Repairing The Fabric of the World

A Conversation with Jonathan F.P. Rose

I met Jonathan F.P. Rose in Manhattan, the week a snow storm knocked out power in much of the Northeast. Heating by woodstove and carrying water home from the local fire station for five long, cold days left me feeling a bit rough and smoky, not to mention unprepared, to be sitting in the comfortable offices of his company in a historic old building near Grand Central Station. Yet the moment I met Rose, a tall, friendly man who met me talking and moving at a confident stride, I realized that my days as a kind of suburban pioneer woman, muddling along in a harsh new world that everyone blamed on global warming and our decaying infrastructure, was the best possible situation to meet a new kind of green pioneer.

Unity In Diversity: Hope in Troubled Times

Swami Swaroopananda

Q: The world seems to be in rough shape and ready to collapse. There seems to be an urgent need for humanity to go about doing things a new way if we are to survive. What is needed?

Swami Vishnudevananda, who is the founder of the Sivananda International Vedanta organization (the largest yoga organization in the world today), spoke with us about this situation on the planet many years back. In 1969, he was sitting and meditating in our ashram in the Bahamas in front of the altar and he had a vision. While he was in very deep meditation, he had a vision in which he saw the whole planet Earth engulfed in fire and he saw people all over the planet running away trying to escape that fire. As they were trying to escape the fire, they were breaking all barriers, physical barriers, mental barriers, spiritual barriers, gender barriers, religious barriers, racial barriers.

If You Want To Be a Rebel, Be Kind

Nipun Mehta

The police had declared Monday, November 14th of 2011, as the day of the raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment. It was the first Occupy site to call for a general strike, one that shut down the fifth largest port in the country; it was also the first Occupy gathering to report a shooting and a murder, as police violence also reached new heights. With tensions mounting amidst political chaos, police escalated their crackdowns. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in preparation for the raid, police from around the state were called in, and uncertainty filled the air.

A Way That Makes Sense

Elena Wertenbaker

FOR THE PAST COUPLE OF MONTHS, several friends and I have been envisioning a land project. We are mostly recent college graduates and together we are undergoing an ordinary process that most graduates go through in the first months and years after leaving school: trying to imagine the shape of our futures.

A Light in Dark Places

Alexandra Zaleski

Wars and strife seem to swallow a little bit more of Earth every day. At least it seems this way as I watch from a distance at a liberal arts college in New England, where I spend my days studying the history and literature of the Middle Ages. Surely, logic sometimes suggests, I should have pursued something more obviously practical in these circumstances. How can I be an active and useful member of this turbulent modern world with a humanities degree, let alone as a medievalist?