Power Versus Love
Robert Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 We are not savages; we are people with an ancient culture, and we are sick in our bones of war. I do…
Category: Activists
Thank You, Liz!
Liz Burkemper sent me news that Ai Weiwei’s memoir is coming out tomorrow!
Remembrance of Teachers Past
Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends This is Elie Wiesel’s third of four installments thus far on his favorite Hasidic teachers, the ones whose tales enchanted him in his childhood, the…
Stamps and a Poem
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, An Elegy to Dispel Gloom
The Plan
My friend Andrew Wimmer’s comment on the above: Of course they have. It was never “on the table.” It’s not a shame, it’s the plan.
Surrealism as a Way of Life
Robert Johnson played last night at that café on Sugar Street. Walt Whitman was detained after chanting “Song of the Open Road” at the Huwarra Checkpoint. Dorothy Day was photographed again just sitting in the…
A Letter from 2005
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…
Righteous, Remorseful Jews
As my 61st birthday approaches, I’ve noticed that I have recently been going back to authors and works I read many years ago. For example, I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, William D. Miller’s…
Start Small
In The Art of Living class, we just finished considering Chan Khong’s classic work of engaged Buddhism, Learning True Love. I shared with my friends at the beginning of the course, “The Rules” of the…
Recent Reading
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….