by Leanne Ogasawara

Talking about sacred music the other day, the Rabbi quite unexpectedly said, the name Bethlehem means the “house of bread,” or “the house of lambs for sacrifice.” Just think about *that* for a minute.

Sacrifice. Whether understood in the traditional ritual do ut des terms familiar throughout much of Asia; or in the liturgical terms of the Eucharist; or even in the grisly terms of ancient Mediterranean polytheism–I wonder whether these acts haven't served to help to lead us away from the dangers of self-deification (even if it leads to other perils).

Binding the individual in communion with others, ancestors, and gods: this call to transcendence was certainly what was behind Guru Dreyfus and Kelly's book, All Shining Things. For as Heidegger famously said, “Only a god can save us.”

Life is more sterile now, anyway.

My own interest in this topic goes back to Carthage. Always and forever dreaming of time-travel, ancient Carthage was for a long-time my top choice destination. Hannibal-obsessed, I thought Carthage would be an interesting place to see. That is, until a friend re-minded me that the Phoenician custom of child sacrifice was practiced notoriously in Carthage. (I only have one son, after all!)

Stanford University professor and archaeologist extraordinaire Patrick Hunt is also pretty obsessed with Carthage. He is yet another great man in a long line of great men in search of Hannibal's route across the Alps.(That is John Hoyte crossing on elephant in the picture below). In Hunt's Carthage lectures he talks about the Carthiginian god Ba'al Hammon. This Baal was the same Baal known in the Bible as Ba‘al Zəbûb. Translated as “Lord of the Flies,” Hunt says this word is a visual image depicting the innumerable flies attracted to the massive amount of offerings of raw meat that were sacrificed to the statues of Ba'al in Can'an. It was all so long ago, and yet no matter what sources you read, whether Biblical or Roman historical– it seems conclusive that the Canaanite religions centered around sacrifice –sometimes human. And this was notoriously so at Carthage.

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by Joy Icayan

After a ten-hour land trip, the L300 parked in front of the Church. We had reached Legazpi, Albay, a province south of Manila just a year before ravaged by a deadly typhoon, which left hundreds dead. It was almost Christmas—Christmas lights hung from the trees around the plaza. In the center, a makeshift Nativity scene made of hay, and already disintegrating caught our eyes. We were sleepy, hungry, cooped in the boxlike vehicle for what seemed like forever. We had come in a convoy, a huge truck carrying our supplies—candies, junk food, foodstuffs, whatever we managed to get from donors back in Manila, and then the L300 carrying me, two clowns who offered their services free of charge and the boys from Tondo—our volunteers.

The boys were our lifeline: we were often tasked to bring relief goods to communities ravaged by typhoons, floods and with that frustrated, hungry people fucked over by weather changes as well as their own political fiascos. The staff was small: Paul who headed the program, a warehouse supervisor, an admin go-to person and me. It was those boys who packed and repacked, who helped organize the masses of people who came in droves, needing food, and water, and whatever assistance they could get. These kids (for I never saw them more than that, even if some of them were older than me) could hold a megaphone and get people lining up. They waded in floodwaters without a second thought.

And so they came to us to Bicol—Michael, ever trustworthy Michael who was twenty seven that time, the oldest and who was the closest to having it together, Alex, eighteen and who needed a way out of worrying over having his girlfriend pregnant, Ping, whom they all teased had some deficiency in the head and who managed to fall in love with every woman he talked to, Bryan, curly haired, ever fierce, who talked and cursed like a pirate, no, like a typical street kid from Tondo, who personified that place by heart.

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by Hannah Green

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film Zero Dark Thirty claims a “journalistic” approach- this claim has been rightfully skewered from a number of angles. The film, some say, inaccurately portrays torture as leading to actionable information vital to Bin Laden’s discovery. It also shows only one perspective- the CIA’s- on the hunt for Bin Laden and the War on Terror itself. For me, though, one of the most problematic aspects of this film that claims not to judge is its main character. Maya, a fresh CIA agent, righteously pursues her goal of killing Bin Laden against all odds. Her conviction to the unlikely exists only in film. It is Maya and her conviction that leave viewers only one correct reaction to the hunt for Bin Laden and all the methods it involves- support.

I am willing to believe that there was one CIA agent who had an especially large role in finding Bin Laden, and I even think it’s possible that she was particularly committed to a lead that other people were ready to drop. But no person exists like Maya, who is portrayed as single handedly making the decisions that lead to Bin Laden’s assassination. Real people have doubts unless they are insane, and real people have lives outside their jobs. In a conversation with a colleague Maya admits to having no boyfriend, maybe no friends at all. Where others have feelings of uncertainty, Maya hints that she is receiving divine guidance. In one scene, she suggests God without invoking religion- she believes that she was spared from an attack that killed her colleagues because she was meant to finish her job. Her ability to see important links that others let slip adds credence to this belief.

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By Liam Heneghan

[Spoiler alert: I discuss in some detail the plot outcome of The Great Gatsby and, for that matter, of Django Unchained]

I do not mean to suggest here that Quentin Tarantino set out in Django Unchained to revive in any sort of deliberate way the characters and themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The differences between these two projects are more substantial than their commonalities. One, after all, is a movie and the other is a novel. More importantly, Tarantino is self-consciously a genre re-configuring story-teller, whereas Fitzgerald wanted in The Great Gatsby to write something new using the form of the traditional novel. The Great Gatsby is that most brazen of beasts The Great American Novel. That being said both, in fact, are distinctively American works. Moreover, in both works the action is driven by a hero’s bid to rescue a gal. Both play games with time, though quite different ones as I will elaborate below. In both, injustices are addressed and resolved with varying degrees of success. To my mind the commonalities of revision, rescue, and redress, though these are perhaps the stuff of all great works, are so distinctively rendered in Django Unchained that one can say that Tarantino has re-authored Gatsby.

***

Many years ago Bono identified, for the edification of an Irish audience, the differences between Irish and American sensibilities. He was appearing on Gay Byrne’s The Late Late Show — as close as one could get in those times to addressing the Irish nation. He was asked to account for U2’s growing infatuation with the United States. As best as I can remember it now Bono reported that when a man gets wealthy in the US and he builds that large mansion on a hill his neighbors look up and say: “Some day I am going to be that guy.” However, when a man builds that house on the hill in Ireland, his neighbors point up and say: “Some day I am going to get that bastard.” This was around the time that U2 were recreating themselves in anticipation of the release of the The Joshua Tree. One supposes they hoped for mansions and accolades. The interview occurred several years after I first read The Great Gatsby as a Dublin teenager. Despite my infatuation with American literature at the time Gatsby struck me as a dud. It was not so-much that a self-made man was uninteresting to me rather I did not even recognize this sort of hero. Gatsby was Bono’s bastard on the hill.

My second reading of the novel was shortly after I got married in the late 1980s. Not only was The Great Gatsby a favorite novel of my wife’s but she grew up in Queens, NY where we were living at the time and she brought me out to see those Long Island mansions. Naturally, a smitten young man rereads in such circumstances. This second, fairly attentive reading, was more successful. The setting of the novel, and the way in which this geography reinforced the class distinctions among the characters impressed me (my wife and I were living closer to Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes — Flushing Meadows, Queens — than to East Egg). As a nature-oriented fellow I was also pleased to notice the scattered but quite crucial references to nature throughout the novel.

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by Jalees Rehman

“This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.” Frank Herbert – Dune

Land grabbing refers to the large-scale acquisition of comparatively inexpensive agricultural land in foreign countries by foreign governments or corporations. In most cases, the acquired land is located in under-developed countries in Africa, Asia or South America, while the grabbers are investment funds based in Europe, North America and the Middle East. The acquisition can take the form of an outright purchase or a long-term-lease, ranging from 25 to 99 years, that gives the grabbing entity extensive control over the acquired land. Proponents of such large-scale acquisitions have criticized the term “land grabbing’ because it carries the stigma of illegitimacy and conjures up images of colonialism or other forms of unethical land acquisitions that were so common in the not so distant past. They point out that land acquisitions by foreign investors are made in accordance with the local laws and that the investments could create jobs and development opportunities in impoverished countries. However, recent reports suggest that these land acquisitions are indeed “land grabs”. NGOs and not-for profit organizations such as GRAIN, TNI and Oxfam have documented the disastrous consequences of large-scale land acquisitions for the local communities. More often than not, the promised jobs are not created and families that were farming the land for generations are evicted from their ancestral land and lose their livelihood. The money provided to the government by the investors frequently disappears into the coffers of corrupt officials while the evicted farmers receive little or no compensation.

One aspect of land grabbing that has received comparatively little attention is the fact that land grabbing is invariably linked to water grabbing. When the newly acquired land is used for growing crops, it requires some combination of rainwater (referred to as “green water”) and irrigation from freshwater resources (referred to as “blue water”). The amount of required blue water depends on the rainfall in the grabbed land. For example, land that is grabbed in a country with heavy rainfalls, such as Indonesia, may require very little irrigation and tapping of its blue water resources. The link between land grabbing and water grabbing is very obvious in the case of Saudi Arabia, which used to be a major exporter of wheat in the 1990s, when there were few concerns about the country’s water resources. The kingdom provided water at minimal costs to its heavily subsidized farmers, thus resulting in a very inefficient usage of the water. Instead of the global average of using 1,000 tons of water per ton of wheat, Saudi farmers used 3,000 and 6,000 tons of water. Fred Pearce describes the depletion of the Saudi water resources in his book The Land Grabbers:

Saudis thought they had water to waste because, beneath the Arabian sands, lay one of the world’s largest underground reservoirs of water. In the late 1970s, when pumping started, the pores of the sandstone rocks contained around 400 million acre-feet of water, enough to fill Lake Erie. The water had percolated underground during the last ice age, when Arabia was wet. So it was not being replaced. It was fossil water— and like Saudi oil, once it is gone it will be gone for good. And that time is now coming. In recent years, the Saudis have been pumping up the underground reserves of water at a rate of 16 million acre-feet a year. Hydrologists estimate that only a fifth of the reserve remains, and it could be gone before the decade is out.

Saudi Arabia responded to this depletion of its water resources by deciding to gradually phase out all wheat production. Instead of growing wheat in Saudi Arabia, it would import wheat from African farmlands that were leased and operated by Saudi investors. This way, the kingdom could conserve its own water resources while using African water resources for the production of the wheat that would be consumed by Saudis.

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by Misha Lepetic

No subject has hitherto been so much neglected by the profession
to which the author has the honour to belong.
~Higgins, The House Painter, 1841

When we move into a new home or apartment, oftentimes the first thing we do (except for setting up the stereo) is to give most every surface a fresh coat of paint. This accomplishes several things. Obviously, there is the satisfaction of meting out a wholesale revisionism – the permanent occlusion, by the thinnest and yet most opaque and decisive means, of the previous inhabitants’ history or even presence. Paint fumes are redolent of fresh beginnings; their smell creates an almost Pavlovian reaction, celebrating a new start, or at least the thorough dismissal of what went before.

But in another sense, it is the first articulation of an implied contract between our new dwelling and ourselves. It is almost as if we are saying to all those empty rooms, “I will take care of you, and you will take care of me. As proof, here is my act of good will.” For those of us who like to paint before even moving in, it is our first, truly physical interaction with the space. We take its measure in a painstaking and intimate way, appreciating the true height of the ceilings, the idiosyncrasies (or shoddy workmanship) that has gone into correctly reconciling floors with walls. We wonder, too, when confronted with a vague and knobby detail, how many times it has been painted over by people, perhaps not dissimilar from ourselves. Inevitably, we leave spatters of paint that will haunt us for the remainder of our time there. But in the end, this act of tabula rasa is meant to broadcast our ownership of the place, in a way that is thorough, satisfying, and simultaneously public and private.

If these are the outcomes of a simple and oft-repeated ritual, then why not apply this kind of thinking to larger scales? It may seem to be a trivial suggestion, when one considers the fact that run-down urban neighborhoods are contending with extreme and persistent problems of economic degeneration, crime and social fragmentation. Budget cuts lead to curtailed services, and potholes, broken street lights and shuttered storefronts pile up in a seemingly irreversible, slow-motion car wreck. What could a few coats of fresh paint possibly do? Isn’t this just another elaborate form of denial, an almost literal act of whitewashing?

On the other hand, consider what would be a guiding principle of anyone attempting a revitalization of a beaten-down neighborhood: What is the smallest action that I can take that will have the greatest effect? There has been much discussion and praise of the movement towards DIY urbanism, or bootstrapping. I have written previously about strivers like Marcus Westbury in Newcastle, Australia, who are bringing nearly abandoned downtowns back to life using innovative financing schemes with virtually zero seed capital. And recently, interesting work has been done establishing the possibility that the simplest way to kick-start economic development in informal neighborhoods is to pave the streets. Conducted in the Mexican city of Acayucan, the study’s central finding noted that “while the price of paving the 28 streets in Acayucan came to roughly 11 million pesos, the land value increased roughly 12 million pesos — or 109 percent of the original investment.” While this is a great multiplier, paving streets is a complex business, costly to organize and prone to corruption. The idea here is to be even simpler than that – and what could be simpler than a few cans of paint? Yet, this story is as much about what paint can obscure, as what it can expose.

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after Iqbal

Stars, and beyond the stars other worlds
Love faces more trials

Not lifeless this speckled sky
Hundreds of caravans trail here

Earth’s scent and shade are not enough
There are many gardens, many nests

If one home is lost, why grieve
There are other vales wailing

You are a falcon
Fly

Gone the days I was alone in the crowd
Stars, my confidants

More poems and translations by Rafiq Kathwari here.

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

A recent study on the relationship between positive emotions, social connectedness and a measure of heart health has been getting a lot of attention in the popular media. ¹ It's an interesting addition to the emerging scientific literature on the uses and effects of meditative practices and on the mechanism of the placebo effect (which seems to be shorthand for a wide variety of fascinating and under-studied phenomena)². These are both compelling topics, and perhaps good subjects for a future blog post, but the study was also interesting because it's one of a growing minority of studies that look at compassion meditations rather than concentration or mindfulness meditations.

Compassion meditations, roughly, are a family of exercises where you try to practice compassion by cultivating love and good wishes towards other people³. One way of doing this is to picture a series of people and wish them well in turn (taking your time over each and, typically, moving from yourself to people you like, then to people you are indifferent to and then to people you dislike). Another practice is to look at people as you make your way in the world and, for each person, say to yourself, “Like me, this person wants to be happy and avoid suffering”. Yet another is, in the midst of encountering another person, to every so often ask yourself “What is preventing me from being present with this person?”

Over the last few years, there's been a gradual increase in the number of scientific studies looking at compassion meditations. This is promising, not because these practices should be entirely understood by their effects on physiology, nor because the scientific lens is necessarily the best way to see them, but because it points to greater visibility and more general interest.

It's easy to see why scientists would be reluctant to study these practices; despite their age, they can seem like fluffy New Age exhortations, akin to telling someone, “Now let's all love each other.” When I was first introduced to these techniques, about a decade ago, I remember thinking they were silly. Mindfulness meditation, where you attempt to become aware of your thoughts and feelings as they happen, seemed like an intriguing way of probing at the structure of subjective experience; it could be criticized methodologically for being unverifiable, ungeneralizable and so on, but it seemed to have intellectually sound goals. Similarly, concentration meditation, where you train one-pointed focus, seemed like a useful training regimen: everyone wishes they could concentrate better. But compassion meditations seemed like an exercise in unfounded benevolence for people who couldn't be bothered to think carefully about ethics.

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Actions always planned are never completed.
……………………… —Democritus

Carpenter's Shoes

Yesterday I told myself I’d finish on Sunday
the project I started two years ago
but I can never trust myself to carry through
when it comes to carpentry, so
I swore an oath this time and pricked my thumb
and smeared a blood spot on my forehead like a tilak,
faced the four cardinal directions in turn bowing,
crossed myself, right fingers first to blood,
then chest, left shoulder first then right
like the kid I once was, almost devout
but not quite convinced hammer and nails
were enough to coax the angels out

………………….
Jim Culleny
April 2009

by Dave Maier

An earlier post of mine in this space divides readings of Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge into three kinds: a) relativist rejection of truth and knowledge; b) empiricist/naturalist restriction of Nietzsche's criticism to specifically transcendent truth and knowledge of same, leaving empirical knowledge untouched, if tentative; and c) my preferred option, a more forceful criticism of the Platonic picture of metaphysical objectivity, applicable as well to the Cartesian aspects of modernity, including those still present in naturalism.

I recently read about a most interesting variation on the naturalist view – a turn to ancient skepticism. Jessica Berry is the author of Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, which I have not read, as it costs sixty-five dollars. However, Richard Marshall of 3AM magazine has kindly interviewed her for us, and she gives there an admirably clear and forceful summary of her main points. If I misrepresent her views here due to my ignorance, then I humbly apologize in advance.

According to Berry, the “central preoccupation” of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the problem of nihilism. Values Nietzsche calls “ascetic” are self-denying and will result in nihilism if unchecked. The particular problem with ascetic value systems is the pernicious interaction of a) their self-denying content, and b) the view that “the values to which they subscribe are universal, necessary, categorical.” I emphasize the interaction of these elements, of which more below, because at first it might seem that the problem with the latter aspect of these systems is simply that if they are thought to be universal and necessary, then we can never come up with any alternative to them. And if it's their way or the highway, then nihilism is inevitable: their way squeezes all life from our valuations, eventually resulting in nihilism; and the “highway” is pure nihilism itself. This is what gives Nietzsche's writing its characteristic urgency: the death of God is like an anchor thrown overboard with a rapidly uncoiling rope tied to our feet. If we don't remove it, it will drag us under; but we are afraid to remove it, as we have been conditioned to believe that to do so is to sin against our very essence as rational creatures.

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by James McGirk

“BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.” It was a horrid thought, but Shashank Tripathi’s (i.e. Comfortablysmug’s) infamous Hurricane Sandy tweet had panache.

Tripathi mimicked the style of a breaking news tweet perfectly. The image of water sluicing into the New York Stock Exchange was too good to be true. An irresistible nugget of news distilling the potent emotions stirred by the storm: Sorrow for afflicted New Yorkers, fear for the future, the thrill of seeing history unspool in real time, and a dose of snickering glee at the idea of cuff-linked financiers wading through filthy water.

The cruelty and incendiary media appeal of Tripathi’s tweet was reminiscent of another notorious prank: the attack on the Epilepsy Foundation. On March 22, 2008, a horde of eBaum’s World users (a community devoted to online humor) logged onto the Epilepsy Foundation’s online forums, and plastered its pages with blinking graphics.

As despicable as deliberately triggering thousands of epileptic fits or enflaming a vulnerable community during a catastrophe may be, consider how hard it is to shock a contemporary audience with a piece of art or literature. As subversive texts go, these are arguably genuine artistic achievements, thrilling to witness in real time or read about afterwards.

It’s an aesthetic experience Sherrod DeGrippo, an information security expert who founded two of the world’s preeminent repositories of Internet drama, Encyclopedia Dramatica and OhInternet.com, compares to watching reality television. “I think that a lot of what is attractive about Internet drama is the combination of schadenfreude and superiority people feel when looking at it,” says DeGrippo. “Reality TV inspires a lot of the same feelings. The viewer thinks of himself as superior, but when examined, the viewer is obsessively voyeuristic.”

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by Maniza Naqvi

A soft thud, outside, beyond the door, followed by a steady chiir-chiir. Then, commotion: the sound of running feet—children shrieked, a woman calling out to them—wait—stop! A few minutes later the sound of a whistle–a siren—shoon-shoon. An orange fire, the shape of a disk, rising beyond, the window. Green parrots, arrived with little red beaks, gleaming, alighting on the electric wiring, between the apartment buildings. Then: another and more, two—three-four. She counted at least eight—the excited debate—-tain-tain. She picked up a green chili pepper from the stainless steel bowl–and with the small cutting knife, now too blunt and in need of sharpening, she chopped up the green treat. She opened the kitchen window and set it out in pieces strewn on the window pane for the parrots. That done, she undid the lid on the Tapal tea plastic jar, her fingers fished out the plastic spoon from within to measure a single heaped spoon of tea leaves into the two cup chipped teapot. She poured the scalding water from the whistling kettle into the tea pot—she noted the line of tiny red ants streaming from the sugar jar to a tiny hole in the wall. She covered the teapot with the velvet and mirror worked tea cozy. Looking out she mused, if not a ball of fire, an egg perfectly, served up—yes that’s how she always thought of it—each day break there it was a giant orange blazing egg yolk in the whitish haze in the distance. She watched the orderly line of thousands of geese in a drowsy winter sky making their way to the islands to lay their eggs. She thought about the Cheel, she hardly saw them anymore—the first ones to grab the bread—hardly any left. She had heard, God only knew from where,–that in Bombay, the Parsies had started cremating their dead—because the Cheel had all disappeared, poisoned by the chemical additives in the offal thrown out in the open by butchers which the birds fed on. She worried: was it the same here? Where would life go if not to the birds? There they were—the orderly Vee formation of thousands of geese in a drowsy winter sky making their way to the mangroves just nearby to lay their eggs. Here to escape, the cold, when earth froze over there, to renew life here, then returning to warmer weather and huntsmen. She saw them at ponds when she visited her daughter: Her daughter has a good job there with a company making helicopters for the miitary. She thought she heard popping sounds in the distance. She pried open the Cadbury Chocolates tin box—from it she took out one rusk and place it on a small plate. She poured a tea jug’s worth of milk from the Haleeb cardboard pack from the fridge into the pan and set it on the stove burner on a low fire. Then she headed for the front door. By the time she got back it would be just getting ready to boil over. She made her way slowly to the entrance of the apartment, DAWN lay at her threshold: Another headline of children killed by a drone attack. The arthritis in her knee –made its unwelcome appearance as it always did at this time of the year. But she didn’t want to move away from being so close to the sea. On the balcony where she had placed the torn up pieces of dried roti, the sounds of contentment grew now, the katr-patr, katr patr—of the Myna—yellow beaked. Then came the caw-caw, yes the bullying crows had spotted the roti; the Myna, naturally, had taken flight. As she closed in to the door, she heard, the sound of the jahrtoo as the sweeper moved dust around on the landing, while keeping up a steady chatter with the ayah who squatted in the doorway of the apartment next door fixing herself a paan laced with tambakoo, as she took a breather after having just dispatched her young charges with the usual shouting in their chaotic wake—You forgot your water bottle—Come back you forgot your pencil box–Arey homework—homework!!! Come back! She listened to this calling out, the woman at sixes and sevens with the children. Hers too would be home soon, with her grandchildren, like the geese that came back, only at this time, every year from colder climes.

More writings by Maniza Naqvi

by Kevin S. Baldwin

Shopping in general and shopping at malls in particular, especially during the holidays is one of my least favorite activities. Despite this predilection, a few a years ago, I found myself at the Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis on the Winter Solstice.

The mall's name is descriptive. At its center there is a circular atrium that is several stories high. As I surveyed the structure from the top level, I could see it was crowded and loud, with thousands of people moving about on the various levels. There was not a smile to be seen anywhere. So much for the joy of the season (and one of the reasons I tend to avoid malls between Halloween and New Year's). My Christian friends are quick to remind me that I would be more likely to experience joy in other places (like their congregation). I don't doubt them, but when I look at the time and energy devoted to shopping during the holiday season and the accompanying misery at the individual and planetary levels, I can't help but think we as a culture need to rethink our priorities.

The space got a little busier and noisier. Several school buses full of what looked like junior high and high school students had disgorged themselves into the mall. A church youth group, judging by the number of Christian-themed T-shirts. “Lord's Gym: Bench Press This!”, “this” being the sins of the world in the form of a cross, with Jesus struggling to lift it, was especially popular. Wrong holiday, I thought: Easter isn't for a few months yet (technically, I suppose the shirts actually represented Good Friday). Another popular one showed a bloody hand nailed to a cross emblazoned with “His pain, your gain.” Why the obsession with how Jesus died rather than how he lived and taught us to live? Again, priorities,…

Suddenly, this scene seemed oddly familiar: Throngs of unhappy people milling about in concentric multi-tiered circles. I had unwittingly stumbled into the 21st century version of Dante's Inferno! I began imagining who was on what level and what stores would be where in this mall. Should “Victoria's Secret” be on the upper or lower level? Should food courts that supersize meals be near the bottom? What did you have to do to move between levels, and so on. You get the idea.

Situations like this play out every year and I struggle to keep my inner Grinch at bay especially when I'm out with my kids. For me the holidays are about being at home with good food, family, friends and despite my atheism, good holiday music. The chorale at my college recently rendered an astonishingly transcendent “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” Who cannot be moved by Handel's “Messiah?” My latest discovery/ear-worm is Haydn's “The Creation,” another fabulous Biblically-inspired oratorio. What better way to relax on this, the shortest day of the year, listening to these glorious sounds while pondering the triumphs and travails of the past year and hopes for the one that lies ahead? I marvel that we are improbably careening around the universe on a wet rock and that the sun's rays, which are now streaming in practically horizontally through south-facing windows, will once again begin to tilt towards vertical in the days and months ahead.

by Akim Reinhardt

I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols.

It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics. Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets. When it came to “Deck the Halls,” everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling “Fa la la la, La la la la!”

For me, an American Jew then in my mid-20s, it was a liberating experience.

Christmas might not be everyone’s favorite holiday, but there’s no denying that here in the United States, it is THE holiday. None of the others can really compete. It is front and center in the cultural consciousness for no less then a month, beginning its inexorable, swelling crescendo the minute Thanksgiving ends in late November.

The din of Christmas music, a parade of TV specials, holiday parties one after the next, wrangling a tree, shopping for gifts, writing and reading year-in-review cards from friends and family, and a dozen other tasks and signposts: the United States is consumed by Christmas for roughly four weeks every year. And it doesn’t even end on the 26th. Rather, that merely kicks off a week’s worth of giddy de-escalation, the Christmas season not finally relinquishing its hold on society until the New Year’s arrival.

If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful. If you’ve become jaded about the holiday’s commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying. But if you’re Jewish, and thus imbued from an early age with a uniquely difficult relationship to Christianity, then it can be downright oppressive and wrought with the a deep sense of inner conflict that tears at you from every direction.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

There was recently mention in the media of a religious extremist in Egypt calling for the destruction of the pyramids. I first heard talk of this last summer– around the time that the shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed.

Holy hoax or not, I could not help but think of Bamiyan.

I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the moment I learned that the Taliban had blown up the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan.

Sitting in the backseat of a car in Los Angeles in 2001, we were stopped at a traffic light. The radio news mentioned it, but conversation in the car continued on– I don't think anyone noticed or was really listening.

Despite the fact that they had been firing rockets at the statues for months, still it was a shock to hear that the statues had been completely destroyed– and that these 1400 year old statues no longer existed.

How could they actually have gone through with it? I thought.

Although their destruction came as a shock, in fact the two statues had been practically tortured to death after months of rocket fire, canon fire, machine gun volleys and weeks of dynamiting.

The Japanese had been working furiously behind the scenes when the Taliban first made their intentions known to the world. Working with UNESCO and several Islamic governments, even their concentrated efforts could not stop what was to be. Years later, my Japanese friends still bring it up.

You see, the Japanese are sometimes called the world's great antiquarians. And they can trace their own tradition of Buddhist sculpture back to Bamiyan. So they –like many people– find it nearly impossible to grasp why anyone would have wanted to destroy those precious 55 meter and 38 meter-tall statues, which for so long had towered up against the sandstone cliffs in what is called one of the world's most beautiful high-altitude valleys.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

After the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, we as a nation have come to a crossroads.

No longer can we abide the excuses of gun control advocates, whose policies make us vulnerable to murder and assassination. This is a stark and incontrovertible fact: if only one of those dead 6-year-olds had come to their kindergarten class armed with a high-powered Glock with a magazine of at least 50 rounds, this tragedy could have been averted. Instead of the gunman spraying defenseless children in a hail of bullets, one single 6-year-old could have taken him out in a fatal miasma of deadly homicidal metal.

And today all those dead children could have been tucked away by their grateful parents as lively youngsters sleeping contented in their peaceful little bunk beds. Alive and thriving, they could have gone on to the good life in America, the best country in the world, where everyone is guaranteed a fair shot at the American Dream, as long as you're born fairly well-off to start with.

And if all twenty of these 6-year-olds had been armed, they could've have riddled the gunman till kingdom come, his body a mess of dismembered bits of mangled bullet-puckered tissue with little pieces of brain matter leaking out of his ears.

It is incumbent upon our weapons manufacturers to come up with new child-friendly designs: smaller gun handles that can fit comfortably into a 6-year-old fist, with hair triggers that respond immediately and sensitively to the slight pressure of a 6-year-old trigger finger.

It is also incumbent upon all kindergartens and elementary schools to immediately devote the greater part of their daytime teaching to gun practice, and to turn their corridors into shooting galleries.

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