Everybody Knows By Marcia Pally It feels like the whole thing is falling apart. Not just a tragic news story here or there but the whole network of human-human and human-planet interactions that makes life as we know it. Kaboom: Haiti, Afghanistan, unprecedented flooding, ditto for fires, the 19-year-old Covid-vaccinated Read more
Germany, Antisemitism, and Blackness By Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor Just recently, Germany has made the significant step in acknowledging its colonial genocide in Namibia. It has stunned the world with its generosity by promising more than one billion dollars to support development projects that will benefit the communities related Read more
Marvelous Companions, Past and Present By Sven Gins One of the side effects of the pandemic has been a surge of interest in pet companions, both animal and machine. Many seniors—suddenly cut off from tangible human contact with friends and family—have found solace in so-called biofeedback devices such as robotic Read more
What Are the Time-Scapes of Our Thinking? By Whitney A. Bauman Timescape: 1) A perspective over a period (particularly a long period) of time. 2) A multidimensional view of time, especially one in which time travel occurs. (From Wiktionary) As the human worlds begin to (prematurely?) come out of “Covid Read more
Beauty Will Save the World By Heather Eaton This famous and much discussed phrase from Prince Lev Nikolyaevich Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is that beauty will save the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrestled with the enigmatic idea in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1970. It is the title Read more
Specters of Sorrow: Eco-Grief, Ambiguous Loss, and Religious Creativity By Jacob J. Erickson To live in the wake of a global pandemic is to be haunted by complex uncertainties. In planetary diversity, we navigate our relationships both within ongoing tangles of loss unknown as well as after, slowly making sense Read more
The Art Network: Artists For Plants By Sara Michieletto “Love” by Nina Maaley, France (posted on 23 April 2020) As you are all aware of, a pandemic is currently growing throughout the whole world. As this virus spreads, it also disseminates fear, isolation and suffering. These troubled times made the Read more
Minding the Gap: No Space for Women, Fifty Years and Counting By Jan Millsapps A telling moment at a 1974 Johns Hopkins symposium: As famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun describes his plan for sending a man to Mars, someone in the audience asks, “What about women?” Von Braun’s glib Read more
Apocalypse Anymore? By Catherine Keller No doubt the Trump presidency incited my Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances. Finishing final revisions only weeks after the 2020 U.S. election, I was relieved as I went through it to realize how little of it was about him. He remains a Read more
“Born Free” – A Deceptive and Dangerous Story about South Africa’s Youth By Dion Forster Each year on the 16th of June, South Africans commemorate Youth Day. It is a day on which we remember the sacrifices made by young people in the struggle against apartheid. In particular, we remember Read more