The A-Team: Pundits Who DID SEE Trump Coming Sure, it’s Fun To Beat Up On the Pundits Who Totally Missed Trump. (They Richly Deserve It.) That even includes the smarmy Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, who is trying to spin his promise to eat the column he said he’d eat if Trump won the … Continue reading The A-Team: Pundits Who DID See Trump Coming
Brahms’ music is not only beautiful, often profound, and richly enjoyable. It also saves lives:
The author William Styron is one example. Deep in the pit of depression in 1985, Styron came to the point of carefully planning to kill himself, with a shotgun, in a secluded spot near his home. But when he was driving, Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody came on the radio. [**Note to grammar cops: I KNOW it’s supposed to be “Brahms’s”; but that construction both looks and sound dumb to me, and I choose to ignore it here.]
The melancholy beauty of this brief piece so touched Styron that he turned around, drove home, put away the shotgun and checked into a hospital. And he survived. His concise memoir of that ordeal, Darkness Visible, is an unforgettable reading experience.
Q. What Did Early Quakers Say About Their New Church?
They said many things. Here are only three of numerous available quotes:
George Fox:
“John did bear witness to the light of Christ; the great heavenly prophet hath enlightened every man who cometh into the world withal; that they may believe in it, become the children of the light, and so have the light.”
William Penn:
“The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers.”
John Woolman:
“There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages has different names. It is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any, where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethren in the best sense of the expression.”
Why I Can’t Hate On Bill Clinton — Even Now Considering my somewhat maverick bent, maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t share all the horror and outrage about Bill Clinton’s face-off with some protesters about the 1994 crime bill a week or so ago. I mean, yeah– that law was packed with many awful … Continue reading Why I Can’t Hate On Bill Clinton — Even Now
Interfaith conversation: sounds warm & fuzzy, right?
In reality, though, beyond the Brother/Sisterhood week banquets, it can be pretty tough.
For instance, how would YOU handle these real situations that came up in one such interfaith program?
Rebecca Mays, at the American Academy of Religion, 2015.
–a Muslim young man from a rural island whose hadith lineage would not allow him to enter the sanctuary of a Christian church if a cross stood in the sanctuary (but they were scheduled to visit such a church);
— a young Buddhist scholar from Myanmar (Burma) who argued that the Rohingyah young woman in the group should not call herself by that name as that ethnic group as such has never existed in his country (the Myanmar government has been accused of genocide involving Rohingyah); or
— a Muslim young woman who could not room with our one transgendered participant.
All these and many more such challenges have been faced by Rebecca Mays, a Philadelphia area Friend who has been Director of the Dialogue Institute at Temple University since 2012.
And in the new issue of “Quaker Theology,” she describes how she faced these complex encounters.