America’s Dirtiest Secret: How to Take Your Power Back
By Erik Fogg
Kosmos Journal, FALL | WINTER 2016
I’ve got a dirty secret that almost nobody in America knows. You see, Americans have this very popular notion that we can’t agree on anything politically. It’s so pervasive that to suggest otherwise seems like a bit of a fairy tale. Americans of each party look upon the other with ever-increasing antipathy—so much so that almost a third of…
Polarized America. Polarized Self: A Call for Collaboration
By Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato
Kosmos Journal, FALL | WINTER 2016
I live in a polarized body. My very being is compromised by competing characteristics. Mexican-American heritage–bilingual, bicultural. College-educated millennial on need-based scholarship. Latina social justice leader in white evangelical conservative communities. Independent voter in hyperpartisan America. I have no tribe…
Finding Political Understanding with a Single Question
By Sean Long
Kosmos Journal, FALL | WINTER 2016
Disruption. Innovation. Disruptive innovation.
These oft-cited drivers of sustained and meaningful change will not lead Americans to a better democracy. We do not need to call upon an external agent, an ‘Uber for American politics,’ to save us. Rather, we need to take it upon ourselves to be better communicators. It starts with asking a…
Vital Kosmos | Our Five Most-Read Features of 2016
Dear Reader,
What a year! Since the election and returning from Standing Rock, I'm feeling a sense of overwhelm. How many of you feel it too? Maybe it was the sound and fury of the election coverage that ended (for me) with a sense of emptiness and confusion. And at Standing Rock, experiencing our heavily militarized oil industry kept me wondering what country I was in. No wonder this urge to…
Post-Election, It’s Time for a Radical Rethinking of the News Ecosystem
by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser
The 2016 election exposed a significant crisis for U.S. democracy: the failure of our news media system.
This was an election in which false news was consumed as if true; in which polls were significantly off-base; in which journalists missed the stories both of Trump supporters, who came out in unanticipated numbers, and former Obama voters, who defied predictions…
No Wonder the Buddha
By Marybeth Holleman
http://www.marybethholleman.com
When we bought our home fifteen years ago, we hired an arborist to walk our mostly wooded acre and advise us about the health of our trees. He stopped at a willow in our back yard. “Nice burl,” he said, pointing to the gnarled base. “If you cut this down, I’d love to have it. I could carve a pretty nice bowl from it.” But we weren’t…
Enclaves of Firelight
By Evangeline Elmendorf Greene
Two years ago, one of my students turned in an assignment splattered with blood. I held the paper by one edge and extended it back to him, explaining that I could not accept it in this condition. His eyes remained cast down; in his culture, it is considered disrespectful to look directly into the eyes of anyone in authority. “It’s just pig’s blood, Miss,” he…
Philoxenia: The Art of Expressing Love and Friendship to Strangers
By Bruna Kadletz
Disguised as poor travellers, Zeus and Hermes visited many villages in search of refuge for the night. Residents repeatedly turned the gods away. Everyone regarded them as uninvited guests except a poor elderly couple—Baucis and Philemon. The couple welcomed them as guests in their home and generously served them food and wine. After refilling her guests’ cups many times over,…
Renewal from the Ground of Our Being
By Michael N. Nagler
http://www.mettacenter.org
The spectacularly successful freedom struggle Gandhi conducted in India had three phases: (1) personal empowerment (shedding fear, for starters), (2) Constructive Programme (CP), where you break your dependence on the oppressive regime, and then (3) direct nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) where still needed. It was a program for the complete…
Standing Rock | Being in a Living Prayer and the Art of Collective Resistance
By Thanissara (Mary Weinberg) via her blog
Standing Rock is an Indigenous led resistance through the power of collective prayer and ceremony. Its context is the 500-year long impact of Colonialism on First Nation People, which inflicted one of the largest genocides in human history, alongside mass invasion of Native lands, a litany of broken treaties, legislated cultural oppression, including…