Recently, I started attending Quaker Meetings in New York. (The formal name given to Quakers is “The Religious Society of Friends,” and they refer to each other as “Friends.”) I had long been interested in Quakerism; the value it places on authenticity,...
Power. I define it as the ability to make events and circumstances conform to one’s will. This, of course, presupposes the ability to compel or convince others to act in pursuit of that aim. My interest in the subject of power sparked a desire to examine what some...
The issue of reparations for Black Americans reemerges from time to time, but it has invariably garnered less traction than it deserves. Indeed, it is a controversial and complicated matter, and there are many daunting aspects to it. What should reparations be for? ...
This blog post is a bit lighter than most of my other posts that deal with weightier issues. It’s about what it means to be “real” as seen through the lens of several prominent children’s stories. Perhaps the best-known children’s story that explores what it means to...
Few topics are as treacherous to tread in American political discourse than Marxist/Communist thought. (In this post I will use the terms “Marxist” and “Communist” interchangeably, as Marx was the primary author of The Communist Manifesto.) Indeed, one might say...
The subject of love has been written on more than any other human emotion. Books, poems, songs, plays, and films accord paeans to its sublime nature, its transformative qualities, its power to both lift us up and to cause us pain when it is lost. And it is complex,...
