Beginning a survey on religions

I'm going to start a series next week, taking one world religion at a time and attempting a 50,000-foot view of origin, founder (if any), holy book(s), and major holy days or celebrations. It seems to me that this is a significant part of culture that many people overlook.

I grew up in a religious family, where our faith was a big part of our lives, and not just on Sunday morning. I have known many people in the United States for whom that is also true. A few years back, I found an article one Facebook discussing why several Muslim students chose to attend the University of Notre Dame, a major Catholic campus.  Among the reasons was that a religious campus understood religious observations that can include clothing and dietary restrictions.

E pluribus unum

The title of this post, "E pluribus unum," is written on the ribbon the bald eagle carries, on the Great Seal of the United States. The constitutional committee suggested it as the motto for our country on July 4, 1776. (source)

It means, "Out of many, one," and it was the de facto motto of the United States until Congress officially adopted "In God we trust" in 1956.

The McCarthy era, which was about the same time that the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

If it wasn't already clear from last Friday's post on Democratic Change, I believe our United States were founded on the principal of religious pluralism. While I read arguments that the Constitution was written to exclude ethnic pluralism (with the awful assessment of slaves as 3/5ths of a person), I believe in Civic Republicanism, that Civil Rights belong to ALL Americans, not merely to white people.

Global and transnational feminism

I wanted to link to a summary of different types of feminism, but my Google skills are not showing the taxonomy that I am familiar with.

I've described before how the feminism I grew up hearing about did not resonate with me. I grew up familiar with White, Western feminism, often promoted by executives (like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead ) who seemed to have supportive families, connections, and the money to go to Ivy-League schools.

Marriage Equality

Yesterday was a beautiful day, here in Madison County, Alabama.

I have talked about Intersectionality several times recently. Intersectional feminism is a branch of feminism developed by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. From my perspective, this looked like a good article to start with: "Why Our Feminism Must Be Intersectional (And 3 Ways to Practice It)".

Crawl, Walk, Run

I believe the title phrase came from one of Jim Collins' books, on how people and companies can learn and develop new skills. In part, it is about maintaining discipline.

For example, when my husband tries out a new recipe, he is a stickler for sticking to it exactly, the first few times. (I, on the other hand, see recipes as a starting point. It's not unusual for me to look at the ingredients list and say "I don't like this, so I'll substitute that.")

When it comes to building a Lego MindStorms robot, I've been trying to stick with the crawl - walk - run discipline that my husband used in cooking. So our first robot, is straight from the Robotics Invention System book that came with the kit.