A throwback Thursday post
Someone suggested to the Bodleian Library on Twitter that they should post recordings of ambient library noises on their SoundCloud. I initially misread this as ambient literary noises, like the sound of the snow in Narnia melting… the slight tearing noise made by the Subtle Knife as it opens the way between universes… the ghosts of Christmas tenses manifesting to Scrooge…
That got me thinking about more ambient literary noises that I would like to hear.
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It’s Disability Pride Month, so I thought I would take a look at books written by and for disabled people.
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A Throwback Thursday post
Eco-spirituality is a new name for a set of ideas that goes back a long way.
Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno both viewed the universe as divine. Their ideas were broadly pantheistic. The implications of the idea that the universe itself is divine are explored by Sam Webster, who prefers immediacy to immanence. The universe is a theophany, the manifestation of the Divine. The implication here is that everything is sacred, and we should take care of the Earth and other beings; we certainly don’t have dominion over them.
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People celebrate disability pride in July because it was the month when the United States passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to protect the civil rights of disabled people. Northern Ireland released similar legislation in 1995. England, Wales and Scotland passed disability legislation in 2002. In Canada, each province has disability legislation, introduced from 2005 onwards.
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A Throwback Thursday post
I can’t be the only person who starts reading a Pagan book, gets to an exercise in the middle of the chapter, thinks that I don’t have time to do the exercise right now, and either puts the book down, planning to come back later (and never do), or skips the exercise and reads on.
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A Throwback Thursday post
What can fictional religions tell us about real religions? Are constructed religions just as valid as ancient ones? What about real-world religions based on fictional ones? One impetus for creating constructed religions is for use in jurisdictions where religious activity is imposed by the authorities – but people often find that their joke religion then takes on a life of its own.
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I was researching and writing a post about Indigenous people in tech when I discovered an amazing company called Animikii and their resources about data sovereignty and resisting generative AI (thanks to this article, Celebrating Indigenous Tech).
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Vox Clamantis Books is located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. So let’s unpack what that means.
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A Throwback Thursday post
Science fiction, particularly the writings of Ursula le Guin, explores hypothetical alternative societies, cultures, futures, and histories. I am currently watching Babylon 5 again on DVD, and would highly recommend it as an exploration of what happens when a totalitarian and xenophobic government takes over, and how people come together to resist.
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In a previous post, I looked at the possibility of being granted a religious exemption from using AI. This raises a possible dilemma: if people of conscience can get religious exemptions from harmful activities like war and other forms of causing suffering to others, how is that different from allowing bigots to opt out of registering same-sex marriages, or baking a cake for same-sex weddings, or allowing anti-vaxxers to opt out of getting vaccines?
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