Public Life

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Titanic Revelations

Sometimes we don’t know where certain messages come from as we muse, fingering some words to give our intuitions substance. I think this poem comes from the haunting reverberations of …

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Peace Conference 2012

Every Fall for the past five years more than 300 people have convened here for the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference. This posting is a report on that conference. This year’s …

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Mirrors

The image of the mirror has been wandering through my thoughts lately, not only as I ruminate upon my discovery of family history connected to Cyprus but also as I …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Tax Matters

How amazing! In the midst of the Republican primary circus, the American people are actually trying to debate tax policy.  The problem with such debates is that they either drown …

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Conservatives and Liberals?

Like most of you, I look out at the political landscape in America and see only “the One” and then the circus of opposition hopefuls, feeding on each other. How …

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