A Demon River, Sexuality at Briercrest Bible College, and the Epistemic Roots of White Supremacy - Dinner Table Digest № 30
In this 30th edition of the Dinner Table Digest, I have included three disparate pieces, all intended to get us thinking. But before I get there, I wanted to talk a little bit about the readership of Dinner Table Don’ts. You see, I currently have about 75 subscribers, of which 10 are paid. As Twitter and Facebook become less relevant in reaching broader audiences, I know that I’m going to have to do a lot more work to bring on new readers. This partly means relying on you, my current readers, to share my content with your friends and family, and to suggest that they, themselves, subscribe.
So I want to run a contest:
if you, my dear reader, are able to induce someone to sign up for my free posts, I will give you one entry in a chance to win a year’s subscription.
If you yourself sign up to become a paid reader, you will receive two entries in a chance to win a year’s subscription.
And if you are able to induce someone else to become a paid reader, you’ll get three entries in a chance to win a year’s subscription.
In each case, you’ll have to reply to this Substack email and let me know that you are the reason that so-and-so has signed up.
And, if I hit 100 total subscribers and 15 paid readers by December 31st, 2022, everyone who has received an entry will get one more, and everyone on my entire list will be entered in the chance to win a year’s subscription.
Sections: The Demon River / Briercrest Bible College / What Lies Beneath
The Demon River - J.B. McKinnon - Hakai Magazine
This piece chronicles the devastating effects of the destructive atmospheric river that hit the Pacific Northwest and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia in November 2021, pouring over the mountains into the dry, desert-like part of the province known as The Interior. Zeroing in on the Nicola River, the author explores the consequences of having a terrifying wildfire season followed by the kind of rain and flooding that followed only months later. The narrative follows Constable Brett Schmidt of the RCMP, who, after becoming stranded along a washed out Hwy 8, tries to trek back to Spence's Bridge in over inhospitable terrain with a raging, overflowing river below him.
Schmidt trudged onward into what was now the darkness of night. The scene soon turned from shocking to surreal. The roar of the river filled the valley. From under the water came the thunder of boulders rolling in the deep, and the whoomp of hillsides collapsing. The noise shook the air, and rocks, some the size of Schmidt’s backpack, began tumbling down onto the road.
He could hear power lines twang and poles thud around him as they were toppled by the flood. In the end, 87 poles came down—one of them ultimately found nearly 400 kilometers away, having floated down three different rivers to the coast.
By the light of his phone, Schmidt ducked and wove between the fallen lines, unsure whether electricity still flowed through them or not. Once, he came to a halt with his face just inches from a line. For the second time that day he felt the plain horror of nearness to death.
Then he realized that he wasn’t alone. Animals were gathering on the road: bighorn sheep and deer, as stunned by the day’s events as he was. Glancing down, he saw two creatures plodding beside him, keeping pace like a couple of dogs walking to heel. Except that they weren’t dogs. They were beavers. He wondered if the light of his phone was acting as some kind of beacon, the electronic halo of a patron saint of animals.
In front of him, the road once again petered out into the rampaging river. This time, though, the mountainside was too steep to climb.
I’m so close, he thought. I can’t turn around now. I just want to get the hell out of here. Then he saw that an asphalt ledge, all that was left of the road, still clung to the embankment. He eased his way out onto it, sometimes stepping on the ledge, sometimes the cliff itself.
Then he was falling.
Nik Turner, one of the key members of proto space rock band Hawkwind, passed away on November 10th, 2022. Here's a 2010 performance of my favourite Hawkwind tune, ‘You Shouldn't Do That.’
In the past few months I have been reading more and more academic literature, and have needed a better file management system, so that I can properly organize my reading. ENTER ZOTERO! After using this program for a couple of weeks, I wonder what I ever did without it. Despite the fact that there is no Android app, the application’s reading pane, along its integration with Microsoft Word, have already saved my bacon more than once.
I have set up a Zotero Group, where I will be placing interesting academic pieces that might be suited for a wider audience. If you want to join, go ahead and do so, or let le know, and I’ll make sure to add you.
LGBTQ students allege mistreatment, want change at Saskatchewan Bible college - CBC News
I attended Briercrest Bible College in Caronport, SK (one hour west of Regina) for two years right our of high school, from 2000-2002. I was a part of a short-lived program called LiNK, a small cohort of first year students who had aims of attending a secular university, where a focus was placed on preparing the Christian for a secular educational environment. While I would consider my time there to be largely positive - perhaps shockingly, it was there that I was introduced to Karl Marx for the first time - there were other elements of my time there that, looking back, were not so positive. Thinking specifically of my second year, when as a Resident Assistant for the next cohort of LiNK students, I was tasked with enforcing the Student Handbook, which contained a blanket prohibition on sexual activities outside of an official marriage between one man and one woman. Several years later I learned that one of the men I was responsible for was gay. It should have been apparent at the time, but I was naïve and had never met a 2SLGBTQ+ person before. Thinking back, I can’t imagine what he must have gone through inside his own head as he dealt with the obvious contradictions of being at a conservative bible college where 2SLGBTQ+ people are considered the epitome of sinfulness, despite his own sexuality. With this in mind, news reports are finally starting to report on things that those of us formerly on the inside already knew: private colleges that accept significant amounts of public money and are granted the ability to confer full academic degrees must not discriminate against 2SLGBTQ+ people.
The Canadian Press interviewed eight former LGBTQ students from across Canada who attended the college over the last two decades. They said they experienced homophobia, abuse and discrimination that left them fearful and vulnerable.
They said they are speaking out because they're concerned for current students at the college and want changes or the school defunded. Briercrest receives funding from the province and was given $250,000 for this school year.
One student said she was struggling with her sexuality and feeling suicidal, and that a counsellor told her to pray it away. Another said a professor wrote a derogatory word on a white board in class to describe homosexuals. Others said speakers were brought in to teach them how to deny their sexuality, and they were encouraged to marry a person of their opposite sex.
Pawelke … did not respond to a question about a 2019 school address in which he compared sex outside of heterosexual marriage to intercourse with animals, robots and corpses.
"It's a departure of the ideal. It's the truth we need to embrace," Pawelke said in the address, which is posted on the school's YouTube channel. …
Like McGillicky, several students said they were outed after peers or faculty disclosed their sexual orientation to others without permission, resulting in bullying and alienation from their religion, family and friends.
Some students said they were invited to professors' homes for dinner, where the conversation topic was their sexuality. Others said they experienced or witnessed conversion therapy under the description of "counselling.”
What Lies Beneath: The Epistemic Roots of White Supremacy - Briana Toole - in ‘Political Epistemology’
I thought that this academic article deserved a wider audience. One of the wonderful things about political and social philosophy is that it is usually more easily digested by a wider audience. I hope this piece is able to draw out for you what makes White Supremacy such an insidiously difficult and perniciously complicated evil to uproot.
The view of police as “dispassionate enforcers of the law” cannot be reconciled with the understanding of police as agents who enforce unjust racial hierarchies. Resistance to this conceptualization of the police does not stem from a distrust of testimony (a first-order exclusion), as we have seen more and more that people are willing to acknowledge the excessive force with which police officers treat Blacks. Nor is it the result of inadequate resources for understanding (a second-order exclusion), as the epistemic interventions that would allow us to understand police brutality are in place. Such knowledge instead seems impossible because it conflicts with our understanding of police officers as basically good—an understanding itself provided by white supremacy. This resistance is thus the product of the resilience of white supremacy as an epistemological system. Dotson argues that when an individual is “confronted with the epistemological resilience of a maladjusted system . . . [her] epistemic agency is compromised by being rendered incapable of contributing to the domains of inquiry relevant to her insight” (Dotson, 2014, p. 130). Thus, we see that the knowledge contributions of Black activists—pathways for the abolition and defunding of the police—have struggled to be taken up—resulting in a third-order epistemic exclusion, one that I argue is owed to the resilient epistemological system that is white supremacy.
All FREE subscribers have access to Dinner Table Digests, and to any past content that has been made available to everyone.
A paid subscription nets you Special Edition Digests (like this recent edition on Abortion Rights), my Peter, What Books Are You Reading series, original essays, and acerbic social commentary. Become a supporter of my work today!
I am grateful for your support, and your eyeballs; I look forward to producing interesting and engaging content in the future. I would be especially honoured if you would consider donating $5 per month so that I can continue to create more excellent work in the future. And, of course, if you have any ideas about what you would like to see among the special content, I am all ears!