Contextualizing Urinization: A Topic Worthy of a Dissertation

As English professors have admonished, context is everything. And, as I observe in this blog post, it's hard to teach four-year-olds.

Fresh back from a weekend camping trip, Levi stood at the edge of our front porch, pulled down his shorts and peed into the the hedges.

On one hand, the proper parental response is straight forward enough: "Look Levi, now that we've left the campsite, you can't pee outside anymore." On the other hand, it's worth acknowledging that there are complicated culturally concepts here: nakedness and clothing, the civilized versus the wild, nature and our attempt to return to it through the stylized activity of camping.

Then, once you've introduced camping, you'll have to note that black people don't do it much, poor white people to it differently than wealthy whites, and men and women have differing norms for urinating while doing it. So, you've got race, class and gender -- the essential ingredients of any dissertation. Just add "modernity" and stir for your dissertation topic:

"Contextualizing Urinization: A Critical Analysis of Modernity's Production of 'Camping'"

Quote of the Week: Christian Prison Love

And the quote of the week -- via a New York Times story on the effects of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship -- goes to ... Robert Perkinson. The Times tells us, Perkinson is a historian and the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.”

In setting up the quote the Times writer Mark Oppenheimer explains that, "Dr. Perkinson once visited the Carol S. Vance Unit, a Texas prison that subcontracts with Prison Fellowship for programming.... "He was both discomfited and amazed by what he saw."

And then follows this gem from Perkinson:

On the one hand, it was flagrantly unconstitutional. If you didn’t believe God created the earth in seven days, and not just that same-sex relations were a sin but so was masturbation, you couldn’t graduate from this program. It was almost Taliban-style. But it was the only prison of all that I visited in Texas that was permeated with love.