Rights and Relationships
Political arguments in America are being strangled by our preoccupation with rights to the exclusion of relationships as the focus of our ethics. Whether in arguments over abortion, gun violence, …
The OIKOS Papers on Work, Family and Faith
Almost thirty years ago my wife Sylvia and I launched an adult education program we called the OIKOS Project on Work, Family and Faith. Through colorful visuals, talks, and worksheet …
The Winding Cloth
The electronic revolution increasingly knits us all on planet Earth into a common consciousness, a common memory. It also makes possible an increasing degree of empathy across the barriers of …
Singing the Words
For many of us, the source and power of poetry lies in its oral performance. It is first of all an oral and auditory medium. Indeed, this power of the …
Mountains, Men, Mines and Minerals
We have just returned from six weeks in the Western Cape of South Africa and ten days exploring central Namibia, its neighbor to the north. While it is the people …
Homer, Chiefs, and Presidents
While visiting in Cape Town, I recently had the pleasure of taking a summer school course at the University of Cape Town on Homer’s Iliad, from Professor Richard Whitaker, who …
Moving Midway: Toward Reconciliation
We recently saw an arresting documentary film entitled “Moving Midway,” a story about saving an old North Carolina plantation house and discovering the family histories behind it. Midway was a …
Rachel’s Weeping and Our Response
During the Christmas season we are confronted by two texts that not only speak to, but seem to arise out of, the grief that has swept this country in the …
Quill Pens and Steam Engines
Before I tell you more about my quest for the forgotten grandfather in my life, we have two places to visit. The first takes us back to the era of …
Reconciling Past and Future in Cyprus
Our American friend Pippa Vanderstar had put us in touch with Avo Mangoian, one of Cyprus’s leading photographers, who has a store in the old city of Nicosia not far …
Expanding Marriage
The reactionary impulses of the 2010 elections propelled the North Carolina Republican Party into control of the legislature for the first time in a century. One result was that we …
On Blogging and Publishing
Is a “blog,” which is what they call these items I post on this site, a “publication”? In confronting recent discussions of this question I began to wonder if there …
What’s a Person?
Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in “Citizens United…” that corporations are “persons” who must be accorded all the rights of free speech, non-corporate persons like myself have been …