My friend Mary Wuller told Lea to get in touch with me before she went on her trip to Palestine with Interfaith Peace Builders. We visited at Northwest Coffee in December, and I knew I…
Andrew Wimmer recently watched the documentary Ram Dass, Fierce Grace. He sent me this reminder…
Dear Perry I am sending out the following to a few of my friends, Bengali-Americans, who haven’t heard of Sri Anandamayi Ma. I think they’ll be open to her. I’m grateful we read her before…
In recent years, I’ve known many people who ask themselves, “What can I do, given the state of the world?” In the past year, this question has been especially urgent, given the toxicity of…
for Cami “I love Russia, Aliosha, I love the Russian God, though I am a scoundrel myself.” –Dmitry Karamazov So, maybe you’ve already taken the plunge back in Wisconsin, and are now immersed in “A Nice…
Think about it: Even with all our sophisticated technologies and modes of communication, who feels as though there is enough time? And yet, we need time, as community activist Grace Lee Boggs has said, to…
I just received Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. I noticed this blurb by Alice Walker: “This is the voice I listen for, when I want to learn the deepest reality…
Most interesting among [Alain’s disciples] was Simone Weil, the future author of Gravity and Grace, who was taking the same classes as the future author of The Second Sex. Simone Weil dressed oddly and always…
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
Today Spielberg’s The Post opens It’s true! — a film about the Pentagon Papers I texted Max if he’d like to go and he responded in a couple of minutes: “I took a quick look…