For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been producing a podcast called Sectarian Review. I was just interviewed by C. Derrick Varn for Former People about the project. You can read that interview at the link below.
To check out the podcast, go to www.sectarianreviewpodcast.com
Source: Sectarians for Christian Humanism: Interview with Daniel Anderson of the Sectarian Review
http://sectarianreviewpodcast.weebly.com/
Well this may be it.
I’ve found myself less and less interested in writing for this medium lately. And a quick perusal of this blog will demonstrate that.
It should also reveal that I’ve been aiming my non-teaching efforts toward podcasting instead. There is something truly rewarding about having live conversations with people about the broad range of topics I’ve tried to cover in the blog. If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to check it out. Here’s the link to our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/SectarianReview/
Also, I’ve created a dedicated website to the podcast where you can learn more about it and link to all the episodes.
If you do, please let me know what you’re thinking. What makes that thing so much fun is the dialogue with our listeners. Here’s the link to the site:
http://sectarianreviewpodcast.weebly.com/
If you’ve been reading this blog, thanks so much. I hope you’ll listen to Sectarian Review and talk back!
Be well.
The Sectarian Review Podcast is back.
If you haven’t done so yet, please think about subscribing to the show at iTunes, Stitcher, etc…We would love to expand the conversation. No iPod? Just follow this link:
http://www.christianhumanist.org/2016/04/sectarian-review-7-trumpism/
Join Danny Anderson, Ed Simon, and new contributor Jordan Poss as they fret over the disturbing rise of Donald Trump. What does the rise of Angry White Populism mean for a post-Trump America? Are there historical precedents for this moment? What might a political realignment look like in America’s winner-take-all electoral system? Two English and Cultural Criticism types are joined by a historian to hash it all out. Please enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes.
Hello dear reader. I wonder if you might allow me to call you “dear listener,” tonight.
As you may have seen from previous posts, I’ve gradually transitioned my blogging energies into podcasting. My podcast, Sectarian Review, offers me the chance to actually speak to other people about ideas and culture, and that has been a lot of fun and really gratifying. If you listen to podcasts, I hope you’ll check us out as well. We’re on iTunes and Stitcher and you can find a link here:
http://www.christianhumanist.org/2016/01/sectarian-review-5-the-football-industrial-complex/
There is no real reason these platforms can’t co-exist for a while, though. Below, find the introduction to our latest episode, a hostile inquiry into America’s (and Christendom’s) obsession with football. Drew Van’tland and Todd Pedlar joined me for a pretty lively discussion.
And I’m always looking for new collaborators. If you’d like to join us from time to time, please do let me know. This week, I had a philosopher and a physicist on the show. I’d love to include historians, economists, seminarians…anyone. Now for the intro:
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Hello everyone. Thanks for downloading another episode of the show. Danny Anderson here. Assistant Professor of English at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA.
I want to give fair warning that this episode might be contentious, uncomfortable, and even unfair. This is my hope at least. Football occupies a gigantic space in our cultural consciousness and I think we should at least notice that. In doing so, we’re kind of going to be picking at scabs, an icky image, I know.
I should confess upfront that I have some personal issues with this subject, so I’ll have to work to avoid making this all about me and my psychology. I’m from Cleveland, a huge town for sports fandom, and spent almost all my youth utterly obsessed with the local teams, primarily the Browns. Now maybe it’s because the Browns’ terribleness makes it easy, but as I’ve gotten old and decrepit, I’ve come to a point where I don’t care much at all about it anymore.
Except that I do. I care that we as a society Recklessly engage in what I’ve come to know as the idolatry of my youth. I’ve watched, largely from a distance now, as Cleveland neglects almost every other part of its civic life for its obsession with trying to overcome the heartbreak of “The Drive” and “The Fumble.” I’m also disturbed as a person of Faith at Christendom’s dangerous conflation of the values of sport with the values of Christianity.
So these are my reasons for recording this episode. I know that as you listen, you might say to yourself “he’s ignoring all the positive things about football…teamwork, discipline, whatnot.” If this is the case, know that I’m not ignoring them, I’ve spent much of my life uttering those defenses myself. I’m simply rejecting them for the purposes of this discussion. As always, I want to encourage your angry or supportive responses, either at the Facebook page or our email sectarianreview@gmail.com. I even booted up a Twitter account, hopeless as I am in that medium.
Question 1: Idolatry – I just mentioned the term Idolatry in my prologue. I stand by it, but I’m open to debate. What is idolatry and how might it be related to American Football?
Question 2: Economic – I already threw Cleveland under the bus for what I think is a misappropriation of economic resources. Let’s talk with some specifics about the economics of the sport in America. What are some positive arguments one might make for our investment in this game. Why are those arguments silly?
Question 3: Cultural – Everyone knows that Marx called religion the opiate of the masses – something to keep the proletariat content in an oppressive system. Certainly he would replace that with football today, no? What cultural impact does the Football Industrial Complex impose on us?
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So that’s it. Have a listen and get in touch!
Danny
Sectarian Review episode 3 has just been published.
Follow this link to listen and weigh in:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSectarianReview
In this Godzilla-sized episode, Danny Anderson and Drew Van’tland are joined by Ed Simon to talk about the intersections between horror, religion, and ethics. This month’s Sectarians talk horror films, Nietzsche, H.P. Lovecraft, Flies, Babadooks, and, James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack. Also, Danny interviews Dr. Jamie McDaniel of Pittsburg State University about horror, liminality, and Disability Studies. Also listen for a couple of aural surprises!
Well episode 1 of Sectarian Review is in the books and you can have a listen here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSectarianReview
The next episode will be on the broad topic of voice. In that spirit, I wrote a manifesto to open the next show with:
Sectarian Review: A Manifesto
A voice cannot exist without ears. No word ever spoken since “God said” came from nothing. They say ashes to ashes, dust to dust; we say ashes from ashes, dust from dust.
Sectarian Review is hearing.
Sectarian Review is not knowing.
Progress strives to get things right, when getting things wrong is our perfect form. In wrongness we listen and our voices struggle to rise from forward-moving machines that finish the unfinished.
Sectarian Review is not speeches.
Sectarian Review is not a pounded desk.
We will fight against the terms “mansplaining” and “feminazi,” but will not ban them.
Sectarian Review rights no wrongs.
If you say “fixed in your privilege,” we understand the privilege in being fixed.
I don’t care what you have to say,
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is.
I’m against it.
Sectarian Review is Groucho Marx.
Sectarian Review is chaos.
Sectarian Review listens to the weary wisdom of yellow wallpaper.
Sectarian Review speaks back into its madness.
Sectarian Review is a voice,
not in
but to
the wilderness.
Mark Greif recently published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that considered the importance of Partisan Review in American intellectual life:
(http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921/).
What Greif identified as important about PR, its intellectual cultural contribution, many listeners of the Christian Humanist network of podcasts desire to experience in our own historical moment. This is why we listen.
As a sometimes-contributor to The Christian Humanist Podcast, (http://www.christianhumanist.org/) I’ve found great satisfaction and excitement in engaging with my co-hosts and listeners in conversation about the life of the mind in all its complexity and variousness. So when Farmer, Grubbs, and Gilmour offered me the chance to begin my own podcast, I was honored, and would now like to take them up on their kind offer. I had initially intended to begin this project last year, but unforeseen circumstances drew my time and attention and I had to hold off (long story short, I will be starting a new job as Assistant Professor of English at Mount Aloysius College this Fall). Now seems the time to begin this project.
I have no interest in hosting, as Michial puts it, The Danny Show. My own intellectual inspiration largely springs from New York Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, who was a central figure in the Partisan Review crowd, and he worked within that larger, vibrant intellectual community. So the idea I have is to imagine Partisan Review in the CHP network. Nathan Gilmour suggested the name Sectarian Review, and this is what I’ve gone with.
The idea is to have a large pool of scholars from a variety of disciplines contribute regularly or semi-regularly and to aim for an episode once a month (at least at first). Topics are solicited, and might include subjects such as: the role of the artist in society, Disney and Culture, The Christian Imagination, political commitment in the age of Twitter, etc… In short, whatever strikes the contributors as worthy of discussion.
In the tradition of PR, I welcome contributors from across disciplines. Economists, rhetoricians, sociologists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars, mathematicians, musicologists, and gender studies, as well as professionals from law, clergy, and medicine would bring a diversity of intellectual perspectives that would, I believe, prove to be an enlightening hour of conversation. (I’m sure I left disciplines out of the above list, so please forgive me and take it as a sign of my openness to a variety of perspectives).
If you are interested in participating, please feel invited to contact me at danny.p.anderson@gmail.com
I look forward to developing something great with you.
Danny Anderson
My best teaching has always sprung from a spirit of creativity. And creative teaching means taking risks and wildly experimenting. Sometimes my little experiments succeed and become regular classroom practices, and sometimes they crash and burn. Swings and misses, strikes and gutters. That’s my motto.This past semester, I had a success that both helped my students and drove home an important aspect of teaching and learning for me.
The semester has reached the point at which energy reserves are low and no amount of fracking will replenish them.
Thanksgiving is a full month away, and classrooms are filled with tired people staring at one another. When faced with such a dilemma, a teacher has only two choices. Cancel class or hurl a great ball of chaos at his students. Enter Groucho Marx.
English: Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, cropped from group photo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes his daemonic, chaotic energy is just the thing I need to push through the prison walls of my ivory tower. Case in point.
Today, I decided to drive my students just a bit crazy. In the midst of yet another revision of their visual analysis papers, they showed up to a classroom in which the theme song to Mission: Impossible was blaring. As soon as class started I ran around the room, frantically passing this assignment sheet out:
Now panicky themselves, my students leaped from their seats, and shouted to each other as if my classroom was the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
They ran out of my room and returned 15 minutes later. Out of breath? Sure. But re-engaged with their own educations.
Chaos is beautiful.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Marvin Wilson of Gordon College about his new book Exploring Our Hebraic Heritage. Wilson argues that Christianity was not invented in the first century and, in fact, begins with Abraham, not Jesus himself. He claims that in undervaluing these Jewish roots, Christian thought relies too heavily on Greek-influenced dualism and leaves much of the richness of the faith unexplored. In an attempt to deepen Christianity’s own intellectual tradition then, the author offers examples of Jewish theological practices that he suggests might serve the life of the Christian mind well.
The podcast of the interview can be found at the Christian Humanist at the following link:
The Arnoldian Project 