by Ruirui Kuang We landed in Sweden, my mother and I, and got ready to meet my father at the airport. It was just the two of us that day; my grandmother was not with us. The lone figure of the shriveled old woman waving goodbye in Beijing had been as firmly rooted to the land as… Continue reading My Grandmother
Category: Prose
In Line at the Kremlin, or The Ghost of Kremlin Present
Portraits of India
by Sumit Dua In the summer after my first year of medical school, I decided to travel to India to visit family. At the same time, I wanted to really learn photography and had purchased a Canon film camera during that first year. So I took the camera with me to craft images of India as… Continue reading Portraits of India
Observing Día de los Muertos, San Miguel de Allende, México
Satyagraha: Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Resistance
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “the line separating good and evil passes . . . right through every human heart.” Humanity has always struggled internally, in the space between our better angels and our darker thoughts. As division and hate blight our body politic, the compelling moral power of Gandhi’s satyagraha remains a vibrant and ever-relevant resource. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the Civil Rights Movement were deeply inspired by . . . (An essay by Jonathan English)
Pilgrim Land
An Odyssey: Toward Beauty, Virtue and Redemption
Said to be an admirable children's story but not more, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader contains depths calling for reflection. Yet some have missed these depths. Indeed, one weakness of the film is its compressed, edited storytelling, leaving little time for reflection or anticipation. Largely episodic in nature, the movie should point to the arc . . . (A flash review by Jonathan English)
Apothegm, Philosophy, Wisdom Lit
Apothegm, adage, aphorism, maxim, proverb, saying—it's remarkable how many English words exist to convey the idea of a shared shard of wisdom faithfully handed down to succeeding generations. In America, now, such sayings may not be in vogue, in our modern age of enlightenment. By forgetting the past, some might say, we are free to wander into the future untethered. But even the Renaissance and Enlightenment sparked . . .