Hopeful steps toward recognition of LGBT rights occurred this year in many otherwise homophobic countries, even as brutal anti-LGBT crackdowns were under way elsewhere. Below are thumbnail descriptions of encouraging developments in 11 nations, regions, and international organizations. (For the grimmer side of 2017, watch for an upcoming article.) INDIA Protest against India’s anti-gay Section…
Scene from “Love Is Love” video. A group of Nigerian, Kenyan and Ugandan human rights activists has come together to record a powerful and non-apologetic song championing LGBT equality in Africa. Scene from “Love Is Love” video The song, titled “Love is Love,” was released on Dec. 25 on YouTube as a video filled with…
The Christmas season is a time for family gatherings, which often means a season of sadness for LGBT people who have been expelled by their families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The holiday sadness of a gay man By Erin Royal Brokovitch I have always understood Christmas to be a time to…
via A lonely and painful Christmas for excluded LGBT people —
While wondering what to write about for the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus, I happened upon a book by Naoko Saito entitled The Gleam of Light: Moral perfectionism and education in Emerson and Dewey. As Saito expounds it, the notion of perfection as a practical moral aim, and its relation to growth and human flourishing, is both akin to, and different from, the human perfection that Erasmus advocated — and that Quakers preached and suffered for in Puritan England.
Saito’s reflections are rooted in a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. As Saito shows, Emerson saw this “gleam of light” as a powerful and precious resource for renewal and authentic creativity. This “gleam of light” is “transcendent,” in that…
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