Chinese Communists, Vietnamese Buddhists

Liu Shao-Chi, How To be a Good CommunistForeign Language Press, Peking 1964 Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Commentaries on the Tiep Hien PreceptsParralax Press, Berkeley, 1987 An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process…

Dear Daisy Zamora

(After Reading Riverbed of Memory) I admit itI am filled with guiltWe didn’t do enough back in the 80sWhen the Reaganites were determinedTo crush the RevolutionTrue, you might say, the Sandinistas were far from perfectBut…

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…

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…

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…