Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Four decades later, King remains one of the most vivid symbols of hope for racial unity in America. But that’s not the way he was viewed in the last year of his life.
Bob Dylan Liturgy
Source: trinity-episcopal.org
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
—Franz Kafka, from a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904.
Walter Brueggemann loosely cited this passage from Kafka in our interview being released this week and so, while fact-checking the script, we thought we’d verify for attribution. And, we wanted to read what he originally wrote. Following is the German version from which the English was translated:
“Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.”
Photo by Celeste RC/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
(via beingblog)
Source: beingblog
On Being Blog: A Prayer for Nature That Holds 100 Years Later
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Photo by Joel Bedford/Flickr, cc by-nd 2.0
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, who is our featured guest this week at On Being, shared this poem by his great-grandfather along with his moving Thanksgiving Day Prayer. Nearly a century old, this…
Source: beingblog
A Statement from the General Assembly of Occupy Portland #ows
We remind the people of Portland and the people of the world that we have come together to address the deepest problems of our economic and political system, and that these problems have no easy solutions— especially when those openly seeking the solutions are painted as filthy, ignorant, violent hooligans by those with a vested interest in maintaining the current broken system. We remind them who we are: mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, the unemployed and underemployed, students, teachers, government employees, laborers, and pensioners.
Remix of the Quaker painting ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ by Sarah Gowan. #ows
The top 0.1%— about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million— are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.
Suppressing Nonviolent Dissent
An anthology of police brutality at encampments across America.
you against me a .50 cal versus squirt gun
Hey if this the cut I’m the surgeon Assassinate your character cast aspersions You ain’t gotta verse better than my worst one You ain’t gotta verse better than my worst one Hey, I know I hurt son, but you against me a .50 cal versus squirt gun You ain’t gotta verse better than my worst one You ain’t gotta verse better than my worst one
From @TalibKweli #ows
