#Cambridge authors

[infinitysisters]

“BLAKE WROTE the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial.

The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable "either-or"; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.

This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.

Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, "with backward mutters of dissevering power"-or else not. It is still "either-or." If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in "the High Countries."

In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.

But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”

C.S. Lewis, preface to The Great Divorce

[sassenashsworld]

I have just returned from a 4-day drive Montreal/Boston to follow the first steps of the American revolution and this man who I admire since I was a child and who still has grows within me with the fallout reference: John Hancock.

It was a beautiful journey full of revelations and I cannot recommend enough to people who have not done so to do it...

But as a fanfiction author, that’s another point of view that the journey has revealed to me. The shock SoSu gets when they comes out of the shelter must be even worse than anything I could have imagined because the Vermont, the New Hampshire and the Massachusetts are incredibly beautiful.

The respect for trees and nature in these regions is incredible and the pride of the inhabitants for their heritage as well.

There is not a corner of everything I have seen that is not cared for and that the inhabitants do not care for with religious love and shining pride.

And I’ve seen a lot of them--even in just four days.

I already had the intention to rewrite my fanfiction because I have developed a lot my English since I started it, but there may be major changes...

I think that this love and pride of Boston and the surrounding area, faced with the destruction of everything that was important in the America Spirit is something major.

Look forward to the new version of Silver’s adventures, there will be a complete change up-- (and at the same time, the next chapter of Heartbeat should come out soon)

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Transgressions Blotted Out

I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee. — Isaiah 44:22 | Authorized King James Version (AKJV) The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version; Cambridge University Press, the Crown’s patentee in the UK. All rights reserved. Cross References: 2 Chronicles 6:21; Psalm 51:1; Psalm 51:9; Isaiah 1:18; Isaiah 31:6; Isaiah 33:24; Isaiah 41:14; Isaiah 43:1; Isaiah 43:25; Isaiah 48:20; Isaiah 55:7; Jeremiah 33:8; Zechariah 1:3; Acts 3:19; 1 Corinthians 6:20; 1 Peter 1:18-19

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Notes: This verse calls us to turn to God. By faith in Christ, when He sees us He doesn't see our sin. He sees the very righteousness of Jesus. This is what redemption means, that when we stand before our holy God, the price for our sins have been paid, and they are wiped away. They're gone like mist.

[vox-anglosphere]

Bertrand Russell was Britain's leading intellectual of the 20th century

[shakespearenews]

Shakespeare's Contemporaries Infographic

[malewifestation]

Holiday Harvard 🎄☃️🍪

12/14/2023

[jcmarchi]

A home away from a homeland

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-home-away-from-a-homeland/

A home away from a homeland

When the Haitian Multi-Service Center opened in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston in 1978, it quickly became a valued resource. Haitian immigrants likened it to Ellis Island, Plymouth Rock, and Haiti’s own Citadel, a prominent fort. The center, originally located in an old Victorian convent house in St. Leo Parish, provided health care, adult education, counseling, immigration and employment services, and more.

Such services require substantial funding. Before long, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Francis Law merged the Haitian Multi-Service Center into the Greater Boston Catholic Charities network, whose deeper pockets kept the center intact. Law required that Catholic welfare promote the church’s doctrine. Catholic HIV/AIDS prevention programs started emphasizing only abstinence, not contraception. Meanwhile, the center also received state and federal funding that required grantees to promote medical “best practices” that contrasted with church doctrines.

In short, even while the center served as a community beacon, there were tensions around its funding and function — which in turn reflect bigger tensions about our civic fabric.

“These conflicts are about what the role of government is and where the line is, if there is a line, between public and private, and who ultimately is responsible for the health and well-being of individuals, families, and larger populations,” says MIT scholar Erica Caple James, who has long studied nongovernmental programs.

Now James has written a new book on the subject, “Life at the Center: Haitians and Corporate Catholicism in Boston,” published this spring by the University of California Press and offering a meticulous study of the Haitian Multi-Service Center that illuminates several issues at once.

In it, James, the Professor of Medical Anthropology and Urban Studies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, carefully examines the relationship between the Haitian community, the Catholic Church, and the state, analyzing how the church’s “pastoral power” is exercised and to whose benefit. The book also chronicles the work of the center’s staff, revealing how everyday actions are connected to big-picture matters of power and values. And the book explores larger questions about community, belonging, and finding meaning in work and life — things not unique to Boston’s Haitian Americans but made visible in this study.

Who makes the rules?

Trained as a psychiatric anthropologist, James has studied Haiti since the 1990s; her 2010 book “Democratic Insecurities” examined post-trauma aid programs in Haiti. James was asked to join the Haitian Multi-Service Center’s board in 2005, and served until 2010. She developed the new book as a study of a community in which she was participating.

Over several decades, Boston’s Haitian American population has become one of the city’s most significant immigrant communities. Haitians fleeing violence and insecurity often gained a foothold in the city, especially in the Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods as well as some suburbs. The Haitian Multi-Service Center became integral to the lives of many people trying to gain stability and prosperity. And, from residential clergy to those in need of emergency shelter, people were always at the site.

As James writes, the center “literally was a home for many stakeholders, and for others, a home away from a homeland left behind.”

Church support for the center worked partly because many Haitians felt aligned with the church, attending services and Catholic schools; in turn the church provided uniquely substantial support for the Haitian American community.

That also meant some high-profile issues were resolved according to church doctrine. For example, the center’s education efforts about HIV/AIDS transmission did not include contraception, due to the church’s emphasis on abstinence — which many workers considered less effective. Some staff members would even step outside the center to distribute condoms to community members, thus not violating policy.

“We started as a grassroots organization. … Now we have a church making decisions for the community,” said the former director of the center’s HIV/AIDS prevention programming. By 1996, the center’s adult literacy staff resigned en masse over policy differences, with some workers asserting in a 1996 memo that the church “has assumed a proprietary role over our work in the Haitian community.”

Coalition, not consensus

Another policy tension surrounding Catholic charities emerged after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004. In 2005, a reporter revealed that over the previous 18 years the church had facilitated 13 adoptions of difficult-to-place children with gay couples in the state. After this practice became publicized, the church announced in 2006 that its century of adoption work would end, so as to not violate either church or state laws.

Ultimately, James says, “There are structural dimensions that were baked in, which almost inevitably produced tensions at the institutional or organizational level.”

And yet, as James chronicles attentively, there was hardly consensus about the church’s role in the center. The center’s Haitian American community members were a coalition, not a bloc; some welcomed the church’s presence at the center for spiritual or practical reasons, or both.

“Many Haitians felt there was value from [the center] being independent, but there are others who felt it would be difficult to maintain otherwise,” James says.

Some of the community members even expressed lingering respect for Boston’s Cardinal Law, a central figure of the Catholic Church abuse scandal that emerged in 2002; Law had personally championed the charitable work the church had been performing for Haitians in Boston. In this light, another question emerging from the book, James says, is, “What encourages people to remain loyal to an imperfect institution?”

Keepers of the flame

Some of the people most loyal to the Haitian Multi-Service Center were its staff, whose work James carefully details. Some staff had themselves previously benefitted from the center’s services. The institution’s loyal workers, James writes, served as “keepers of the flame,” understanding its history, building community connections, and extending their own identities through good works for others.

For these kinds of institutions, James notes, “They seem most successful when there is transparency, solidarity, a strong sense of purpose. … It [shows] why we do our jobs and what we do to find meaning.”

“Life at the Center” has generated positive feedback from other scholars. As Linda Barnes, a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, has stated, “One could read ‘Life at the Center’ multiple times and, with each reading, encounter new dimensions. Erica Caple James’s work is exceptional.”

What of the Haitian Multi-Service Center today? In 2006, it was moved and is now housed in Catholic Charities’ Yawkey Center, along with other entities. Some of the workers and community members, James notes in the book, consider the center to have died over the years, compared to its stand-alone self. Others simply consider it transformed. Many have strong feelings, one way or another, about the place that helped orient them as they forged new lives.

As James writes, “It has been difficult to reconcile the intense emotions shared by many of the Center’s stakeholders — confusion, anger, disbelief, and frustration, still expressed with intensity even decades later — alongside reminiscences of love, joy, laughter, and care in rendering service to Haitians and others in need.”

As “Life at the Center” makes clear, that intensity stems from the shared mission many people had, of finding their way in a new and unfamiliar country, in the company of others. And as James writes, in concluding the book, “fulfillment of a mission is never solely about single acts of individuals, but rather the communal striving toward aiding, educating, empowering, and instilling hope in others.”

[howlsmovinglibrary]

Cardinal sin: book did not do British academia and its associated job structures correctly. Big sad :((

[aryburn-trains]

That's the 5:00 pm Portland bound Downeaster in the distance and the towers of the of the new Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (Interstate 93) spanning the Charles River. The bridge was part of the Big Dig. Cambridge, MA September 9, 2012

[haveyoureadthispoll]

As Paris rediscovers its joie de vivre, Tabitha Knight, recently arrived from Detroit for an extended stay with her French grandfather, is on her own journey of discovery. Paris isn’t just the City of Light; it’s the city of history, romance, stunning architecture . . . and food. Thanks to her neighbor and friend Julia Child, another ex-pat who’s fallen head over heels for Paris, Tabitha is learning how to cook for her Grandpère and Oncle Rafe. Between tutoring Americans in French, visiting the market, and eagerly sampling the results of Julia’s studies at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, Tabitha’s sojourn is proving thoroughly delightful. That is, until the cold December day they return to Julia’s building and learn that a body has been found in the cellar. Tabitha recognizes the victim as a woman she’d met only the night before, at a party given by Julia’s sister, Dort. The murder weapon found nearby is recognizable too—a knife from Julia’s kitchen. Tabitha is eager to help the investigation, but is shocked when Inspector Merveille reveals that a note, in Tabitha’s handwriting, was found in the dead woman’s pocket. Is this murder a case of international intrigue, or something far more personal? From the shadows of the Tour Eiffel at midnight, to the tiny third-floor Child kitchen, to the grungy streets of Montmartre, Tabitha navigates through the city hoping to find the real killer before she or one of her friends ends up in prison . . . or worse.

[melcatshenanigans]

"The Black Death, A Personal History." By John Hatcher. A Christmas gift in 2022 from my best friend, months before she died.

[daisyachain]

“The novel by Waugh features a friendship between male students sometimes referred to as an ‘S-Class’ relationship”

[desdasiwrites]

– Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

The Coming of the Son of Man

29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: 30 and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

The Lesson of the Fig Tree

32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: 33 so likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. 34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. 35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. — Matthew 24:29-35 | Authorized King James Version (AKJV) The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version; Cambridge University Press, the Crown’s patentee in the UK. All rights reserved. Cross References: Exodus 19:16; Deuteronomy 4:32; Psalm 102:26; Psalm 119:89; Ecclesiastes 12:2; Song of Solomon 2:13; Isaiah 13:10; Daniel 7:13; Zechariah 12:11; Matthew 10:23; Matthew 16:28; Mark 13:28; James 5:9; Revelation 3:20

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What is the meaning of the Parable of the Fig Tree?

[atwitchyship]

I mean to be fair the woods can be pretty darn dense. Hope your don't mind your character being eaten by fisher cats (actually a weasel)/mountain lion/mosquitos/water-borne parasites/flesh deer.

if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality

[tjeromebaker]

#MaxineNweri: ‘I now know that anything is possible’ | From a women’s shelter to Cambridge University

No matter how low you sink, your dreams can still come true: one woman’s inspirational story by Maxine Nwaneri, Source: The Guardian, Sun 21 Apr 2024 12.00 BST Maxine Nwaneri As a woman with decades of business experience, a Cambridge graduate with a fulfilling career running my own company, alongside a joy-filled family life, few would guess from looking at me today how close I came to having…