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Showing posts from 2020

Song stories #1

In April 2016, I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Rome. I had been working with Pax Christi International for several months at that point, organizing the Nonviolence and Just Peace conference . We were expecting 85 theologians and peace practitioners from around the world. My previous weeks had been a whirlwind of visa applications, logistics, negotiations on every small details ... And now it was Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before our meeting was to begin. Folks were arriving from the United States, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America. One of our participants, Jean Jacques from the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- who had already endured significant obstacles to get a visa to enter Europe -- sent me an email to tell me that his flight had been delayed so he had missed his connection and would miss the entire conference unless he was able to buy a new ticket on a different flight to Rome. So I'm toggling back and forth between Google Translate and email to communicate...

The view from the futon

Comfort food, soothing radio voice, bright blue sky and cool breeze. Full of gratitude. 

75 years of nuclear weapons

The biggest fight I had with my father was about the U.S.’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — he, a veteran of the World War II European theater, believed that the bombings had been necessary to protect U.S. soldiers from what he had been told would have been a ghastly invasion of Japan, and I thought (and still believe) the bombings are the worst thing humans have ever done. The fact that 100,000+ people were killed or injured is terrible enough, but tragically the world powers, over the past 75 years, have spent trillions of dollars on weapons of extraordinary destruction, money that could have been spent actually improving living conditions and protecting the earth. But no, it was all wasted. 75 years of waste and fear and distrust.  Today the Washington Post’s Style section has an article about John Hersey who wrote “Hiroshima,” originally for The New Yorker. I’ve never seen a photo of him before: Holy smokes, was he gorgeous. Reminded me of another gorgeous guy who wore fati...