Interviews With Wise People Of Today / 12 Sep 2019

Rabbi Michal Loving On The Challenges Of Being A Female Rabbi

An interview with Rabbi Michal Loving of southern California.

Inspiring People / 05 Sep 2019

What We Can Learn From Saint Romero About Social Justice

What Liberation Theology can teach us today.

Art & Culture / 30 Aug 2019

What Madeleine L’Engle Taught Me About The Power Of Naming

The work of the artist, the act of creation, is an act of naming and making a thing known.

News & Politics / 27 Aug 2019

To Address The Problem of Guns, We Need Both Data And Emotion

In the span of two days, two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton have once again brought anguish over gun deaths to the forefront of the public conversation. An outpouring of emotion was followed by questions of how many times this needs to happen again before lawmakers make substantial steps to reduce gun violence. Soon afterwards, Neil deGrasse Tyson attempted to help bring reason to a very emotional topic:   Understandably, Twitter and the media excoriated him — for the timing, for some potential inaccuracies in the numbers, and for coming off as cold-hearted. Where I think his biggest mistake was, though, was in separating emotion and data. For any kind of solution, we need both. Fear and anger are what compel us to act, including the willingness to gather data. As psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote in his book Emotional Intelligence: All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. The very root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb “to move,” plus the prefix “e-” to connote “move away,” suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion. (6) I think (or at least hope) everyone would agree that we want fewer gun deaths in our country. And if we are angry about those deaths, or scared for our children’s lives, we need to lean into those feelings in our efforts to bring about positive change. As John Oliver remarked, “while the depressingly familiar numbness that you may be currently feeling can help you handle the pain in the short term, in the long term it can actually be a real problem because unless something hurts as much as it’s supposed to, nothing gets done about it.” So we do need to feel…

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News & Politics / 22 Aug 2019

We Must Not Forget That We Were Also Strangers On This Land

History and policy teach us that citizenship—especially citizenship in a stable, peaceful democracy– is almost always a matter of luck, not righteousness.