Analysis

By Archie Kennedy

As surely as cancer rots away the individual body, there are malignant forms of social cancer that sicken and eat away at the social world of human beings. Some forms are fast, violent, and deadly. Other forms of cancer rot away at the collective body, year in, year out. The host becomes progressively ill and eventually, it dies.

Read more: Caterpillar: Symptoms of Social Cancer

By Gilad Atzmon

On January 12th at a Martin Luther King Birthday Concert I joined the NYC Meeting House Orchestra to perform a set of my music. The event was the annual fundraiser for a local homeless shelter and it took place at the auditorium of the Friends Seminary, an elite Quaker private school in Lower Manhattan.  The cause was obviously worthy and fully consistent with Quaker values, the house was packed and the concert was a smashing success.

Read more: The American Dilemma

By MWC News

The Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace
by William Blum

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you've forgotten ...

Read more: The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats

By Robert Jensen

A review of Walter Brueggemann, The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipatory Word (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).

Does God take sides in the elections? Is there a voters’ guide hiding in our holy books? Should we pray for electoral inspiration?

Secular people tend to answer an emphatic “NO” to those questions, as do most progressive religious folk. Because religious fundamentalists so often present an easy-to-caricature version of faith-based politics -- even to the point of implying that God would want us to vote for certain candidates -- it’s tempting to want to banish all talk of the divine from political life.

Read more: Prophetic politics: Charting a healthy role for religion in public life

By Sheldon Richman

This would be news to most Americans, who for several years have been subjected to a steady drumbeat of alarming reports about Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program and its imminent acquisition of the bomb. Yet here is America’s top intelligence officer admitting that Iran has not even decided to build a weapon.

Read more: Are Obama and Netanyahu Trying to Push Iran toward a Nuke?