Blog
TOLERANCE
The world offers much to be indifferent about—violence, hatred, bias, discrimination, lies and death. At 68 it would be easy to snuggle up to that indifference by just working my garden, taking out the trash and muttering platitudes at my neighbors.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
Seventy-seven years ago today, one of the most influential and widely-read writers of all time was silenced—not by death or infirmity or age, but by bigotry and hate.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
To say that a person’s faith is very personal and important is to state the obvious. To observe, however, that what a person believes is part of that person, and as often as not defines that person, takes empathy and a wish to understand people as individuals, rather than as a demographic mass.
TOLERANCE
Some of the people I most admire are those who are devout in their personal faith but also curious and generous in their interest to learn about others who may have a different one.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
Behind the impersonal statistics are tragic stories of businesses being vandalized, people being denigrated, assaulted, and in some cases killed, such as the tragedy which befell an 84-year-old Thai man in San Francisco, targeted solely because of his ethnicity, who was shoved to the ground and died.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
In a way no scholarly treatise or forensic statistical analysis ever could, the book opened the eyes of its audience, particularly its Southern readers, to their generations-long, casual acceptance of injustice and their indifference towards inequality. By seeing the events of the book through the eyes of a child, Atticus’ daughter, Scout, one experiences the story through the sensibilities and feelings of an innocent.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
It was the late 1860s. The plan was for a colossal neoclassical sculpture on the scale of the Colossus of Rhodes: 86 feet high on a 48-foot pedestal. It was to be called “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia.” It was to depict a woman holding a torch and would serve as a a symbol of Egypt’s technological progress.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
My family fled anti-Semitism in the Ukraine about 100 years ago. Jews coming to America at that time were often fleeing the pogroms. Basically, if you were headed to Ellis Island, it was likely someone back home wanted you and your family dead.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
To this day, the effects of that shot continue to be felt as nations come to grips with the concept of individual freedom.
MEDIA & ETHICS
According to a recent Gallup Poll, mistrust of news and information sources is at an all-time high. In the U.S., only 9 percent of those surveyed have a “great deal” of trust in mass media. Thirty-three percent have “none at all. ” Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media (gallup.
