Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_beldend/)
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. In Moriarty’s book, there aren’t two worlds, only one. Magic isn’t a counterculture. It is everyone’s folk culture.
Most articles in this issue come from progressive and radical activists, scholars, lawyers, and teachers who are writing wholly from within the restorative justice movement. So with one foot planted inside the restorative justice movement as a student and the other in more journalistic territory, I am hoping to offer a different perspective: a beginner’s birds-eye glance at some of the controversial issues both outside and within the movement, and at factors that may be enabling it to gather traction.
These are lean times for utopian thinking. We know too much about its dangers and failures. What within previous utopian experiments, from communism to kibbutzim to ’70s communes, undermined them? Human nature? Our particular cultures?
For the scientifically well-informed, there’s a seriously bleak quality in the air around global warming and other environmental threats. To avert the multiple foreseen catastrophes will require heroic measures. But which measures have a chance of working?
If science saves us from religion gone bad, who or what will save us from science gone bad?