David Perez Years ago, I was sitting in a café with my rabble-rousing friend James, both of us gnawing our teeth over the myriad difficulties facing the peace and social justice movement in the United States. We cited the usual suspects that stood in the way of progress: the entrenched corporate and financial elite; the …
Sinead Murphy ‘Goodness’ is not the word I wanted to use in this article. But ‘ethics’ sounded too abstract, ‘morality’ too rule-bound, ‘virtue’ too archaic, and ‘kindness’ too corporate (at least since ‘random acts of kindness’). The ubiquity of that dreaded term ‘safety,’ brayed at us from every angle, has made all the old names …
Edward Curtin In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil …
David Perez Hardly a day goes by without news of the multi-sided impact of the digital world, how it shapes our individual lives and our collective future. Curse and cure and contradiction, it’s all unfolding before us at hyper-speed, and it’s often difficult to keep up with all the latest gadgets and inventions. As I …
Edward Curtin It was early morning on St. Patrick’s Day and I was sitting in the kitchen eating a few slices of delicious Irish Soda Bread. My wife had made it at 5am while I was still in bed half-asleep, but its smell wafting through the rooms induced me to get up. From outside the …
Edward Curtin It’s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins. Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live it, even though most of us don’t tell it until later, if we can find our tongues. …
Edward Curtin After a night of haunting dreams that flowed as if they were written like running water, written on air, as the Roman poet Catullus once said, in the depth of a dark winter morning, I decided that I would take a walk in the afternoon, hoping that the sun would then appear, and …
Steve Lipman A review of Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a Born-Again Jew, by Michael Lesher. Published by Lincoln Square Books The typical Jew-who-has-found-the-light-and-discovers-God book follows a familiar pattern: some description of the author’s upbringing in an identifiably Jewish but resolutely secular family, some event that causes him as a young adult to examine …
Edward Curtin Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity. The laws of necessity are as unexceptional as the laws of gravitation. The human faculty of compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural. To forget oneself, …
Edward Curtin “Mendacity is a system we live in.” Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof A profusion of philosophical, psychological, and political ink has been spent on the subject of lying and liars. The toll in loves lost and relationships destroyed from lying is incalculable. All the war dead are victims of government lies; …
