Violence and Insanity in Politics
I was down in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, with my fiancé attending the OBX Wedding Expo when news reached us about the recent shooting in Arizona. I rolled out of my hotel bed on Sunday morning to...
View ArticleFurther Thoughts on Insanity and Hyper-Rationality in Politics
A follow-up to my previous post about the relationship between politics and insanity: I recently came across this fascinating interview with Manfred Schneider, professor of aesthetics and literary...
View ArticleWho’s Democracy For?
It’s interesting to watch the quiet struggle of conflicting interests and ideologies going on inside the United States right now as the protests in Egypt unfold. An uncoordinated, non-ideological,...
View ArticleThe Killing Blow
Call me the name of peace as though it were a curse, and I will bless you, saying, Yes, and I will lift up the white flower of cowardice and trembling, I will lift up that blossom the color of snow and...
View ArticleMaking Money: Currency, Cultural Symbols and Civil Religion
The story reads like one of The Colbert Report’s “Nailed ‘Em” segments. Sixty seven year old Bernard von NotHaus — founder of Liberty Services and the creator of the Liberty Dollar, a collectable coin...
View ArticleSecular Society, Civil Religion & Alternative Spiritualities
(…Continued from yesterday’s post.) It might seem strange that a supposedly secular society would be so concerned with the use of its cultural symbols as to codify their exclusivity into law,...
View ArticleMaking Peace Out of Nothing At All
An amazing, though not surprising, story caught my eye recently in Yes! Magazine on the ever-developing scientific discoveries about our closest primate relatives in the animal kingdom. For those of us...
View ArticleWhat Does Justice Look Like?
What does justice look like? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself over the past few days, in the wake of the startling news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Responses have been flooding the internet as...
View ArticleOnly the Dead: On Memory and History
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” – George Santayana Popularly misattributed to Plato, it was Spanish-American George Santayana who first wrote that ringing phrase in his “Soliloquies in...
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Sustainable Living as Civil Disobedience
The Rosa Parks of Sustainable Gardening? Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks, the African-American civil rights activist who on December 1, 1955, refused to give up her bus seat to accommodate a...
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