AROUND THE WORLD wide web: PART ONE

I'm not sure how well known the website, Burnside Writers Collective (BWC), is, but every so often (once a week?) they have a posting entitled Across the Universe where the author gives four or five links to interesting happenings on the internet. It's a great resource to find new corners of the web or fresh perspectives on popular topics. I suppose they could simply Twitter links every couple days but I just love how they're all grouped together in some sort of megaTweet of substantive information.

Anyways, I'm copying their idea and giving mine a snappy title: AROUND THE WORLD wide web.

Without any further ado, check out what's hip on the internets:

• Sufjan Steven directed and scored a film about New York's ugliest highway, The BQE. It released last fall but Pitchfork has the entire film streaming for the next week. I've loved the music for a few months now and the visual side (which I'm watching now) is equally beautiful.
• A great blog entry (stolen from BWC's Across the Universe) on appropriate responses to art.
• I don't pretend to know anything about fashion, etc. but The Sartorialist is one of my favorite GoogleReader followings. Just stylish people shot in the "real" world.
• March Madness has been madness. I thoroughly enjoyed filling out and following my own brackets. Here's Obama's picks.

sins and mistakes and the distinction

Taken from a comments section of a blog I regularly read (BurnsideWriter'sBlog). Interesting thought that I had previously never really considered:

"... it drives me nuts when people refer to sins as "mistakes"; if you cheated on your wife, or posed for pictures you now regret, or embezzled money, or used a racial slur, you didn't make a mistake. A mistake is when you misspell a word, or when you say "Jerry Lewis" when you meant to say "Jerry lee Lewis". A sin is a sin, not a mistake. I should know. I've sinned a lot. Calling it a mistake is a way of minimizing it."

Questioning

Hi,

I've been busier than I have been in my earlier college experiences. This has led to the decrease in blogs especially when I made the mental decision to limit my blogs to more than the mundane. I've started on a few others and then stopped midway but I thought that although this one is brief and not really a full thought, it's still worth posting. So keep in mind my slight hesitation in posting demi-thoughts...

I occasionally read articles on a website called The Burnside Writers Collective. I like what they say and the subjects vary. They recently posted a review of a book called Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion in which the author (Antonio Monda) interviews a variety of famous people, many of which have Nobel Prizes or are accomplished writers (basically - the intellectual elite). This book is on my list to read. Hopefully this summer.

Anyhow, the article ended with 8 questions which are a compiling of the questions asked in the book:

1. Do you believe in God?
2. What is the image you have of God?
3. Were you brought up in a religious environment?
4. Then what happened?
5. What do you think there is after life?
6. What artists do you admire in whom you feel a strong religious presence?
7. What is your opinion of Dostoevsky’s assertion “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted?”
8. How do you see a believer? Someone deluded? Ingenuous? A person blessed by grace?

Good questions. I'm too tired to put the mental effort into legitimately answering them but I wonder how I would respond and how my responses have changed in the recent years.

I think that's it. If you wish to respond to the question(s) through comments, blogs of your own, or verbally with myself or others, then do it.