b. traven I look at the “The Contrary Perspective” as a community of citizens interested in challenging the accepted views of our society, a community interested in seeking different or contrary views. But what if what you see (or think you saw) is so out of your experience of the physical and social world you…
W.J. Astore During the Roman Empire, chariot races and gladiatorial games served to entertain the people. The U.S. empire’s equivalent, of course, is NASCAR and the NFL. Serve up some bread to go with the circuses and you have a surefire way to keep most people satisfied and distracted. That’s true enough, but let’s dig…
Eric Frith (This article originally appeared at Tropics of Meta and is used with the kind permission of the author.) The Greek sovereign debt crisis reached a climax early this week when, in an impromptu popular referendum, Greeks overwhelmingly rejected the terms of the bailout package offered by Eurozone leaders and the troika (the European…
By Graciela Huth. Introduction by Michael Murry. Graciela (Grace) Huth calls herself “an old woman.” She says that she writes as a form of therapy, “to unload my anger and avoid having a stroke due to what is going on today in the USA.” Yet her long life of good citizenship and community activism testify…
b. traven In this brave new world filled with a plethora of digital information there is little use for the real meat of knowledge. There has been a slow dismantling of that love of learning, of examining ourselves and our world and seeking truth, the Socratic tradition of always questioning that fosters humility. Fortunately, when…
Daniel N. White Aggie jokes are the Texas version of Polack jokes, jokes about the students at Texas A&M University as rural yokels lost at sea in modern life. The foil in Aggie jokes are graduates of UT Austin, referred to by Aggies as T-sips. Everyone everywhere in the world tells similar jokes about their…
W.J. Astore Back in 2010, I wrote the following article on American sports for Huffington Post. With the end of “March Madness” and the beginning of baseball season, the time seems right to revive it. I love watching my hometown teams and experiencing the vicarious thrill of victory (as well as the agony of defeat),…
Richard Sahn In 1933 Dorothy Day, a progressive journalist and Catholic convert, and Peter Maurin, a French peasant and philosopher, founded an anarchist-pacifist movement and newspaper they called the “Catholic Worker.” The paper was meant to be the Christian answer to the Communist Party paper, “The Daily Worker.” Not affiliated with the Catholic Church,…
W.J. Astore I’m a Catholic, so of course I know all about Original Sin. For disobeying God and tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Eve would suffer the pains of childbirth, and both she and Adam would age and die, their earthly bodies returning to the…
b. traven In 1937 my father died and my mother was left penniless with three young boys under twelve. She didn’t go to pieces, or maybe she did and I just didn’t know, but we moved to poorer quarters and she got a job handing out samples of food in the big local department store…
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