When Asked How I’m Feeling after Bernie’s Endorsement Speech at the DNC . . .
One day, a year and a half ago, I casually read a list of issues that Bernie Sanders believed in promoting. Although I did not know much of Bernie at the time, perhaps seeing him a few times on Bill Maher, I loved his resolve to give a clear voice to a number of concerns […]
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To My Dear Friends Who Are Planning A Vote for Hillary…and Why Not to Do it
One of the largest misrepresentations of this election is that Hillary Clinton has earned her right to be President. Hillary pundits will tell us that she has experience, and more importantly, that she is a woman. So important. The time has come for the United States to have a woman President.
Agreed. The time has […]
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The Politics of Social Media . . . or . . . The Blind Men and the Elephant
If you have not heard the story of the blind men and the elephant…
Once several blindman came upon an elephant. The first said, “Oh, an elephant is like a large rough wall.” The second said, “No. An elephant is like a thin short stick with hair at the end.” A third said, “You are […]
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Star Wars for a New Generation
When asked if I wanted to see the new Star Wars movie, I thought of several reasons why I simply didn’t have time for it. I wondered if I could take a few hours to see something I was sure would be a bit slow with an overly simple plot. But to make several […]
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Medicinal, Recreational…and Sacramental/ Rastafarianism and White Dreads
About ten years ago, I had just returned from Jamaica where I had spent time in trying to develop a recycling center. In the course of my stay on the island, I had come to know a good many Rastas.
Rastafarianism, briefly, is a back-to-Africa movement that holds Haile Selassie, the one-time Emperor of Ethiopia, […]
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“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
I recently went to see another one of Tom Hank’s extraordinary movies, Bridge of Spies. No one watching the film could be untouched by the scenes of the building of the Berlin Wall—first the movement of people from the houses surrounding the area, the concrete blocks and cement delivered by trucks, the barbed wire resting […]
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Meditating with Children
I can remember most vividly three books that were a staple of our bookshelf as my children were growing up: Loving Hands: The Traditional Indian Art of Baby Massage by Frederick Leboyer; Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Christopher Cerf; and Be a Frog, a Bird, or a Tree/ Rachel Carr’s Creative […]
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Pope Francis, the Environment, and Liberation Theology
In listening to Pope Francis’s speech to the United Nations (September 25, 2015), his sentiment towards the environment and man’s place in it was strikingly familiar, one we had heard for many years. Man was a part of nature and our interrelationship was an intimate symbiotic reality. Clearly, so many ideas from the environmental movement, those […]
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Teach Your Children Well (Part 2) Man’s Place in Nature
I remember when my children were small and first attending school in the mid-to late seventies. Environmental activism and awareness was just beginning to make headway into the curriculum, and teachers had begun to find ways to connect children with the environment, teaching local and global responsibility.
Part of the task in teaching environmentalism, was to […]
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Teach Your Children Well (Part 1): The Environmental Movement
During the 1960’s we first became familiar with the idea that the earth needed husbandry, that corporations were polluting the Mother for profit, and that it was up to us to find ways to heal an environmentally stressed planet.
In our lifetime, we had already witnessed dramatic air pollution catastrophes—sulphur dioxide fog emissions from a […]
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