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The Only Thing We Have to Fear…

“So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more, but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.”                                                                  Ezra Klein I fear …

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The Tattered and Torn Moral Arc Toward Justice

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”                                                                                Martin Luther King, Jr. The arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice; however, its trajectory is not unerringly true. As I step ever so gently, perhaps timidly, into the new year, I feel a terrible vulnerability; my naiveté gone, replaced …

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Listening with New Ears

“This is usually where the desire to dismiss claims of racial oppression come from—it just doesn’t make sense to you so it cannot be right.”                                                 Ijeoma Oluo in So you want to talk about race I can be justly accused of remaining silent for far too long when words condemning racism should have been …

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When Opening Doors & Windows Is Not Enough

Note: The following will be published in the November/December issue of Neighbors of Batavia magazine. The morning of September 12, the world of Neighbors magazines was torn apart. Kate Sullivan, who, with her husband Tim, published Neighbors of Batavia magazine, was ripped from our lives. The vision they shared—helping communities discover their heart and soul—has …

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Opening Doors & Windows – Part 1

Fair warning. For those who look to these posts for comfort and reconciliation, this piece is likely an exception. Several recent books and conversations emboldened me to peer some distance into the future. The vista is, at best, sobering. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has been writing about global warming for more than 30 years, …

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The Significance of My Insignificance

It’s time again for resolutions, but in this moment, it is not New Year’s resolutions I seek. I am, instead, in a quandary about New Epoch’s resolutions. What might I resolve as we enter what many geologists are calling the Anthropocene Epoch? Anthropocene, much like Anthropology or anthropomorphic, takes its root from the Greek anthropos, …

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