By Kim E. Nielsen Photo credit: Kim E. Nielsen In the last three months The Family and I have twice piled into the car for eight-plus-hour (one way!) road trips to Washington, D.C. As family road trips, the journeys necessarily... Read more →
18 posts from July 2015
By Robert L. Fried: To a new teacher, or a teacher with years of experience, the twenty-first-century classroom can seem overwhelming. Along with the traditional challenges that teachers face—disobedient kids, unfriendly administrators, demanding parents, shortages of supplies, or feeling isolated in the classroom—there are so many new aspects to consider, so many new issues to resolve, so many new demands to respond to, coming at us seemingly from all sides: Read more →
By Amy Caldwell Beach in Gaza City July 8 marks the anniversary of the Israeli-Gazan conflict, one of the subjects that concerns Amy Caldwell, executive editor at Beacon Press. She has acquired The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary... Read more →
By Lennard J. Davis | Trying to find a moment when the ADA began is like trying to find the source of the Nile or the Amazon. So many tributaries flow into the making of the ADA that you cannot say if any single stream is the true source. But you can say that at some point, like a mighty river, the movement toward the ADA surged powerfully and in a sense became inevitable. Read more →
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II This piece was originally delivered as a sermon and appeared previously in Sojourners. During my meditation on the messages being sent out from South Carolina this week, three scriptures came to me: Jeremiah... Read more →
By Ruthanne Lum McCunn Our 2015 reissue of Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s classic, Thousand Pieces of Gold, is on sale! First published in 1981, McCunn's novel was adapted to film a decade later with actors Chris Cooper and Rosalind Chao. It's... Read more →
By Kay Whitlock This is the second part of the two-part discussion of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman begun on July 17 with Michael Bronski's blog piece. *** What is always at stake in a contest of imaginations is... Read more →
By Michael Bronski This blog post is one of two about the publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. To read part two, Kay Whitlock's follow-up on the conversation, click here. *** American readers love stories of political uplift... Read more →
By Fran Hawthorne Image credit: Steve Rhodes | Flickr Organic ingredients can cost nearly twice as much as processed ones. The price of solar and wind energy has dropped but still remains far above coal, oil, and natural gas in... Read more →
Today Beacon Press takes part in the international conversation highlighting stories of people with disabilities. In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ADA, we present two disability stories: one from Terry Galloway, the other from Suzanne Kamata. *** Hearing's... Read more →
By Nancy Merrick On the steps of Gombe, 2008. Merrick is seated next to Goodall in the company of family and others. Fifty-five years ago today, young Jane Goodall arrived on the shores of Lake Tanganyika to begin the study... Read more →
By Karl Giberson Photo credit: Dave Bullock This blog appeared originally on Huffington Post Religion. The tragic shooting in South Carolina offers another painful reminder of American Christianity's troubled relationship with race and segregation. While it is true that most... Read more →
By Sharon Leslie Morgan In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer “testified” before the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The highlight of her remarks was when she exclaimed “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired!” In... Read more →
By Robert Oswald and Michelle Bamberger Photo credit: Joshua Doubek The EPA recently released a review draft of its long awaited study of hydraulic fracturing in the United States entitled “Assessment of the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil... Read more →
By Fran Hawthorne Image from Flickr user Mr. TinDC Ben. Jerry. Tom. Burt. They are icons of the ethical-shopping world, the patriarchs (there are no famous matriarchs) of the small crop of natural products that made the leap from the... Read more →
By Ruth Behar This blog appeared originally on Bridges to/from Cuba. For years Richard Blanco and I had talked about traveling to Cuba together. Finally the time seemed right. On June 13th, we met up at the airport in Miami.... Read more →
This weekend will see the flourish of red, white, and blue return as Independence Day festivities fill the streets. No other symbol has been more emblematic of our country’s independence than the American flag. Unfurled and waving in the breeze,... Read more →
By Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski The Tribe/YouTube “What if sensational acts of hate violence, which media accounts often represent as aberrant, actually reflect existing community norms?” —Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics Early in... Read more →