On Disney-fication (thumbs down) and NCR (thumbs up!)

First, a thank you! to recent commenters: Kim, Debbie, Gail, Loretta, and Carol.

One commenter, Loretta Pyles, is a very good friend who has recently started her own blog. She lives in New Orleans and teaches at Tulane University; some of her blog posts are about the experience of post-Katrina New Orleans (a city I dearly love). Recently she wrote about the “disney-fication” of the city, a topic that I can easily get riled up about. This whole business of turning something real and gritty, beautiful and terrible, into a cartoon-fake, cleaned-up, family-friendly version of itself is highly offensive to me. It represents a form of denial of the complexity of life, a type of escape into something that is superficially attractive (all clean and tidy) but shallow, and without the blood and guts that cannot be separated from life itself.

Here’s a picture of Loretta:

Also, the latest edition of National Catholic Reporter (which is a great publication) has a nice story about faculty and staff members at Avila University who have become Associates of the Sisters of St. Joseph (CSJ). The Sisters of St. Joseph are a religious order that traces its history to France; they are known for their capacity and willingness to perceive the needs of their neighbors, wherever they might be, and finding ways to meet those needs. You can say that they are all bodhisattvas, ones who hear (and respond to) the cries of the poor. In Kansas City, St. Teresa’s Academy, Avila University, and St. Joseph’s Hospital were all founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph.