So she bites it, her hand, bites it because she’s read somewhere about the transporting power of pain.
Articles
Toward a New Buddhist Story
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Is a new Buddhist story beginning to develop out of the interaction between Buddhism and the modern world? Both need such a new story.
Articles
Postmortem
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Not counting what I can’t remember, / the closest I ever came to her was when I put my hand / inside the urn…
Articles
Therapist from the Depths: A Conversation with Michael Eigen
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Michael Eigen isn’t only one of the leading and most important psychoanalysts in the world, but also a poet of strong-expression who plays the piano, wanders in the forest, and seeks holiness through Chasidic studies and Kabbalah. I had a conversation with Eigen, the Jewish kid who became one of Wilfred Bion’s greatest students (“thanks to him I decided to get married”), on the occasion of the publishing of his book Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. At that time he told me:
When I was a little boy I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness.
Articles
Lost Limbs and New Gestures in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic
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People living in contaminated areas collect military waste to melt into household goods: they’re called war spoons, war chopsticks, war knives, etc. Houses are built on stilts made of bomb cases, which don’t rot in the monsoon mud. Householders make bomb gardens, using the largest bomb cases as raised planters. And, of course, bombs also explode and kill or injure more people every year.
28.3 Summer
An Evangelical’s Call for Immigration Reform
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I belong to a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table, a loosely connected group of evangelical Christians who are advocating an approach to immigration that is rooted in Judeo-Christian principles like respect for the dignity of life, the rule of law, and the importance of family.
28.3 Summer
Border Insecurity: Immigration Reform on “The Line”
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The entrenchment of Border Patrol agents, military contractors, surveillance technology, and fencing on our southern border has not made us safer. The last decade of border spending has left the border more deadly and more corrupt than ever before. We hope that Comprehensive Immigration Reform will bring relief to many families who will no longer fear that going out to buy milk could end in a deportation. We look forward to a day when fewer people have to trek through the desert to reunite with their families.
Articles
In the Midst of the Ruins: Activists Struggle to Save the Palestinian Village of Lifta
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Lifta is the last remaining Palestinian village within the disavowed Green Line that hasn’t been destroyed or renovated and resettled. Threatened by Israel’s “Master Plan 6036,” which aims to convert Lifta into an exclusive suburban enclave and tourist resort, the crumbling village’s main hope lies in a coalition of Palestinian and Israeli activists who are working to try to save it.
Activism
In the Name of God: Interfaith Activism, Immigration Reform, and the Dangers of Pragmatism
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A key component of the “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal would entail a strengthening of the very system of immigration control and exclusion that has given rise to the current “crisis” and underlies the push for change. It will also permanently bar many now living and working in the United States—regardless of their ties to the country—from ever having the possibility of regularizing their status, while making their lives, and those of future unauthorized immigrants, more difficult.
Activism
Twenty Years After the Gay March on Washington: Time for a Spiritual Progressive Paradigm to Affirm Homosexuality
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With the gay pride and rights marches of yesteryear, the responses from mainstream society to homosexual people marching down city boulevards or the National Mall was either the sound of vitriolic hatred, or a tepid tolerance. Now, a slight majority of Americans favor full marriage equality for same-sex couples, and there is an outside chance that the Supreme Court may declare state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, or at least end same-sex marriage discrimination in California.
Articles
The Butcher
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With a smooth blade, he slit the throats of steers, / drained the blood into a bucket, salted the meat / to make it fully kosher. A poem by Carol V. Davis.
Articles
With What Will I Fill the Space You Left Behind?
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Where Karen Bender’s A Town of Empty Rooms truly succeeds is not in the petty arguments that move the plot along, but in how we, as readers, can observe how invested these characters are in those arguments. What emerges, then, is a novel about the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the ways we talk past the dividing lines between us.
Articles
The Natatorium
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But in class all she could see was Jacob, his lithe movements, the panicky heat of his body when she swam beside him and let their legs kick against each other in an ecstasy of splash.
2013
Blossom Road
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I don’t know why I pulled over, idling, right before Christmas, two months of snow and
salt
plowed onto the shoulder, each squat rambler aglow, a life-size baby Jesus reborn in the
DiPasquale’s front yard,
why everything looked different, the way the woods you got lost in as a kid seem small
and disappointing when you return to them older,
because I hadn’t been out of there that long, less than a year, and as far as I could tell in
the December blur,
beyond the slight expansion of the motherhouse infirmary, where the sick nuns, most of
them retired teachers,
convalesced or passed, where I’d volunteered during study hall changing bed pans and
pouring Hawaiian Punch into paper cups,
they hadn’t renovated the spired building I’d entered day after day, my plaid jumper
becoming more ironic with each curve. How selfish it is after you leave a place to doubt that it could function without you. That it all goes on was enough to make me crack, facing the grotto
I’d stood around with my class, a hundred of us, in Easter white in another season,
singing as the May queen and her court offered flowers to the stone Virgin or just
pretending to sing.
Articles
The Futilitarian Heresy
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A heresy with regard to Christian hope has arisen. I will call it “futilitarianism,” having stolen that name from one of its adherents. Futilitarianism is a fairly sober and comforting faith. It allows its believers to be honest about the current crises without having to think through how a positive outcome might be strategized and accomplished.