On December 6, our family will participate in the annual Hot Chocolate Run/Walk for Safe Passage, the main fundraiser for Hampshire County’s domestic violence shelter and services provider. We hope you’ll feel moved to sponsor us here. Our community is unusually fortunate to have a domestic violence program that is trained to serve the LGBTQ
Support LGBT-Inclusive Domestic Violence Services in Massachusetts Read More »
Donal Mahoney, a loyal reader and occasional contributor to Reiter’s Block, returns with a thoughtful poem about holidays, privilege, and blind spots. Along those lines, while we retell the Thanksgiving legend of Native Americans welcoming white European refugees, some of our leaders and media outlets are stirring up fear and hatred against Middle Eastern refugees
Donal Mahoney: “At Bus Stops on Thanksgiving Day” Read More »
I just finished a philosophy book that I loved in 1999, and found it equally rewarding to re-read from a new perspective. Marxist-feminist philosopher Robin May Schott’s Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Beacon Press, 1988) challenges the body-mind split that has constituted “objectivity” for the Western religious and intellectual tradition. I
November Links Roundup: It’s Supposed to Hurt Read More »
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s widely-shared TED Talk “The danger of a single story” (transcript here) links narrative hegemony and prejudice. When you only see a limited range of images of a community or social group, both your self-understanding and your empathy become stunted: “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over
Religion as Medicine, or Diversity Without Relativism Read More »
I discovered Canadian poet Leah Horlick via an interview at Little Red Tarot, an excellent blog with an interest in queer and feminist interpretations of the cards. Horlick’s breathtaking second full-length collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), breaks the silence around intimate partner violence in same-sex relationships. Jewish tradition, nature spirituality, and archetypes
“For Your Own Good”: Leah Horlick’s Tarot-Inspired Poetry of Survival Read More »
I sing a song of the cats of God, Korat and Russian Blue; Who purred and pounced, and chased their tails, For the God who made them mew; And one was a tabby, and one Siamese, And one was an alley cat full of fleas– They were all of them saints of God, if you
A Song for All Saints’ Day Read More »