Beacon Broadside

Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to
issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive
energies to a month of Interfaith
Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such
disparate voices for tolerance as Moses Maimonides, Jaluddin Muhammed Akbar, and Roger Williams.

(Incidentally, we also owe a word of thanks to Read the
Spirit for their link to us and a very flattering mention for Beacon Press generally and the blog
specifically.)

In other good reviews of work from Beacon, the L.A. Times
ran a thoughtful and moving piece by Susan Salter Reynolds about Our World, a book that collects
Molly Malone Cook’s photographs with accompanying text by her life partner, the
poet Mary Oliver.

The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook’s intuitive
relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the
stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly
Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though
most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a
lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her
subjects — reading a book, looking through a telescope — is always
distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of
Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well.

Marketplace ran a story over the holiday break that many, including Judith Warner on the New York Times opinion blogs, found troubling.
The story highlighted the practice of "womb
outsourcing," an increasingly popular surrogacy option involving hopeful
parents from wealthy countries paying what amounts to "bargain rates"
(when compared with the high cost of surrogacy in the U.S.) for surrogates in India.
Amy Tiemann at MojoMom condemned the practice – "Is this what colonialism looks like in the 21st century?" – and
invited Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, to comment as well:

We women of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation
of poor women, men and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs,
almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have
to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood — but unlike the shirt
and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an
explanation. (Read more here)

And, to return to a topic  we discussed during Veterans Day Week last November, Penny Coleman, author of
Flashback: Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War, has been writing
about the issue of veteran suicides regularly at Alternet. Her latest post is an account of her experience testifying before Congress alongside Mike and Kim
Bowman, who lost their son to suicide after he returned from Iraq. In the piece she
quotes Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, who displayed a stunning lack of tact and
understanding of the issue when he passed the buck to the Bowman family for
their son’s death:

"The building up of the self-esteem is the key,"
he said, "and the parents somehow have to convince him or her that
everything is going to be all right, we’re going to work through it. And in
this case it didn’t happen, and so, tragic and sad."

It is precisely because of this tendency to blame the victims that the work that Coleman and the Bowmans do is so important. The hearing ultimately resulted in a dressing down of the head of mental health at the VA by the chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Bob Filner, along with the appeal that the VA start listening to the stories of families who have lost loved ones to suicide. Excuses and passing the buck are not going to save any lives.