by Kelly Bulkeley Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my... Read more →
by Patricia A. Gozemba Draft a constitutional amendment that is divisive and sweeping in its possibilities for endangering committed and established relationships of all Floridians, straight and gay, and call it the "Florida Marriage Protection Amendment." Make sure that it’s... Read more →
by Thomas N. DeWolf The snow is falling outside the home several of us have rented in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival in support of our cousin Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade: A Story... Read more →
"We live in a moment of religious conflict around the world, and that's precisely why we need to be proactive about a positive conversation about religion." Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and founder and director of the Interfaith... Read more →
Beacon Author Tom DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade)—who blogged here on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the U.S.—is at the Sundance Film Festival this week with his cousin Katrina Browne, director of Traces of the... Read more →
by Laila Halaby During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted... Read more →
by Carole Joffe "I haven’t sorted out the penalties...of course there’s got to be some penalties to enforce the law, whatever they may be." So spoke George H.W. Bush, in one of the major gaffes of his first presidential run... Read more →
Bill Ayers, founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press,... Read more →
Gayle F. Wald, a professor at George Washington University, is the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th -Century U.S. Literature and Culture. She wrote... Read more →
by David R. Dow When the death penalty was resurrected in 1976, following a brief four-year hiatus, death penalty lawyers made a fateful tactical decision. They decided to abandon the goal of abolition and instead elected to chip away gradually.... Read more →
by Mark Winne An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. —Plutarch We have in America today a tale of two food systems—one for the poor and one for everyone else. The... Read more →
Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive energies to a month of Interfaith Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such... Read more →
by Peter Laarman There was never any question that religion would play a huge role in the electoral pageant now fully unfolding as those frozen Iowans at last begin to caucus. After everyone saw how the well-organized voting faithful on... Read more →
by Rev. C. Welton Gaddy As a Baptist minister and as a patriotic American, I’m deeply disturbed—although no longer surprised—by the inappropriate use of religion as a political tactic in presidential campaigns. I’m particularly disheartened by former Gov. Mike Huckabee... Read more →