A Salvo Against War, Torture, and Racism: The Art of Mariano Gonzales

Working in political isolation from most of his artistic colleagues in Alaska, Mariano Gonzales continues a noble tradition of critical visual consciousness that goes back many centuries and that thrives in the early decades of the twenty-first century. His politically and socially charged images challenge his audiences to think about the major issues of their times.

In Praise of Baseball

After decades of observation and outright devotion, I believe that even in these difficult days for the sport, baseball continues to instruct on our most fundamental human virtues and values. More to the point, I believe baseball far more that any other team sport embodies and celebrates many of the principles at the core of what it means to be a progressive, and especially a spiritually minded progressive.

Our Progressive Traditions

The source waters of the American religious imagination are larger than Christian orthodoxy—just as Jesus was an Orthodox Jew only more so, and St. Francis, a cosmic Christian whose love for his brethren included birds, donkeys, and the sun. Whatever the source of our common faith, it contains multitudes.

Comics and Jews

A most unusual book by a most unusual author in the comics world, this small-sized, thick, square volume follows in many ways upon Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (2001). It also departs in so many other ways that the contrast is vastly illuminating.

Dark Days with the Dark Knight

We are the beneficiaries of the most advanced audiovisual systems ever known, capable of moving our emotions, challenging our ideas, and opening our imaginations. Is it right that the most technologically sophisticated and financially expensive products of this system are entertainments like the Batman movies, designed to deliver their gratifications not to the mind but to the gut?

American Mass Murder: A Toxic Cultural Brew

Whatever psychological diagnosis ultimately gets pinned to him, Holmes and the act that will forever define him—as he hoped it would—were the products of a peculiarly American set of cultural experiences, values, and motivation, which hold the key to understanding how and the United States seems to produce such a disproportionate number of people who engage in acts of seemingly senseless mass murder.

Sociopaths Rule

A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen.

Crossing Borders, Planting Olive Trees

Joshua Davis has played music in South American rainforests, on the promenade in Havana, in old mining towns in Michigan, and beyond. But Tuwani, a village in the Palestinian West Bank, tested his comfort level perhaps more than any previous gig.