By: Deve Persad on January 30, 2014
Webster’s Dictionay (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pawn): pawn noun ˈpȯn, ˈpän 1: one of the chessmen of least value having the power to move only forward ordinarily one square at a time, to capture only diagonally forward, and to be promoted to any piece except a king upon reaching the eighth rank 2: one that can be used to…
By: Ashley Goad on January 28, 2014
For years I heard my son, Clint, a soldier in the 173rd Airborne, speak of “collateral damage.” I cringed every time he said the phrase, knowing he used the words to describe an unintended consequence of an armed intervention. In plain speak, though it was not planned, innocent people lost their lives. Reading Zygmunt Bauman’s Collateral Damage:…
By: Clint Baldwin on January 27, 2014
To my recollection, I first encountered Zygmunt Bauman in 1996 through reading Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. As I remember, I appreciated what I was able to encounter of Bauman there. I subsequently came across Bauman more frequently in readings and really appreciated his Globalization: The Human Consequences. It was some time after he wrote Globalization and as we…
By: Clint Baldwin on January 27, 2014
What “makes” you think the way that you do? What orientations do you typically adhere to without even considering that you do so? What subconsciously drives your thinking and your actions? Charles Taylor in Modern Social Imaginaries explores facets of these very questions. Taylor, suggests that ideas drive actions which lead to the creation of…
By: Carol McLaughlin on January 26, 2014
Three words describe my learning and capture my response to Zygmunt Bauman’s work in Collateral Damage: sobering, overwhelmed and pondering. The dominant word, the one with the greatest weight, the one that is “sitting” on my chest is sobering. This one word reflects both a deepening awareness and reveals my response to Bauman’s light on…
By: rhbaker275 on January 26, 2014
There is surely something within any decent, caring, unpretentious, human being that has lived, perhaps thrived prosperously or eked out a livelihood in their own social order that recoils and is reviled by the concept of “collateral damage” as presented by Zygmunt Bauman in the introduction to Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age.”…
By: Mitch Arbelaez on January 25, 2014
Let me begin with an apology for my tardiness on this post. I was in Orlando representing GFU and GFES at a leaders conference from Tuesday till Thursday night. My book failed to arrive before I left and did not arrive till Thursday. My day was packed Friday with me teaching Friday evening. I here…
By: Miriam Mendez on January 25, 2014
We often complain about the trivial things that inconvenience our daily routine (i.e. we got whole milk instead of soy milk in our coffee order; we forgot the power cord to our GPS and now we have to rely on our brain to get us to our destination; the wind blew the cable out and…
By: Raphael Samuel on January 25, 2014
A few years ago, I was on my way home from work listening to Christian radio. A feature that afternoon was a program call, “Missions network news.” This is a brief news cast highlighting what God is doing through the efforts of his people around the world. That afternoon the spotlight was on a woman…
By: Richard Volzke on January 25, 2014
In the early 90’s, I visited Turkey while in the military. During my visit to Turkey, I witnessed an impoverished young boy steal a piece of fruit from a fruit stand and took off running. The vendor began yelling at the boy in Arabic, and as the vendor was yelling and running after the boy…
By: Liz Linssen on January 24, 2014
A new report by Oxfam has found that a tiny elite owns the wealth of half of the world’s population. The report, entitled “Working for the few” shows that 85 of the world’s richest people own the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population. The report was released ahead of this week’s World…
By: John Woodward on January 24, 2014
Six years ago, my wife and I moved to Omaha. We were excited for a change in life (new jobs, new start). We decided, as part of our downsizing, we would locate in a newer suburb where young families gravitated, where we’d have opportunity to develop new friendships in a new neighborhood. We eagerly moved…
By: Telile Fikru Badecha on January 24, 2014
Collateral Damage: Social inequality in a Global Age by Zygmount Bauman offers deep insight into the ways the global society has been dealing with social inequality. In the introduction, the author explained social inequality using engineering metaphors: one is fuse, the weakest part of an electrical circuit that is designed to blow as a safety…
By: Bill Dobrenen on January 24, 2014
Godward faith and human reason have been wrestling with each other for millennia. Which of these philosophies will ultimately lead humanity to its evolutionary finale? Are we getting better and better as a species, as created beings. Or are we devolving with time and with the unfolding of modernity? Zygmunt Bauman writes expertly in this…
By: Julie Dodge on January 24, 2014
As I soothe my slightly taxed brain, it begins to make sense to me that we were asked to follow up Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries[1] with Zygmunt Bauman’s Collateral Damage.[2] In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor described the long march of the Western European and North American social imaginary to individualism, presumed equal participation in…
By: Deve Persad on January 23, 2014
Up the coast in Northern Ireland, in the county of Antrim, sits Dunluce castle. From many angles it still look majestic and strong, sitting upon a thick carpet of deep green grass, held high against the sky. But to look from the water, straight up the cliffs, you realize that something went wrong. Thought to…
By: Bill Dobrenen on January 19, 2014
There is a fun game that we play when friends come over sometimes called “Imagine If…” This game allows each player to link a real person (known to all the players around the board) to something that best describes that person. For example: “Imagine if Bill were a type of music. Would he be…
By: Mitch Arbelaez on January 19, 2014
Modern Social Imaginaries Standing on the premise that modern society has come about through countless struggles in order to first build, and then maintain the social framework that the world now understands as the modern western world, Charles Taylor, crafts a wonderful read, outlining the developments of our distinct modern western society, characterized by…
By: Miriam Mendez on January 18, 2014
I was intrigued by the first sentence on the back cover of Modern Social Imaginaries, “Charles Taylor is internationally renowned for his contributions to political and moral theory, particularly to debates about identity formation, multiculturalism, secularism, and modernity.” As I engaged in reading “Modern Social Imaginaries” I found myself being challenged and invited to understand…
By: John Woodward on January 18, 2014
In Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries we are treated to wide ranging study of our modern mentality describing not only what it is but also how it came about. Drawing on history, philosophy and social theory, Taylor discerns a dramatic shift in how people imagine their lives today from their imaginaries of the past. The…
