These pictures should be in a binder album all their own, with a numbered table of contents in the front describing each of the pictures and naming everyone in them. But they aren't. These pictures are from the College Choir tour my senior year. All three previous yeas I had taken pictures just as described … Continue reading A Blast of the Past #5 — the truncated album
Okay, Here's another blast of past photos. It shows an interesting start to a certain pastime of mine. These are pictures of Homecoming from my senior year at Houghton College. The theme that year was obviously some sort of Renaissance Theme. Now, I noticed in the pictures that the college madrigal singers had been brought … Continue reading A Blast of the Past #4 — Renaissance Man
More photos from my college days. Birthday photos. The question is which birthday? Do these photos come from the same birthday or different birthdays? You see, my birthday always fell right around the end of the second semester, usually in the break between the end of semester and finals week. So according to these pictures, … Continue reading A Blast of the Past #3 — Can You Count
Yesterday I featured photos from a 23-year-old photo album. They were from my wife's photo album, events I didn't experience. Today I started on an album from my own life. These pictures come from my original college days about 28 years ago. They were an assortment of events. And though I had experienced them all, … Continue reading A Blast of the Past — my past this time
Sometime around when this blog is set to publish, a busload of teens and adults from North Kansas City High School, members of the choral music program, will be arriving in Port New Orleans. Hopefully it won't take too long after that to get off the chartered bus and onto the Carnival Cruise ship Elation. … Continue reading Bon Voyage
Okay -- don't fade out on me now. I know some of you (the few that follow me regularly) look at the day's post to see "is he writing about his class again" and ignore it if I am. Well, today I am, sort of, but you don't need to fade out. Because today's post … Continue reading The Strength (and Sensitivity) to do Good
In chapter 13 of Class Matters Hook discusses moving back and forth between classes. She started in a working class family, and moved through college into a middle-class educated environment. Her fear was losing who she was as a daughter of the working class. But she learned through practice that she could maintain who she … Continue reading Crossing Class Boundaries
Chapter 12 of Class Matters is about racism in real estate, and how class is used to reinforce race. She discusses her experiences trying to buy property in California, Florida and New York. NYC, one of the most ethnically diverse city in the world, and yet is still so ethnically and racially segregated. And class … Continue reading Class Claims: Real Estate Racism
In the opening of Chapter 11 of Class Matters, Hook makes one of those common, but also logically flawed uses of words. Poor and poverty are not the same thing. To go from “the poor will always be with us” as the words of Jesus, to talking about poverty is to cloud an issue that … Continue reading Solidarity with the poor
“In the southern world of racial apartheid” is how Hook begins chapter 10 of Class Matters. Again she chooses the most charged terms possible to radicalize her conversations. This chapter focuses on poor whites vs. blacks. Poor whites, some of which are known as “white trash,” had an advantage in being able to lord it … Continue reading White Poverty: The Politics of Invisibility
At The Rainbow 