A University Can Ruin You

Activist Abbie Hoffman on his father: “Until the day he died, he always blamed Brandeis for my corruption, be it divorce, dope, hippies, or schvartzes, he always ended up cursing Brandeis.”

There’s a Difference

Last night, twenty of us gathered to discuss Mev’s The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation. People ranged in age from 20 to 65; some of us knew Mev personally, others had read…

Freedom

Month off between semesters 14-hour days Smiling at mile 18 of marathon Straining to do five pushups “We are pleased to accept you as a Corps member” “We are unable to take many qualified candidates”

Our Wars

On David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) Today there exist tremendous and unprecedented possibilities for knowing the reality of our world just as it is, with all that it has in it of anti-kingdom…

An Unpayable Debt

Upon beginning Martha Hess’s book, Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam, I was immediately reminded of my late wife Mev Puleo who embarked on a similar project at about the same time as Hess….

Deep Listening

“I’m sorry. We Americans have never taken responsibility for what we did.” –Lady Borton Lady Borton worked for the American Friends Service Committee in South Vietnam from 1969-1971. A decade later, she assisted Vietnamese boat…

Hedy & Heine

The year after Mev died I read a lot of literature– Poetry, novels, plays One volume I took refuge in Was a bi-lingual edition of Heine’s Songs of Love & Grief I have a favorite…

Good Citizens/1

Dear Friends in the Sangha, I first encountered The Miracle of Being Awake (later published as The Miracle of Mindfulness) in 1982, when a monk from the Abbey of Gethsemani gave me a mimeograph of…