Dear Layla
Do you Remember The days Of Bert Sacks? Robert Fisk? Fadi Kiblawi?
Category: Activists
The Buddha Smiles in Hell
A Reflection on Claude Anshin Thomas, At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace. Shambhala Publications, 2004. In one of the most fascinating pieces I’ve read on the U.S. war in Iraq, the litany-esque,…
Reflections on “Beautiful Resistance” by Laura Weis
My friend Laura Weis wrote the following about a play we saw together in July in Xavier Hall on SLU’s campus. The playwright and lead actor was Magan WIles, one of my former students and…
The Meaning of Vietnam
This year there has been a lot of reflection and retrospection, 40 years after the pivotal 1968, which included the Tet Offensive, assassinations (King and Kennedy), student uprisings, and protest and police violence outside the…
The Work Goes on
Recently I learned that Norman Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel and banned from coming there for ten years. Reading about this, I thought of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party…
The Prophetic Voice (Accompaniment)
A Reflection on Rosalie G. Riegle, Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her Convert to Catholicism, unapologetic pacifist, denizen of the Lower East Side, comforter of the poor, journalist by trade, and nay-sayer to secular…
The Power of Example
for Michelle Conley For years in my Social Justice course at Saint Louis University, I assigned the 1993 paperback by Cao Ngoc Phuong entitled, Learning True Love: How I Learned & Practiced Social Change in Vietnam….
Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie
I am thinking of Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie, and how they are quite similar. Not on the surface, for who could more dissimilar: A young college student and an august former statesman. But I can…
Allen Ginsberg: What’s More Important than Hope
Via email I received an essay by Bay Area activist and founder of Middle East Children’s Alliance, Barbara Lubin. In her conclusion on her 20+years of activism on Israel/Palestine, she writes the following… And what…
Reputation
On Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (With Azadeh Moaven) But a personal story is more powerful than any dry summary of why a given law should be changed. To attract people’s…