Tag: responsibility
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The Kabul Scarf
It’s New Year’s Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end the endless war, to which so many young people in that country have…
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Apolitical Heresies
Yesterday the folks over at The Guardian’s Belief section asked me to weigh in on their question of the week, and for better or worse I sacrificed most of the day’s opportunity for book-writing on the altar of Welcome Distraction. The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and…
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Reza Aslan on the Academy
I recently had the pleasure of a Midtown conversation over lunch with writer, scholar, and filmmaker Reza Aslan, which appears today at The Immanent Frame. In it, he shares a number of quite radical ideas, including his support for the one-state “solution” in Palestine-Israel, the un-uniqueness of Jesus, and, as well, the prospects for an…
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Karen Armstrong’s Compassion
It’s a common refrain that one hears among those of us looking to think responsibly about the world’s religions: at bottom, they all have a common core, and the core is a genuinely good one. That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be…
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Hipsters, Hasidim, and My Bike Lane
A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant…
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Journalism as an Encounter
People usually don’t like what’s written about them. If you’ve ever been quoted in an article somewhere, you know that journalists mess up and mangle what you say beyond recognition. One wonders why people even bother talking to them (us) at all. Recently on The American Prospect’s website, Courtney E. Martin had a really thought-provoking…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
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The Examined Life Is Good
Sometimes I wish I were somewhere else. Who doesn’t? On a beach, maybe (done that). Or at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Obama says the action is now. But on some days, my goodness, New York is pretty hard to beat. Tonight at the glorious Brooklyn Academy of Music, I got to see…
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Taking Our Bombs Too Lightly
As far as I can recall, Jeffrey Stout is the only person who has managed to make me come close to tears at an academic lecture. The occasion was his plenary at the 2007 American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego, later published in the JAAR as “The Folly of Secularism.” At the time…