In a perfect follow-up to our video podcast posted on Friday, Lake Lambert III pens a major op-ed in USA Today’s Monday religion section.

Jesus instructed his followers not to serve both God and mammon. Buddha taught his followers to abandon all earthly attachments. But in the past few years, a new workplace spirituality movement has proclaimed the exact opposite and seeks to transform capitalism away from narrow materialism. Many wonder whether it will work, but the better question is whether we want our work to be holistic and all-consuming.

According to the workplace spirituality movement, creativity at work is a spiritual process that involves the whole person and not just the intellect or manual skill, and the new class of knowledge workers is devoting more of their time to work because they find deep meaning and a sense of purpose on the job. Today, clergy from various traditions serve as corporate chaplains, and the new faces of spiritual leadership are organizational development consultants who lead employees through creativity-enhancing spiritual practices. Overall, the contemporary workplace is regarded as a community, open to spirituality in the same way that it is hospitable to friendship and love.

Lake Lambert, author of Spirituality, Inc., talked to NYU Press editor Jennifer Hammer about Religion in the American Workplace.

The Boston Globe takes a look at the comedy sprouting from Scott Brown’s improbably election to the Senate last month. In doing so, they consult the editors of our book, Satire TV.

Jonathan Gray, coauthor of the book, “Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era,’’ said Brown should see his presence in comedy routines as a badge of honor. “At one level, it means he’s arrived,’’ Gray said. “Once you’re being satirized, you’re clearly seen to matter.’’

And Gray’s coauthor, Old Dominion University communications professor Jeffrey P. Jones, said comedians play an important role shaping public perceptions of politicians, especially those who are not well known.

“Comedians, in this day and age, with someone we don’t know a lot about, get to play a large role in writing that person for the public imagination,’’ Jones said.

“To those of us in Virginia and in Texas, what we know about him is being shaped by this third voice, and we’ll see if he’s able to overcome that over time,’’ he said.

The Announcement of NYU’s new Riot Grrl Archive at Fales Library has brought new attention to Alison Piepmeier’s book, Girl Zines. Two blog reviews, here and here, and a great review in the Charleston City Paper:

Bringing these zines into her classroom, Piepmeier recognized their continuing popularity even in a time of blogs and social networking. When a New York University Press editor asked her if anyone had written a book on the subject, she found that nobody had. Her new book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism unearths the phenomenon, analyzing titles like Fragments of Friendship, Grit & Glitter, and I’m So Fucking Beautiful.

Although the current crop of photocopied or self-printed zines have their direct roots in the Riot Grrrl music scene of the early ’90s (Piepmeier often refers to them as grrrl zines), she traces their ancestry through the scrapbooks of the 19th century, mimeographed pamphlets in the ’70s, and the ornate handmade packaging that some zines have been shipped in over the years to give her academic subject extra validity. “I too had fallen into the mindset that these weren’t important enough to study on their own,” she says. By placing them in a greater historical context she was able to take them seriously in their own right. “Many zines I read are incredibly thoughtful and complex,” she adds. “They’re documents of feminist and female legacy.”

Check out all the art for the book at our minisite.

An article about the Modern Languages Association’s annual meeting by Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. His new book, No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, has just been published. Read the full article at Inside Higher Ed.

A generation ago, when the MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus sought to reform the organization, it circulated several posters at annual meetings. Most telling, I thought, was a photograph of the Titanic, captioned “Are you enjoying your assistant-ship?” It was no easy task back then convincing the average tenured MLA member that the large waves towering over our lifeboats would not be good for surfing. Now the average college teacher is no longer eligible for tenure, and the good ship humanities is already partly under water.

From popmatters.com –

It’s easy to tell the difference between a book that is written with genuine passion, and one that’s written to fulfill a contract, or build a curriculum vitae, or fatten a wallet. Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville fits firmly into the former category, as is apparent from its very first pages when the author, David Freeland, recounts a recurring dream: “Although some details change, the basic situation is the same: I am walking in an American city sometime during the middle of the 20th century. I keep searching for a neighborhood that I know, from my previous visits, contains a large number of old theaters. By the time I figure out where the neighborhood is I am forced to remember that many of the theaters have been torn down… but always I am able to find one or two that are still there—and feel tremendous relief when I go inside and head to a seat, usually in the balcony where I can get a nice view of the whole building. But always something is different about the interior: either it has been stripped of all architectural detail, just a blank shell, or else the stage seems so far away that I can barely see it. It’s as if I’m watching it from the opposite end of a telescope. Everything appears to be growing smaller, shrinking in front of me to a pin-sized speck before evaporating completely.” The emotions that motivate a recurring dream like this are a combination of nostalgia for a past that never was, and yearning, mixed with a bitter regret, for a present that can never be again. Freeland, a writer who has the courage of his dreams, is not afraid to remind us of what we have wiped out, and in our stumbling, childlike sleepwalk through time, continue to destroy. Michael Antman.

The Back Table is a new blog highlighting special collections at the libraries of New York University. This blog was born out of a collective interest among archives and library staff to forge a stronger connection between the NYU special collections, the departments that act in accordance with them, and the larger library and archives community. Our goal is to maintain a virtual space for exploring our professional interests as archivists and examining how those interests apply to our work at NYU Libraries.

Watch for posts every Tuesday. The month of February will feature introductory posts from each Bobst special collections repository (Fales, University Archives, Tamiment) and affiliated departments (Preservation, Digital Libraries).

The Wall Street Journal reviews Spirituality, Inc.: Religion in the American Workplace by Lake Lambert III.

In a country where the line defining the separation of church and state is well drawn—lawsuits over Christmas manger scenes aside—the separation of church and work is hardly defined at all. An employee’s spiritual expression may be seen by his cubicle-mate as an admirable emblem of shared values or as a troubling imposition. When a boss places, say, a Bible prominently on his desk, what should his subordinates think? Should it be regarded like a family photo or thought to be a source of intimidation? The legal guidelines here are surprisingly vague. The courts still haven’t fully worked out what is allowed.

Expressions of spirituality with no specific religious affiliation are considered less likely to cause complaint. In Mr. Lambert’s telling, this sort of spirituality is in fact linked to the advent of the knowledge-based economy. “Creativity, community, autonomy, and holistic concern became new employee benefits that supported the productivity of the new knowledge class,” he writes, “and a particular type of spirituality found a partner in knowledge work.” Today’s workplace spirituality is a search for meaning, but it embraces questions rather than looks for answers. It is essentially, Mr. Lambert says, “the quest for wholeness.”

The Association for Asian American Studies has awarded Jamillah Karim’s American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah its 2008 Book Award in Social Sciences! The award will be given out in April at the annual meeting in Austin, TX.

José Ramón Sánchez , author of Boricua Power, wrote a great article a couple weeks ago about the NYTimes ignoring Latinos in its year-end round up of deaths. Read the full article at his blog.

When does one dead Hollywood actor trump another? When does one fierce dead organizer against social injustices trump another? In fact, when does a dead chimp responsible for a hideous attack catapult himself above the life of a dead Mexican anthropologist with over 150 books and articles filled with archaeological and cultural studies about Mayan civilization? For the New York Times, the answer seems to be whenever the second option is a Latino.

Travis the chimp was one of the few fortunate deceased to get star billing in the New York Times 2009 annual issue devoted to the passing of important people. Travis, you may remember, was the Connecticut chimpanzee, raised by a woman in Stamford, who was killed after he mauled the face off of his caretaker’s friend. This annual Times compilation included twenty-three essays on this year’s deceased. Like in most years, not one single Latino made it onto this lamentable list of the departed famous and not so famous.

Many Latinos died this year, arguably many of them having led interesting and notable lives. They were not interesting enough for the New York Times. This newspaper highlighted the death of Karl Malden but not Ricardo Montalban. The latter was the debonair Mexican movie and television star best known for his roles on the Star Trek series and his commercials for promoting the “soft, Corinthian leather” in Chrysler Motors car seats.

The Times also wrote about the death of Crystal Lee Sutton, a fierce labor organizer in the South. But it ignored the death of Esther Chavez, a Mexican accountant who was one of the first to discover a pattern of murders in the 1990s against Mexican women working in U.S.-owned factories in border cities. Chavez helped to draw public attention and government prosecution against men who kidnapped young Mexican women off the streets, raped and killed them with impunity. Her advocacy led the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to rule that Mexico had violated the human rights of women.