In 2004, while designing a town house on East Seventy-ninth Street, Pennoyer encountered a novel challenge: “The clients requested a greater number of mezuzahs than I had ever heard of.” Pennoyer is Episcopalian. “I was familiar with mezuzahs, but I knew very little about them. I started doing research.”Somewhat related, Ta-Nehisi Coates is posting on race and religion today:
In Deuteronomy, God instructs the Israelites to affix His holy words “upon the doorposts of thy house.” Eventually, rabbis specified which words, exactly, and how to affix them: the modern custom is to place a parchment scroll inside a small decorative case—a mezuzah—and screw it to the doorjamb at an angle. Some secular Jews go mezuzahless or make do with a single mezuzah on the front door; Orthodox Jews, or those with a liberal parchment budget, mark every room larger than sixteen square cubits. Pennoyer’s clients were quite observant. “They wanted one on every door except bathrooms and closets,” Pennoyer said. “Fifty-two in all.”
The Talmud is silent on the question of mezuzah design, and, to Pennoyer’s dismay, contemporary venders seemed inclined toward kitsch. “We wanted it to look exactly right,” he said. “We tried Manhattan Judaica shops, online auction sites, MezuzahStore.com. We could not find anything that wasn’t terribly, unacceptably ugly.”
Eventually, Pennoyer designed a line of artisanal mezuzahs, which he hopes to sell on the Internet. “I never set out to be a mezuzah salesman, but why not?”
Argument that killing religion would give us "one less thing to fight over" confuses the leaves with the tree itself.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
Basically "everything that does not aid my argument is religion." @CarlGWoodward @wheresthemind @JeffreyGoldberg
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
An under-appreciated point. “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” @JamesFallows http://t.co/F3WXWMvEC8
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
Notion that getting rid of religion gets rid of war seems to miss one of the great lessons of the 20th century.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
There's a parallel here with how people understand race. Lot of people believe if weren't different "races" then "racism" would disappear.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
Don't realize that phenotype is just a just pretext to take someone else's shit. If not that pretext, another one will do. Always has.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
Actual "Jews" are sort of beside the point. The words stands in for something else. There need not even be any "Jews" present.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) February 8, 2015
@HeerJeet @tanehisicoates See: NYT on 19th c. whites distinguishing btwn "Norman" whites and "Anglo Saxon" whites: http://t.co/5m8L0cHlkM
— Asher Smith (@Asher_E_Smith) February 8, 2015
His recent take on Spider-Man's marriage to Mary Jane was also good reading:
My mother and father never gave me "The Talk." "The Talk" was my entire childhood. From the time I remember them talking, I remembering them, my mother especially, talking about sex. It makes me laugh now but I recall her telling me, when my time came, not to just "jump up and down on a woman." I might have been ten when she first said that. My family was all kinds of inappropriate—hood hippies—and yet we were correct. I say this because I knew, from a very early age, that there was love in my house, imperfect love, love that was built, decided upon, as opposed to magicked into existence.
That was how Peter loved Mary Jane.