In her book, Slow Dancing with a Stranger, Comer details her excruciating journey through the maze of Alzheimer’s, an unforgiving disease. Through this book, she is changing the conversation from acceptance of what is to demanding what should be.
2014
Can a Spiritual Outlook Regenerate Our Social Institutions?
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Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel. Review by Kim Chernin.
2014
Peter Gabel Responds
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While I appreciate these serious, thoughtful responses to my book by Roger Gottlieb and Kim Chernin, I do not quite see myself reflected in their respective descriptions of the role of spirit (Gottlieb), or the role of hope (Chernin). My claim is that these are not abstract ideas that I attribute to human reality, but that they are concretely revealed by that human reality if we will but embrace “another way of seeing” that makes the presence of both spirit and hope visible in that human reality. The central idea of my book is that human beings are not actually “individuals” in the liberal sense of our existing in separate spheres as disconnected monads, but are rather inherently united by a social bond, a “fraternity” as the present pope calls it, that seeks to make itself manifest in the world through the experience of “mutual recognition.” Because of the legacy of the Fear of the Other that has shaped our cultural conditioning throughout history thus far—a fear reflected in our own individual lives through the social formation of our individual egos—our cultural memory inclines us to see the other as a threat. But coexisting with this fearful impulse in every human interaction and at every moment transcending the fearful impulse, is an unconditioned, wholly original, spontaneous movement toward a new and sudden recognition of one another in which we would become fully present to each other, and in which we would more fully realize ourselves as the source of each other’s completion. {{{subscriber}}} [trackrt]
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2014
Visionary Hope
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Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel
Review by Roger S. Gottlieb
Articles
Ready and Rising: A Review of Sariyah Idan’s New Album
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It seems like every summer there’s an album that comes along and rocks my world. When I first listened to this album in my car during my morning commute, the fierce lyrics and smooth rhythm on Deeper at once captivated me.
Christianity
Co-Creating a Peaceful World Through Love-in-Action
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A review of Chris Saade’s book Second Wave Spirituality: Passion for Peace, Passion for Justice, which explores the constructive aspects of globalization.
Articles
Beyond the Narrow Straits of Memory
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We must face stories of suffering children, as well as the stories of suffering that we tell to children, in order to understand the religious tropes at work in American culture…. By facing our wounds across boundaries, we can struggle toward the blueprints of rebuilding our memoryscape.
Art
To Deserve Such Pain
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During his lifetime, Leonid Tsypkin, who survived Hitler and Stalin only to face the sterility to post-war Soviet life, was forced to write “for the drawer.” Discovered by today’s audience, his style, which blurs the background while simultaneously capturing the specific, has special resonance in an age of near-total surveillance.
Articles
A Painful Past Remembered from Within: Frederic Tubach’s Book on the German Experience During the Third Reich
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At once a crash course in the history of Nazi Germany and a weaving together of non-Jewish Germans’ personal recollections, German Voices conveys a sense of what life was like for the average person living under Hitler. While acknowledging that no amount of understanding or empathy can heal the generational wounds of the Holocaust, Tubach nevertheless brings an identifiable human dimension to a period of history that is often dismissed as too horrific to comprehend.
Articles
Dream-Wizardry: A Collaboration Between Rodger Kamenetz and Michael Hafftka
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Jacob and Joseph begat Freud who begat Jung, who begat the poet Rodger Kamenetz and the visual artist Michael Hafftka. Their collaborative wizardry, published in the book To Die Next To You, is stunning. The poems and drawings (always paired) create vivid, waking dreams on psychological and spiritual subjects—dreams that are as resistant and open to interpretation as Pharaoh’s.
2014
Faith and the Metaphor Muscle
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To grapple well with the big challenges of our times, Hering says, we need to reclaim the language of myth, metaphor, and imagination.
2014
Joyful Poems of Leave-Taking and Transience
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Without a Claim is a book of leave-taking and transience, filled with poems about loss and decline, poems that look at the world intently but refuse to cling or assert dominion.
2014
A Secular Analysis of Evil
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In the second book of his trilogy, Lawrence Swaim explains in strictly human terms what causes aggression to replicate itself and how aggression—when rationalized, concealed, or dissembled—can become evil.
Articles
Very Much Present at the Creation: John Judis’s Book on American Jews and the Establishment of Israel
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Judis’s Genesis, which stresses the importance of American Jewish/Zionist activism and lobbying in persuading President Harry Truman to support the establishment of a Jewish state, is not that different from the received narrative. What is different is that Judis makes explicit that he doesn’t understand how American Jewish liberals could so completely forsake their liberal ideas in opposing Palestinian efforts to retain their homeland.
Articles
Alona Kimhi’s Magical Brutalism
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Lily La Tigresse is unsparing in its critique, but it’s also seminal in terms of launching its indictment of Israel—a society that, in Kimhi’s view, is no more generous or compassionate than the barbarous terrain of Europe, not to mention the U.S.S.R.