The Earthquake Thunder Fish, Yosuke Ueno Since its “opening” in 1854 by U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan often has been defined in the West by a single, simple image. Sometimes that image has been one of exotic, romantic tradition … More →

March 18, 2011

Purim is a bittersweet holiday with a powerful spiritual message, says Rabbi Gil Steinlauf of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, DC. A story about Esther that seems to be all about chance is really about “God’s presence working itself out in ways we can’t quite understand.” More →

March 18, 2011

Shaker communities “required of you to give your all to God to and to strive to work at your salvation each and every day,” says one of the last living Shakers. More →

March 18, 2011

The current president of Friends of the Shakers says the communities believed they would “grow to a great number and then dwindle down to as few as the fingers on one hand, and then there would be a resurgence.”
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March 18, 2011

“The individual soldier often feels not that he or she is broken, but that the world itself is broken, and there is no easy fix for a broken world,” writes US Navy Commander Greg Parker. More →

March 11, 2011

“Whether we’re actually preserving veterans’ capacity to have a flourishing life afer war, a good life for a human being after war, I don’t know. I just don’t know,” says clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. More →

March 11, 2011

“Soldiers carry all the moral weight of war, and we carry very little, and we need to share that moral burden by realizing that they are our surrogates,” according to philosopher, ethicist, and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman, author of “The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers.” More →

March 11, 2011

“To do the war on the cheap and not hold us all accountable for the decisions that are made is a travesty,” says this New York National Guard state chaplain. More →

March 11, 2011

“It’s like you don’t really know your spirit until it’s been damaged. We don’t really have a consciousness of our own spirit until it’s wounded, and then it needs help,” says Michael Abbatello, who served in Afghanistan as a rifleman in a Marine Corps infantry line unit. More →

March 11, 2011

“It’s our job as civilians to tend to the returning warriors by bringing them into the center of the communitiy,” says this psychotherapist and author of “War and the Soul.” More →

March 11, 2011