Ben Jammin' Zilla

I bumped into a Facebook ad for a book that upset me. It will be released in a few days: Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender , by Christopher West. He is Catholic and has made a career out of defending the Church's teachings on gender and sexuality, filtered through John Paul II's Theology of the Body lecture series. I am continuing to discover and gain curiosity about the power that the Theology of the Body wielded on generations of conservative Catholics who wish to puff up and dress up the credibility of gender essentialism, homophobia, queerphobia, and moral prohibitions on contraception.  I think what caught my attention and disturbed me the most is the title. What assumptions lie behind the notion that our bodies tell God's story? It is a beautiful notion. But therein lies my uneasiness. It is sinister to twist this creative notion that our bodies tell God's story into the notion that our bodies as they are now i...

This is perhaps my favorite film. I love the scene when NJ spends the evening with the Japanese businessman Ota. For a few scenes the film switches from Mandarin to English. The characters are speaking in their second language, and the way they talk changes too. It is more thoughtful and more halting; NJ and the businessman search for the right words. Yet in spite of this language that is simultaneously barrier and bridge the two move away from company talk and bond. NJ shares about his affair; Ota shares his love of music and awes a karaoke bar with classical piano. The talking and the bonding are also ways to make their work human and authentic. A real connection is made. The use of English as a second language is brilliant because it points to the fundamentally searching nature of all human language and human communication. To be human is like being imbedded in a second language. We can feel the tentative, liquid hesitations of it at all times. And this is displayed in the rela...