Damn! Invisible Adjunct is packing it in. Rolling up the carpets, unplugging the lamps, feeding the leftover cake to the cat. In short, leaving. Leaving both blogging and adjuncting. I don’t know which is sadder. Well yes I do – the latter is. Presumably it was more important to her, so it’s worse that the world of academe closed her out. My Cliopatria colleague Ralph Luker and IA’s real world history teaching colleague is angry about it.

I am stunned! Angry, first of all, at the academy and more particularly at the history profession for its failure. And, yes, it is the profession’s failure, not IA’s. Deeply sorry, secondly, for the loss of a humane and deeply thoughtful voice in

There is a discussion at Twisty Sticks of the subject we were talking about a few days ago (‘Immunity’), and will be talking about in the future – as I said, it’s one I’m curious about and would like to explore. The subject of Why Does Religion Get Special Treatment? Why does it get a blank check, a free pass, a dispensation, diplomatic immunity. Why are there special rules that apply to religion and nothing else, why does religion get to trump other concerns, why does the importance of religion outweigh the importance of other things – of other concerns, commitments, values, desires, goals.

Which raises a related question, one which probably needs answering or at least clarifying in order … Read the rest

Norm Geras has taken up the discussion of women and names. (And by the way, speaking of Norm, there was a conference to honour his career at Manchester a few days ago. Chris Bertram of Twisty Sticks gave a paper there on Marx and Engels reading Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave one on the singularity of the Holocaust. I was not there, I was over here, several miles away, turning pale with envy.) You’ll see that he doesn’t entirely agree with JerryS.

..what’s always struck me as the most difficult issue is not – as gets pointed out pretty quickly – that by keeping her own name a woman is still thereby accepting to be known by the name of another