recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: Religion
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Eight of Mary Oliver‘s poems were set to music by Ronald Perera and performed by the The New Amsterdam Singers this past Sunday afternoon. From the New York Times: Ms. Oliver’s poetry, which has drawn comparisons to the work of Emerson and Thoreau, reveals an awestruck regard of nature that verges on the religious: “What…
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Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, ponders the question of blame in the Nation: Could it be…
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"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth,…
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A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website. Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in…
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by Suzanne Strempek Shea The woman in the post office doesn’t like Hillary, but tells me she’s not about to vote for Barack. "He’s Muslim," she leans in to whisper. I lean in closer and reply "He’s not." Barack Obama is a Christian. But he’s also one from a varied cultural and religious family, the…
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"We live in a moment of religious conflict around the world, and that's precisely why we need to be proactive about a positive conversation about religion." Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, appeared with a panel of IFYC fellows on a Good Morning America segment…
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Beacon Author Tom DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade)—who blogged here on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the U.S.—is at the Sundance Film Festival this week with his cousin Katrina Browne, director of Traces of the Trade. The book and the film deal with their shared family history as descendants of…
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by Laila Halaby During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted layered in the back so there would be a cascading effect. We sat outside the…
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Bill Ayers, founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2005). His blog is pretty low-traffic, so it’s always a great happiness to see him…
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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…
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