A Website of the Radical Imagination
This spring St. Francis College presented a forum on “the virtues of liberal democracy compared to its Islamic rivals.” Panelists were asked to respond to the argument in Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West Is Best. Paul Berman was one of the panelists and here’s a slightly adapted transcript of what he had to … Read more
Typically, a new president of Egypt is sworn in in front of the People’s Assembly (PA). The PA, however, was dissolved by the High Constitutional Court in the run-up to the presidential election. So on June 30 2012, Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president, took his oath in front of the High Constitutional Court. … Read more
Introduction The most famous line of the most famous book of one of the great American public intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth-century defines “the problem” of the coming century as “the problem of the color-line.” The Souls of Black Folk (1903) uses the sentence three times, and may not refer exclusively to … Read more
First is honored (and stoked!) to reprint the following tributes (which originally appeared in a German publisher’s “yearbook”) to two classic ethnographies. The Stones Ethnographers Trip Over By John Chernoff In my first course in cultural anthropology, more than thirty years ago during the heyday of structuralism and functionalism, the first ethnography we students read was … Read more
Walking the Tiger’s Path: A Soldier’s Spiritual Journey Paul Kendel Tendril Press, 2011 “The Tiger’s Path” is the name that the Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham gives “the path of discernment” in his book Ruling Your World. “Venturing onto the path of the tiger, we place our paws carefully. We respect karma; we know that every … Read more
THE KILLING of Muammar Gaddafi and his son Muatasim was not a pretty sight. After seeing it once, I looked away when it was shown again and again on TV – literally ad nauseam. Commercial TV exists, of course, to make money for the tycoons by appealing to the basest instincts and tastes of the … Read more
The author is a doctor and priest who has been working in Haiti for a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. For a few minutes he was just another dead man. That was the easiest way for me. … Read more