most of what is talked about here could be learned from a Google search that combined the phrase ‘Jewish people, history of’ with ‘misery,’ ‘oppression’ or ‘prejudice,’ but the value of purely informational programming like this in the age of Wikipedia is in seeing how ideas and theories and narratives move people.”
(Image: From Michael Kimmelman’s great NY Times column “Simmering Anti-Semitism Mars a Vibrant Hungary.”)
[Guardian] A great line from Charlotte Gardner’s “Caught between baroque and a smoother pace”: “Despite the fashionably snappy pace of the opening movement, their smoother sound and sensitive phrasing and dynamics make the orchestra heave and sigh like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.”
[Journal of the American Academy of Religion, subscription required] David D. Hall on Kate Peters’s “Print Culture and the Early Quakers” (though print culture evidently has nothing to do with illustrations of any sort), and Fatima Harrak reviews Earle H. Waugh’s “Memory, Music and Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters.”
[Yeshiva World News] A very bizarre and offensive article on why right-wing Orthodox Jews do not pause for the siren in Israel that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust. For those whose Hebrew/Yiddish/Aramaic is shaky, here’s the gist: Orthodox Jews always trust in God and in miracles, so they don’t need to commemorate them. Only the secular folks require a moment every year to remember about God. Interestingly, these same Orthodox Jews commemorate their own relatives once a year through prayer and good deeds via yarzheit.
[Telegraph] A white horse, 33 times life size, will soon dwarf the Angel of the North. Is this a triumph of nature over religion?
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