Gideon Burton's Blog

Review: God for President (New Play Project)

Religious identity in America may be more deeply partisan than political identity. But as Robert Bellah has convincingly argued, America sustains a "civil religion." The idea, articulated by Rousseau in The Social Contract, is that a few general religious ideas--the existence of God, belief in morality, and especially the rejection of religious intolerance--are held sacred by the people. There is a reverence for religious pluralism in the United States, a kind of civic pride that one's neighbor can be Jewish, Muslim, or whatever flavor of Christian, and good for us.

Katherine Gee's new play, God for President (which premiered at the Provo Theatre Company last night), is a celebration of civil religion.

Fire and Rain: The New Play Project

Primal elements themed the latest installment of the New Play Project's series of short plays, adding to fire and rain the fundamental of faith. These were no morality tales, no Sunday school homilies. As good drama should, these amateur productions explored and experimented. Diverse in theme and approach, they once again proved the viability and growing maturity of amateur LDS theater. (See also my review of their last round of plays from July, 2008)

Open Access meets Open Teaching in the Institutional Repository

At a presentation on Open Access to the Academic Vice President's Council at BYU last week we discussed changes in academic publishing and proposed moving toward a Open Access policy for this university comparable to Harvard's.

A key component of the Open Access movement is the rise of institutional and disciplinary repositories. While these are archives, their role will not be purely archival. A repository becomes a de facto publishing platform, and the publishing it will do will not be limited to republishing copies of scholarly articles that have first appeared elsewhere. An institutional repository will be a place where faculty can deposit their teaching materials. Open Access meets Open Teaching.