“Philosophy” conjures dusty places and donnish faces, elbow patches on corduroy jackets, fusty squares straining to split hairs. But when I look back on this year, it is a problem in philosophy that commands my attention and gives meaning to my journey. Anyone who feels the suffering of our fellows and sees the hope of …
Current controversy around a work of art has me asking this question: what is our obligation to respect what is sacred to others, especially if it has no such significance to ourselves? In this story, four different notions of the sacred have come into conflict. Talk about a teachable moment! What can be learned from …
When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant tracing your spread-out fingers on construction paper to make a colorful turkey cut-out, and listening to prepackaged accounts of harmony among the early European settlers and the Native Americans who took pity on them, teaching them to grow corn, hunt deer and catch fish. At home, we cooked …
A kind reader directed me to The Singing Revolution, a film on Estonians’ movement to regain their independence from the Soviet Union, highlighting the special role music played in the sustenance of spirit and solidarity. And also, for me, a film on the double meaning of patriotism, both a shining strength—the indispensable key to independence—and …
Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this: We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not …
What is the extent of our capacity for imaginative empathy? When is it easy to put oneself in the place of other, and when is the stretch too far to manage? I don’t have much trouble imagining how Henry Louis Gates felt earlier this week when he was arrested at the door of his own …
I haven’t had my driving-on-black-ice lesson yet. Weather conditions have been spectacularly cold, but there hasn’t been the right combination of temperature, precipitation and time off to open space for this particular learning experience—yet. Everyone is happy to offer advice, though. They tell me to drive slowly, brake slowly and turn slowly, so as to …
I remember reading something in a book by Doris Lessing—I think it was one of her “space fiction” series, maybe Shikasta. Human beings, her character said, were really meant to live much longer lives than our typical life-expectancy, perhaps even the hundreds of years attributed to biblical characters. The problem is that our civilizations have …
Yom Kippur begins tonight. This holy day is the fulcrum of the Jewish year: in preparation, we do a cheshbon hanefesh—a soul inventory—cleaning up our conduct and relationships to ready ourselves for the moment tonight when the beautiful Kol Nidre prayer is chanted, annulling all vows, reminding us that in the deepest place, in the …
I recorded the several hours of the Democratic Party convention broadcast on PBS each night, then fast-forwarded through the pundification that occupied perhaps a third of each program, stopping to listen to all the speeches. On the first evening, I was aware of so many sensations in my body: my heart lifted, but with difficulty, …