This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to
Ruins of a Christian church built into the ruins of an ancient Insula (apartment block) in the Southwest hillside of the Capitoline. Rome, where even the new ruins are three times older than my country.
Flower shop at night. It seems to me that the fellow on the right has had his fill of tourist taking snapshots.
Long exposure of St. Peter's square at night. Hard to capture the unbelievable huge vastness of the space without a fisheye lens, or a spy satellite or something. When Bernini first designed the Piazza the ginormous porch had not yet been built on the front of the Basilica, and the dome was much more prominent. The porch is generally derided for its clumsy proportions and opressive and overwhelming mass. In this photo you can really see how it makes the dome (which is, uh, the tallest in the world at *450* feet!!!!) look like a pathetic little beanie. This is a trick of scale, as the dome is actually almost a tenth of a mile from the front of the porch. I know, go big or go home, but you have to have a sense of perspective.
I think this is some really great counter-grafitti. 
The interior of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The columns are plundered from temples and buildings of antiquity, and the mosaics in the apse date from the late 13th century. I'll post some closeups further down. This is an incredibly beautiful and peaceful church. The floor is Cosmatesque mosaic, elaborate cosmological designs in small chips of colored marble. Again, more of that to come...
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