This page will feature lighter and shorter pieces on a variety of topics
CHANGING EXPECTATIONS
GETTING RESURRECTION RIGHT I’m back—from Europe, that is, from a part of Europe where religion remains vital—the countries of the former Yugoslavia—and where religious traditions meet, sometimes in peace and sometimes not. More on that in later posts. (If you would like an introduction to the complicated religious and political scene in the region, check…
CONVERSATION IN AN OTTOMAN SITTING ROOM
Mostar, Bosnia Our guide in Mostar, a city in Bosnia, was describing the war in the 90s. Earlier we had walked by a graveyard in what had been a small city park. The dates on the gravestones all ended in the same year, 1993. The people of Mostar buried their dead in the park because…
WHEN THINGS FALL APART
HOPE IN A TIME OF DISINTEGRATION Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. W.H. Yeats, “The Second…