Veteran TV journalist Bill Moyers has returned from retirement to inaugurate a new season of Bill Moyers Journal, premiering on April 25th with a program entitled “Buying The War,” which examines the less than glorious role of the American press in the creation of the War in Iraq. After listening to Terry Gross interview Moyers [...]
What do you suppose the most compassionate person in Iraq thought when the killings at Virginia Tech made headlines last week? Here’s how I imagine it: “What a terrible thing! May their souls rest in peace. Forgive me for saying so, but perhaps the Americans will now begin to understand how we feel when our [...]
On Friday, I went to rottentomatoes.com to check out the reviews for several films we were thinking about seeing. They all had high scores, meaning most reviewers loved them. But in every case, if you scrolled down far enough, there would be one or two writers who rated them “superficial pap” or something like it. [...]
This morning’s New York Times reports protests from members of Congress over the FBI’s repeated abuses of the Patriot Act to spy illegally on citizens. Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the Justice Department, reported that the use of “national security letters,” authorizing warrentless spying, had escalated:
There were 8,500 in 2000, the year before [...]
There is a persistent story that people who stood up to fascism in the 1930s, before World War II took shape, were later condemned as “premature antifascists.” Some of the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, volunteers who fought the fascists in Spain in 1936-39, described facing this opprobrium when they later attempted to join [...]
“Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid,” said my friend, calibrating the precise level of fanatic devotion practiced by her colleagues on an especially consuming project. Then I heard it on a TV program: the mother-figure of a somewhat suspect group offered glasses of red liquid to two bright-eyed teenagers: “Kool-Aid anybody?” “Don’t worry,” she said, [...]
I spent Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) with my Jewish Renewal community, a cohort that prizes creative liturgy, ecstatic chant, guided meditation and socially conscious sermons—just my style. Because one intention of the holiday is to turn toward life and away from whatever embitters it, many of the leaders talked about the terrible suffering [...]
What do Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U. S. president George W. Bush have in common? Thrusting ego, overwhelming confidence in their own rightness (whether they believe themselves to be anointed by God or History) and belligerent readiness to get up in their opponents’ faces and give them what for.
Last [...]
Last month I quoted Gandhi on inner guidance. “For me, he wrote, “the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.”
The Torah reading for the week just ending underscores the same truth, exhorting the people to follow what they know deep [...]
My friend was speaking of a well-known Israeli peace activist who, at the start of the bombing, had come out publicly in support of the war in Lebanon. “He has trouble maintaining a big view,” she said, “when he’s in fear of his life.”
No kidding. So do we all. In fact, it’s hard-wired into [...]
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