Peter Gabel's Blog
Please join us for Peter Gabel's recent talk on "Originalism," a judicial world-view requiring judges to interpret the American Constitution according to the meaning it would have had in the late 18th century.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7,” the new film on Netflix that is number 3 in the country at last view, will introduce a whole new generation to the extraordinary events that took place in and around the Democratic Convention in Chicago leading up to the 1968 presidential election.
Amy Coney Barrett will not openly base her decisions on the Affordable Care Act, or Roe v. Wade, or the right to gay marriage on whether she herself agrees with the policies behind these cases. Instead, she will purport to base her decisions on her “originalism,” the view that the actual words of Constitution must be interpreted according to the original intent of the so-called Founding Fathers in 1789.
The Left needs to think about our social interconnectedness--and the distortions within it--in a way that goes beyond perceiving our society as determined at bottom by an economic system based on material self-interest.
"No one is born a racist. The question is what happens to the newborn child as he or she is introduced to the world that leads him or her to develop this terrible affliction that causes so much harm and social violence." We should of course condemn and seek to abolish racism now. But until we can more fully understand the social pathology that produces racial prejudice, it will be difficult to fully overcome its effects.
How can we each help to initiate or participate in thawing the frozen circulation of fear and releasing the forward flow of desire?
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo imposed additional sanctions on Iran as Iranians face one of the world's most deadly coronavirus outbreaks. What causes someone in his position to so lose touch with his own humanity and the humanity of the other?
To the extent that A approaches and becomes less than 1, law becomes increasingly plastic and open to liberating interpretation.
This new blog shows us that the use of great songs carrying powerful memories in advertising is an attempt not merely to sell products, but also to coopt the deeper meaning of the songs themselves so as to adjust us to an alienated world, to the world as it is.
“May the Holy Spirit arm us with the weapons of dialogue, understanding and desire for mutual recognition and fraternity”
“All human beings are animated by a desire for mutual recognition. A desire to see and be seen by one another as we really are in our whole presence to each other. That desire in a way was described by Martin Buber the Jewish theologian as the experience of ‘I and Thou’.”
How was the pace of the rise in fascist violence tied to the pace of Greek Christian indifference?
When terrorists engage in mass murder, they seek to reverse the dehumanization that was done to them by dehumanizing their imagined oppressors while seeking to bring about the redemption of an imaginary world in which they will become healed, become recognized, become finally included and loved as they anticipated they would be from their earliest days.
The walk-outs and demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of high-school students across the country yesterday…
Chapter 10: Social-Spiritual Activism: Activism that Thaws the False Self and Fosters Mutuality of Presence
Drawing on the concluding passages from Chapter 9, this final chapter begins by emphasizing that the aim of a new social-spiritual activism must be to link social change with a deepening ...
Chapter 9: The Movement’s Lack of Confidence in Itself: On the Necessity of Spiritualizing Social Activism
Chapter 8: Knowledge, Truth, and Understanding
This book has relied implicitly the compelling nature of phenomenological descriptions in illuminating human and inter-human reality--both the experience of ...
Chapter 7: Politics as the Struggle Over Who ‘We’ Are: On the Necessity of Building a Parallel Universe
Chapter 6: The Economic System as a Network of Alienated Reciprocities
This chapter shows how the characterization of the so-called "economic system" is actually an over-objectification ...
Chapter 5: Language, Thought, Ideology
This chapter describes the way that the the false self's representation of itself "as if it were real" is carried ...