This is a serious book addressing the motives and the emotional burdens on whistleblowers. Kohn conveys an enthusiastic, can-do theme and attitude. He is clearly supportive of whistleblowing as a benefit to private and public good governance.
The phenomenon of moral injury is currently being explored seriously in the areas of military service and torture experience, and it has been recognized as a genuine challenge by leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces branches and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It is also becoming the object of broader serious discussion in areas of human experience relating to sexuality, abortion, child abuse and poverty.
Our world is escalating toward the sort of brutal intolerance of “the Other” that led to World War II. This time, though, the government and people of the United States are perilously close to embracing that brutality themselves.
In this post we review two books that add to our depth perception regarding tolerance and intolerance, though without offering solutions. Denis Lacorne’s The Limits of Tolerance traces the history and vulnerability of the Enlightenment value of tolerance. Robert Bartholomew and Anja Reumschussel’s American Intolerance indicts the United States for its terrible history of official and populist intolerance toward each new influx of immigrants.
Edwin L. Battistella’s book Sorry About That is a compilation and analysis of stories of pubic apologies in the primarily U.S. experience. Leaders everywhere make apologies, yet apology-phobia is a global disability. Apology is complex in human relationships. Effective public apologies are even more complex. Public apologies differ with cultural context, just as personal apologies differ in language and timing.
John S. Garrison’s Shakespeare and the Afterlife is, on the surface, a study of the views and devices used by William Shakespeare in his plays and poetry in treating the nature and activities of existence after death. More deeply, though, this book is a meditation on the variety of contemporary views about existence after death….
Margaret Fell: Women’s Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets , edited by Jane Donawerth and Rebecca M. Lush (2019) In Margaret Fell: Women’s Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets, Jane Donawerth and Rebecca M. Lush seek to provide a representative…
Jesus and After: The First Eighty Years, by E. Bruce Brooks – A review. Is the Christian scripture a moving text which changes with time? The author witnesses to such changes through an episodic philological analysis of Christian scriptures.
Lynne Taylor’s In the Children’s Best Interests is a timely reminder of the universal plight of migrating children throughout history. It highlights the chronic inadequacy of government mechanisms for the management of their needs and lives. More telling, it shocks us with the recognition that our current national and global controversy over refugees from violence is just the latest in a string of moral failures.
The Books section of the September 2018 Friends Journal includes reviews of three exemplary works to help “white” readers go deeper into self-awareness about the hidden dynamics of racism. This post offers an excerpt from each review. We strongly encourage you to read the linked reviews and to seek out the books themselves.
Terrorism is universal in all cultures, in all traditions, in all times. Terrorism is only a means not an end, in human behavior. When other means are not perceived as effective, terrorism is a final option. The only way to stop terrorist is talking.