Tag: cowardice
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The Scandal of White Complicity
In the national Catholic magazine America I’ve just published a short review of an important new book with a long title: The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A White Spirituality of Resistance. It’s an effort by three Catholic thinkers to articulate the depth of white complicity in this country’s massive, highly racialized prison…
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Sackcloth on Wall Street
Religion Dispatches posted a crazy little blog post of mine, “Repentance on Wall Street?” It came to mind after getting the chance to hear yet another rousing talk by Cornel West (along with Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor) at an SSRC event at Cooper Union. His words and encouragement, such as they are,…
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Dying, Desperately, Heroic
“To study philosophy,” wrote the French essayist Montaigne, “is to learn how to die.” In medieval times, particularly as the Black Death spread through Europe, the art of dying—ars moriendi—became the goal to which a lifetime of piety was devoted. Sure, a person can get by faking a good life. But a good death? There’s…
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When Soldiers Become Warriors
For some time, I’ve been hearing talk of “warriors” or “warfighters,” rather than “soldiers,” in my casual observation of the U.S. military. You hear this at all levels, from infantrymen referring to themselves, to the “warfighter standardized equipment” discussed at the highest echelons of the military-industrial mafia. At a recent talk in New York, the…
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Cicero’s Sin
I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or…