He Contains Multitudes
[Hamlet] inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors–and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
A Poem
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore was a prolific American Muslim poet.
Share the Wealth with Cami Kasmerchak: The good grief project
Grief can be a lonely experience, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes we don’t talk about grief because it makes us uncomfortable or we don’t know what to say. The good grief project was…
Scholars
1. “What will a pundit’s scholarship profit him if he does not think of God and has no discrimination and renunciation? Of what use is erudition if the mind dwells on ‘woman and gold’?”–Sri Ramakrishna,…
Shantideva on Bodhisattvadom 101
Those who will falsely accuse me, and others who will do me harm, and others still who will degrade me, may they all share in Awakening. I am the protector of the unprotected and the…
Be In Love with This Life: A Class with Cami Kasmerchak and Mark Chmiel
One September evening, a group of Weston students walked past a disfigured man in a wheel-chair begging outside the school. No one said hello or even acknowledged him, which prompted Gene later to ask aloud…
The Patron Saint of All Outsiders
This French version of Kafka, this cross between Pascal and Orwell remains unclassifiable. She is intellectually stateless, prophet without any country in which she can be sure of honor. A Catholic Jewess who criticized impeccably…
Arundhati Roy on How MLK Is Remembered
Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and…
Unodious Comparisons
Make the most and best of your lot, and compare yourself not with the few that are above you, but with the multitudes which are below you. –Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of…
Closer than Your Jugular Vein
“Look not for my reality in the realm of appearances or in the Void. Seek it in your own mind. There only it resides.–Kuan Yin, in John Blofeld, Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of…