Top Responses To a World on Fire: Party as Protest — Part 2 In the last article in this series, the history of festive events used as rebellion against power was traced from the removal of dance from medieval churches, to the pathologizing of festivity by early psychologists, to the…

How To Respond To A World On Fire: Party as Protest, Part 1: It can be overwhelming and taxing for any activist or concerned citizen of planet earth to know that the world is on fire — from the Amazon to the Trump* White House, to the unraveling of previously…

In the late winter, early spring of 2012, I found myself wandering among hundreds of religious pilgrims trailing processions of caskets carried like thrones and purportedly holding sacred relics of revered saints at both the Feast of Saint Agatha in Catania, Sicily and at a Saint Bernadette anniversary event in…

Dear Straight People: I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you, and I promise to do better. …

There is an intense debate within the academy as to whether professional scholars should make their work more accessible to public audiences — a realization that all the knowledge in the world doesn’t bring change if researchers only talk to each other. Fitting the theme of the argument that academic…

Scene 1: It’s an interim year between 1922–1966. The Hays Office is ceding ‘morally inappropriate’ expressions of reckless abandonment in visual media to Protestant values via the uncannily religiously-influenced, Hollywood generated terms set out in The Motion Picture Production Code. Circumventing a government-imposed code situation, these suffocating guidelines are agreed…

The year 2019* included surreal predictions of an impeached president getting a swing at a re-election campaign announced alongside terrifyingly heartbreaking images of large swaths of Australia on fire, endangering cities and animals alike. A year later, and things feel no less surreal, as the Coronavirus is on every airwave…

I recently had a conversation with someone who repeatedly used the words “China Virus” to describe the Coronavirus — a term popularized by Donald Trump, even as he also has (characteristically) provided contradictory statements enough to ride the wave of propaganda fueled plausible deniability of his intentions to incite racist…

2020 feels like a dystopia, but one we’ve been building for a long time. From 2013 to 2019, police killed 7,666 people in the United States. This is a despicable, shameful, and tragic average of 1277–1278 people murdered per year. The latest most publicized case of police violence ending in…