Tag: saints
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The Teachings of Carl on Vice
Vice magazine has just run a blog post of mine, an invitation into the world and works of Carl Johnson, whom I visited last month in his hometown of Thornton, IL. He’s a man of cosmic imagination who doesn’t get on well with his neighbors. Check out the pamphlet I published in 2006 of one…
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Work Is Love Made Visible
On the subway last night, for the third time in recent months, I happily ran into E—we’d met at a party once, and we’ve been building a little friendship out of chance meetings on the C train. I was with my friends, and he was with his. His friends happened to mention that they regretted…
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What Would Darwin Do?
Happy Darwin Day! If you didn’t already fall victim to all the fuss, today is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. It’s even Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And my friend Jake Rosenberg’s birthday too!) To celebrate, I have essay in today’s Religion…
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An Experiment in Faith
More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…
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The Feast of Father Louis
In the Catholic Church, it is traditional to celebrate a saint not on the day of his or her birth, as we do for American presidents, but on the day of death. Part of the reason is that so many of the saints were martyrs, whose status depends precisely on the way they died. They…
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Obama’s Harlem
After giving up on the excruciating computer graphics and talking heads of MSNBC’s election coverage, my friends and I got on the train and headed up to Harlem. We arrived at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard not a minute before Barack Obama was declared winner. The enormous crowd, pouring into the streets far…
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Face to Face
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Ancient Scribbles
A very satisfying day at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. As is typical, I got so thoroghly engrossed by the relatively small collection of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that I hardly had energy for the vast halls of pottery and burial monuments from antique Anatolia. Even so, the splendor of the Alexander Sarcophagous from Sidon (as well as…