The times they are a’changing. The contrast is very stark: Authoritarian powers and dupes of leaders are falling like dominoes around the world. Those hanging onto their power through iron-fisted control tremble in the face of something brewing beyond their control. Even in our own supposedly democratic government, there is exposed the most glaring self-centeredness, [...]
“These are the times that try mens’ souls.” These famous words of Thomas Paine from his pamphlet “The Crisis”, written during the American Revolutionary War, stirred the spirit of all Americans of that difficult time. The words might as well have been uttered today. Paine lived and wrote amid two great revolutions: The American Revolution, [...]
So now people are finally bringing the revolution to the streets. At New York’s Stock Exchange, we suddenly see hundreds of people, young and old, protesting greed, protesting banks and bankers, protesting the stock market, protesting something almost indefinable now in the air in America. It is despair, it is disgust, with our own government. [...]
The uprisings and revolts taking place throughout the Arab world are astonishing harbingers of a new world order emerging, not only in that part of the globe, but all over the planet. We have not yet seen the true face of this revolution. The old ways are no longer holding. Autocracy is on its way [...]
Who are we? Buddhism has always looked deeply into this question. In “The Buddha and the Dream of America”, author James Hilgendorf ‘s new book, our deepest identity is at the very core of the answer – an identity that looks beyond the more common ways we identify ourselves, by religion, by gender, by ethnicity, [...]