General News

Justice for Mohammad Akhlaq

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On this auspicious day—Gandhi Jayanti (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday) and International Day of Non-Violence —my colleagues and I at Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus are heartbroken to read the news that a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched and murdered by a Hindu mob in Northern India because it was rumored that he killed and cow and consumed the meat. News reports claim that a mob of Hindus wielding bricks, batons, and swords came to the man’s house to hunt him down, beat him to death and severely injure his son and mother.

art

Alison OK Frost Captures the Strange Absurdities of War and Discrimination

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Alison OK Frost creates delicate and disturbing watercolors. Her figures seem to be part of a post apocalyptic world even though they are all drawn from news articles. Stripped of context and background information they float eerily on the white page. Her images use the delicate style of watercolors to express the brutal elements of modern society. She wants to illustrate this dynamic in her work: “A few years ago I took part in the occupy Oakland protest and one thing that was really striking was how beautiful tear gas is, especially at night.

General News

A Note for the New Year

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This year, perhaps more than in years past, as we contemplate the spiritual process of Yom Kippur as ritually signified by white rainment, white clothing, the special white Torah ark covers used for these days, we should meditate upon the true nature of white light, a light made up of all the possible colors of the spectrum.

General News

The Power of an Image

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A picture is worth a thousand words, even more so in the digital age than ever before. My experience has been that images are amazing things, with the power to anger, comfort or heal. They have the power to change opinion, to reflect harsh realities. And the last two days have been fraught with all the baggage that comes from one tiny image with a huge message. You know the one I’m talking about, of course.

Culture

Remembering Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) and His Gift

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But his writings didn’t venture into the overtly political. His life’s work – his gift – was to find a way of entering into his patients’ inner worlds not as a detached clinician but as a fellow human being, and to find a form of words to describe the experiences being suffered or endured or just lived with.

General News

Beliefs Don't Land You in Jail – Actions Do

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Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis was jailed today by a federal judge for failing to issue marriage licenses, a duty she is sworn to carry out, but which she has refused to do since the Supreme Court decided that LGBTQ people could get married in all 50 states. She claims that her religious beliefs trump the law, saying that issuing licenses to gay couples “irreparably and irreversibly violates her conscience.” “I myself have genuinely held religious beliefs,” the judge said, but “I took an oath.” He noted: “Mrs. Davis took an oath. Oaths mean things.”

Education

Ten Things I Learned from Hugo Chávez

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Chávez was a democratically elected president, elected by a wide margin after running as an outsider in Venezuela’s fixed two-party system. His first acts as president were to wipe out illiteracy, establish healthcare clinics in the poorest barrios, and create a brand new constitution based on citizen input and participatory democracy. I wish our democratically elected presidents and governors would build our hopes up by empowering us with better education, healthcare for all, and new rules to improve rather than degrade our democracy.