Category: Politics and Current Events
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Eboo Patel, a Beacon author who blogs at the Washington Post/Newsweek website, has a a fiery post about the controversial author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticism of Islam and embrace of Western values are, in Patel’s view, based on misconceptions about what both Islam and the West stand for: To all those who claim Ayaan…
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by Marcus Eriksen Two young soldiers, along with five fellow service members, penned a letter from Baghdad to the New York Times in which they vented their frustration and opposition to a war they knew intimately. A few weeks later, they were both killed in the line of duty. Despite marginal pundits like Rush Limbaugh…
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by Annelise Orleck On Wednesday October 3, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that allocated $35 billion over the next five years to expand the number of children eligible for the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which presently provides the only access to medical care for 6.6 million of the…
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Religious leaders of all faiths are joining together this coming Monday, October 8th, for an Interfaith Fast to End the War in Iraq. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, co-author of The Tent of Abraham, forwarded this call to participate, which you can read in full at his Shalom Center blog: In grief we see that our culture,…
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In a comment on yesterday’s post about International Non-Violence Day, one reader prodded us to address the alarming situation in Burma/Myanmar. Many of us are probably wondering what we can do to educate ourselves about the country and to help bring an end to the egregious human rights violations being committed there. Here’s a quick…
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October 2 is Gandhi’s birthday and also the first International Non-Violence Day. Does this mean that the headlines tomorrow will be devoid of murder, war, and oppression? Unlikely, but it does give us a chance to reflect of the teachings of Gandhi and what they mean to us today.
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Banned Books Week officially begins tomorrow, and Beacon Broadside has already begun our tribute to free speech with Chris Finan’s discussion of censorship in America, Helene Atwan’s interview with the oft-banned Lois Lowry, and a little nudge in the direction of something we’re quite proud of around these parts: a fantastic page devoted to the…
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On this Banned Books Week, almost 36 years after Beacon Press published the Pentagon Papers in defiance of all efforts by the government to suppress them, we’re reminded of the critical and continued need for books deemed “dangerous.” To remember that a single publication once held the power to enrage the president, incur an FBI…
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by Christopher M. Finan Censorship is very American. After all, the First Amendment was something of an afterthought. The Founding Fathers did not plan to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights was a concession to critics who argued that the Constitution did not provide adequate…
