How to use this Page

Reenactment, it seems, defines our memorial experience, but isn’t it time to refocus on lessons learned?

The post Fifteen years after 9/11 appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Judy Willner is an educator and writing skills teacher for elementary school students in Philadelphia. When she lost her closest friend Cathy earlier this year, Judy decided the best way to honor her would be to set up a First Book campaign. She wanted to celebrate their shared love of reading and children.

Judy wanted to share Cathy’s story in her own words:

Dear Reader,

June 29 would have been my Cathy’s 60^th birthday. I had already started planning for it this time last year. We did that kind of stuff for each other – big parties, cards sent sixty days in advance.

Cathy was my best friend. We met in middle school, survived high school as nerdy late-bloomers, and traversed around Mexico together after graduation. I remember how the “older folks” who shared our tour bus loved her so much, how her smile and charm were infectious.

She was a reader, a card-sender, the queen of Facebook, and above all else, the most generous and kind-hearted person anyone could ever hope to be their best friend. I am so happy that for forty-five years I was privileged enough to call Cathy my best friend.

To celebrate and honor Cathy I decided to create a First Book Campaign in her name.

Cathy never had children of her own, but children had a very special place in her heart. Getting books to kids in her hometown of Philadelphia would have sent her over the moon. There would have been pictures all over Facebook of kids with their books!

Now, more than 500 books are going to be put in the hands of students in my classes and other classes across Philadelphia.

Cathy did that. And you can too.

Here’s to Cathy,

Judy Willner
Teacher and Book Lover
Philadelphia, PA

The post Cathy Was My Best Friend. Here’s How I Honored Her. appeared first on First Book Blog.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

I lost India, my beloved studio-mate Saturday, June 7th. I’m only now able to write about her.  She was loved and maybe even a little spoiled. India was her mama’s baby but she spent the workday with me. Not only was she my work companion—as well as the official Studio 27B greeter—India made many cameo appearances in my books. I’ve compiled them here. There are probably more and I’ll add them as I find them.

Sleep well, my princess.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Add a Comment

By Peter Gardella

Unlike the 4th of July with its fireworks or Thanksgiving with its turkeys, Memorial Day has no special object. But the new 9/11 Museum near the World Trade Center in New York has thousands of objects. Some complain that its objects are for sale, in a gift shop and because of the admission fee. Together, the old holiday and the new museum show what has changed and what remains constant about American civil religion.

For a century after Memorial Day began, it had its own date, May 30. That was lost in 1968, when Congress passed a law moving Memorial Day to the last Monday in May. Rather than interrupting the week whenever it falls, as July 4th still does, Memorial Day became the end of a long weekend. A search for Memorial Day parades finds as many parades happening on Sunday as on Monday. Some happen on Saturday.

These parades are not nearly as important as they were in the decades following World Wars One and Two, when veterans were much more numerous than they are now. The unpopularity of Vietnam also hurt Memorial Day parades. In my childhood, all grammar school children in my town marched on Memorial Day, but now even high school bands march reluctantly. Having parades to honor war dead came to seem to be celebrating war, and after Vietnam celebrating war was unacceptable. Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day, a day for visiting and decorating graves, and this quieter ceremony persists. On Memorial Day, the president still lays a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and a small crowd gathers for a speech.

But the site of the World Trade Center drew large crowds in the first weeks after the attack. The 9/11 Memorial has been drawing millions since it opened in 2011, and the new Museum will draw millions more. It will become a pilgrimage site of American civil religion.

As Mayor Bloomberg said at the dedication ceremonies, the site of the World Trade Center will join Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a “sacred marker” and a “solemn gathering place.” The word “sacred” was used by many at the dedication, and this sense of being set apart marks the sites of civil religion. The word “solemn” was identified more than a century ago as an aspect of religious feeling by the psychologist and philosopher William James. Expressions of religion involve solemnity, respect for what is held sacred, even when triumphal pride or ecstasy may also be expressed. Such solemnity can be felt at older sites of American civil religion, like the Capitol or the White House, the Washington Monument, and the memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson. The new Martin Luther King Memorial continues a mood of solemnity combined with triumph. It’s a place where clean white stone invokes eternity.

But the 9/11 Memorial belongs to another tradition, finding the sacred in dirty objects. Twisted beams of steel and mangled fire trucks dominate a seven-story atrium. More intimate objects, like displays of sweatshirts that were for sale on that day, now covered in ash, and shoes worn by survivors as they fled the Twin Towers, and melted fax machines and rolodexes, are displayed under glass to help visitors identify with the human victims and their suffering. Voices from last cell phone calls can be heard. This power in everyday objects has appeared before in memorials to the Holocaust and in the museum on Ellis Island. Leaving objects on graves and memorials is new to American civil religion, but it is a practice with old roots, seen on the graves of slaves in the South and in the tombs of Egypt. Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial surprised groundskeepers by leaving objects at that memorial when it opened, and people left objects along the fences that separated the streets of New York from Ground Zero in the months after September 11.

Questions have been raised about the stress on objects in the new museum. Some think that unidentified human remains should not be in the same building as a museum visited by tourists. According to some family members of victims, the gift shop profits from the deaths of their loved ones to support the salaries of administrators. Some object to the cafe. Even more object to the $24 admission fee. One answer might be to keep the gift shop and cafe but to eliminate any admission fee, following the examples of Smithsonian and National Park Service sites, some of which also contain human remains.

Many new forms of American civil religion stress death and the ancestors, not God and the future. The new museum goes down into the earth to bedrock, rather than rising toward heaven. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which follows the line of its landscape and honors the dead, and the Pearl Harbor Memorial, which centers on the sunken wreck of the U.S.S. Arizona and the dead that it contains, the 9/11 Memorial and the 9/11 Museum both emphasize descent. In the Memorial, cascades of water, the largest man-made waterfalls in the world, flow from bronze parapets etched with the names of the dead into the former footprints of the Twin Towers. The sound of the water cancels street noise. The sight of the water falling into the squares at the center of each footprint suggests the underworld journey.

But next to the Memorial and Museum rises the spire of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. This pairing echoes the rise of the Statue of Liberty, next to the buildings of Ellis Island where immigrants were examined and sometimes rejected. However much expressions of American civil religion change, they still affirm personal freedom, the triumph of the human person over all difficulties, and even over death.

Peter Gardella is Professor of World Religions at Manhattanville College and author of American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (Oxford, 2014). His previous books are Innocent Ecstasy (Oxford, 1985), on sex and religion in America; Domestic Religion, on American attitudes toward everyday life; and American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World. He is now working on The World’s Religions in New York City: A History and Guide and on Birds in the World’s Religions (with Laurence Krute).

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Memorial Day and the 9/11 museum in American civil religion appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

A private graduation party worthy of the cutest, tiniest and smartest tooth fairy in the whole wide world :)

Display Comments Add a Comment

For the longest night there is...in the memory of my late grandma and her unforgettable stories :)

Add a Comment

Display Comments Add a Comment

Add a Comment

...screamed my daughter.

Now you see it - now you don't!

No, I've turned all of the panels around and I am currently painting a couple coats of clear varnish on the backsides.  I wanted to do the backs first because I wasn't sure how tacky it would be for and for how long.  The primer we used seemed to always have a certain degree of tackiness - even at this point.  If that was to be the case with the varnish, then I wanted to do the fronts last and make sure they didn't lean up against anything while they awaited transportation.

I've now discovered that the varnish dries quickly and the finish isn't tacky at all.  Good!  Now, I plan to put the panels one at a time on sawhorses and paint a couple coats on the fronts and all edges.

In Loving Memory...

Past Horizons Group During Some Outdoor Activities

I had really hoped to be done by now - I feel like things have been moving at a snails pace.  Of course, we have since had the memorial for my father-in-law, Robert Smith, and will soon be doing much to care for my mother-in-law as we are the only relatives in the area.  We're also 2 1/2 weeks into our school year, now - so far so good!  I have an 8th grader, a 5th grader, and a preschooler this year.  Also, we'll be starting our multi-family, multi-subject co-op called Horizons on Tuesday.  I've had A LOT of communication, organization, supplies, and general loose-ends to tie up. So, I will be "laboring" on that this Labor Day Weekend.

Still, God is great and life is good!  Just keep plugging away...

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

By Margot Minardi The new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC, attracted criticism from an unlikely corner recently when poet Maya Angelou complained that one of the inscriptions made the civil rights leader seem like an “arrogant twit.” In a sermon on “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered two months before

Add a Comment