A Website of the Radical Imagination
Fr. Frechette, a priest-doctor (and hero of our time) who’s worked for a generation in Haiti, wrote this Christmas reflection last December, but it will always be in season. HOW BEAUTIFUL UPON THE MOUNTAINS ARE THE FEET of the one who brings good tidings, who proclaims peace; who brings the good news of salvation; who … Read more
Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace by Ralph Peters Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World by Ralph Peters Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? by Ralph Peters Flames of Heaven: A Novel of the End of the Soviet Union by Ralph Peters The Perfect Soldier by Ralph Peters The Devil’s Garden by Ralph … Read more
First Thought: if you came of age in the late nineteen sixties, the assertions about Mr. Kerrey’s participation in a massacre in Vietnam trigger very powerful moral reflexes – and it is the nature of a reflex to come into play faster than thought. Reflex condemnations of Kerrey – and reflex exonerations of him – … Read more
Charles Keil emailed First of the Month a series of essays, notes and poems during, and immediately after, the war in Kosovo. Keil’s messages were marked by his determination to keep thinking — and feeling — in the face of fascism. Here are excerpts from his communications. April 29 A month into this war against … Read more
David Horowitz, still here, has lately fashioned himself into a martyr for Free Speech. He composed an ad in opposition to the idea of reparation payments for the United States’ part in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade; tried, with mixed success, to place the ad in various college newspapers; and then spun that mixed success … Read more
When last we spoke…One squireen was eulogizing yet another one [[http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/06/lineages_of_the.html]. The still living one, Perry Anderson, found hope in the existence of a newish magazine, Jacobin. It’s been said before: hope that is seen is not hope.
A few months before her death, Ellen Willis emailed to say pieces by Charles O’Brien and Fredric Smoler on the Danish Cartoon Controversy posted on this site were “good.” (That was high praise from Ellen whose mode of approbation was the opposite of American idolaters.) Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the time of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice [in 1989] as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down.”