An Appreciation of Roy Bourgeois
This was written in 2005 and I am sharing it here for friends who may be headed this weekend to Fort Benning. For some of us, the story of Father Roy Bourgeois is familiar. We…
Category: Reviews
A Lifetime of Letters
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008) I have a file titled “Noam Chomsky” that contains several letters from the linguist during the 1990s. I first began writing him…
Refuseniks
On Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004) 1. General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men. But it has one flaw:…
The Mere Gook and Haji Rule
Under reviewDeborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes—Inside the Army’s Secret Archive of Investigations (New York: Basic Books, 2008) and Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, Collateral Damage:…
Mobilizing the Bible
The following review is forthcoming in the summer edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine, by Nur Masalha. New York and London: Zed Books, 2007….
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…
No Salvation outside the Palestinians
A Reflection on Jon Sobrino, No Salvation outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays When I was in graduate school at Maryknoll, I recall a description of theology offered by my teacher Marc Ellis: “Theology ought to nurture…
A Preferential Option for the Iraqi People
Here is the last paragraph of Dahr Jamail’s book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq: If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government…
Towards a Post-Civilizational Praxis
For Jim Flynn and Pat Geier A Reflection on John Dominic Crossan God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now [2007] In the past few awful, maleficent years of the Bush Administration, a spate of books has appeared…
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….