Peace

When The Shalom Center honored Tony Kushner as a “Prophetic Voice in the Arts,” our interviewer (herself a prophetic film-maker as well) began by asking him: “What is a prophetic voice?”

He laughed and explained that when he told his life-partner that he was being honored for being a “prophetic voice” in the world, his partner cocked an eyebrow: “Pathetic voice? What kind of honor is that?”

So the interview begins. It winds its profound, funny, provocative, and never pathetic way into where you can find it now — on videotape in The Shalom Center’s YouTube “neighborhood.”

You can watch and hear this exploration by two artists of “the artist as prophet” by clicking here:

Our interviewer was Ilana Trachtman, whom we also honored as a Prophetic Voice in the Arts for directing “Praying with Lior” – an award-winning documentary film about how a Philadelphia kid with Down Syndrome became bar mitzvah in the midst of a celebratory community.

On the same evening, we posted and honored the “prophetic visions” of the next generation –drawings by the children of Mishkan Shalom, the Philadelphia synagogue where we held the “Prophetic Voices in the Arts” event. Some of their visions are shown at a Flickr slide-show we’ve set up here. —

So we welcome you to the on-line version of our “Prophetic Voices” event. It’s all great, and we especially recommend letting yourself soak in the Prophetic wisdom of our own epoch by clicking to that amazing Trachtman-Kushner interview

We’re glad to make these goodies available. Summer is for most activist non-profit groups the “driest” time of year — and it would be a really great help to our work in general if you can contribute with a tax-deductible donation. Click on the “Donate” box on the left-hand column. Thanks!

Blessings of shalom, salaam – peace!
 Arthur   Read more »

Tuesday morning – just two days ago – I wrote half a dozen leaders of progressive thought and action in America, each separately, the letter that follows.

It proposes creating a grand coalition calling for independence from the corporate & military elites that have taken great power over America’s future, and gathering in hundreds of thousands all over our country on July 4 — Independence Day.

One of the people I wrote was the historian /activist Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States whom I have known for 45 years or so. He responded just 90 minutes later, and his response is also below.

I intended this morning, Thursday morning, to write Howard back to ask how to follow up on his comments.

But I can’t. Howard died yesterday, at 87.

He was one of the wisest, gentlest, drily good-humored of progressive thinkers and activists. The best of the America he celebrated in his bottom-up history, in which the energies and currents of Blacks, of workers, of women, of religious minorities, of war resisters, were the center –- not Presidents and Senators.   Read more »

[When I first began working on this essay, the word “earthquake” had not yet been swallowed up by the catastrophe in Haiti, and I could use the word to mean the combination of religious, political, sexual, ecological, and economic changes — often labeled Modernity — that have upended the kinds of societies that had shaped our world for the last two thousand years.   Read more »