This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws. I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp. The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we […]
Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment
Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history: Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible […]
Brueggemann on social ideology
“We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good… [This] ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very […]
Copeland: Deeper change is needed
The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us […]
Copeland: On the value of lives
I’m still processing some of the materials I worked through over the last few months to talk about trauma, resilience, nonviolence, and atonement. So I’m still reading Copeland’s work on embodiment and the value of human lives, and it’s echoing for me as I read headline upon headline of more Black death. Over the weekend in […]
Divesting in order to re-invest
When we move beyond our aspirational tales about fictive kinship and we-are-family, we gain the space to examine exactly what solidarity means.” —One of us“ When kinship hasn’t also meant solidarity, I’ve felt such a sense of betrayal. It just feels wrong when people I know I have a deep, existential relationship with use their energy to work against my thriving. The culture of […]
