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Welcome!
Welcome to my Web site, in which you will find writings by me over twenty years, including poems both old and new. The articles on this site reflect my interests, which are vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, religion, social justice, and literature and politics.
I have also been engaged in trying to understand my more immediate environment, Union Square in Manhattan. You can read my thoughts on Union Square as it relates to New York City, the United States, and a sustainable planet, by clicking here.
You can read other articles and material in the blog section of my company, Lantern Books.
Articles
In Its End, a Beginning
Satya Magazine,
Jun 2007
This is the one hundred and forty-second—and last—issue of this magazine, which Beth Gould and I founded way back in 1994. Beth has decided it’s time to move on, and so the magazine is coming to an end. [Read more...]
Sanctuary
Parabola magazine,
Sep 2006
What makes a place holy? We build places of worship and a religious authority sanctifies them: that is one way. Another is for a teacher to be born, teach, die, or be reborn at a place, and for the followers to congregate there. Yet another is that a miracle occurs and pilgrims travel to the site to attend, in some intangible manner, to the echo of that rupture of the quotidian.
Yet none of these sanctifications quite capture the mystery of the place. When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and tells him to take off his shoes because the ground he is on is holy, we do not know whether the place is divine because God has appeared in it or that its coordinates of astonishment pre-exist this particular event. Perhaps what makes the ground holy is simply that Moses’ bare feet touch the dust, the human touches the humus, and that is the point of sanctification. Or perhaps it is something else entirely: something to do with being called and giving an answer: Here I am. [Read more...]
You Be The Vegetarian
Satya Magazine,
Sep 2006
As a publisher, I look forward to and dread trends. I’ll explain why in a moment, but the trend I’ve noticed recently is the enormous number of books being published on what might loosely be called food politics. There’s Marion Nestle’s What We Eat (North Point), Jim Mason and Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat (Rodale), Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin), Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury), Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson’s Chew on This (Houghton Mifflin), and Grub by Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry (Tarcher)—and that’s just in the first six months of 2006.
As the titles themselves show, Americans are looking for guidance and authenticity. They’re confused and they want their food choices demystified. Their consciences have been pricked and they want them salved. These books are admirably direct: Nestle takes the reader around a supermarket; Mason and Singer provide an analysis of the life-choices of three families; Pollan samples four different kinds of meals; Grub is full of recipes; Planck knows how to negotiate farmers’ markets; and Schlosser and Wilson are down with the kids. It’s the kind of practical knowledge that busy consumers, who really don’t want to think too hard about their food choices, can digest easily and feel good as they go about their over-scheduled lives. [Read more...]
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