Worthy Reads

Michael Pollan reviews five books on the rise of the increasingly visible food movement.  The article alone is worth reading, providing excellent summaries as good reviews are supposed to do.  His closing comments on Janet Flammang's book are particular interesting given the tension created by the apparently conflicting values of women in the workplace and the importance of shared meals perceived as "women's work."

The full article is here.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

JK Rowling on why she will not be voting Tory in the upcoming British Elections.  In case you don't follow British politics, that would be the British party that shares similar rhetorical values with the GOP.  Courtesy of 3quarkesdaily via Crooked Timber.  

I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State at the DSS, had recently entertained the Conservative Party conference with a spoof Gilbert and Sullivan number, in which he decried “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list”. The Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, castigated single-parent families from St Mellons, Cardiff, as “one of the biggest social problems of our day”. (John Redwood has since divorced the mother of his children.) Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on how we do our theology in context.

The Transfiguration: Theophanes the Greek, 1408

Recently, I had the pleasure of spending the