February 1, 2021
One of the most important union militants in Central American history, Alejandro Molina Lara, died in Los Angeles, California on December 17, 2020. Born in El Carmen, La Unión, El Salvador, on May 20, 1944, Molina Lara quickly rose to prominence in the Salvadoran labor movement while working at a shrimp packing facility in Usulután. He leaves a legacy of militant labor organizing in El Salvador and the United States.
The Salvadoran labor movement was part of a Latin American upsurge in organizing during the 1970s. In El Salvador and beyond, strike movements had to contend with military regimes. In El Salvador, the labor movement developed over two decades under such a regime. By the late 1970s, the unions pushed the regime in a highly repressive direction that, in turn, propelled an expansion of the movement.
Elliot Wolfson.
Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis. Indiana University Press, 2020. 453 pages. (Paperback $60)
Wolfson’s new book
Heidegger and Kabbalah is arguably the
magnum opus of his long and productive career. It stands as a landmark study in Judaism
and philosophy. In the realm of Jewish philosophy, I dare say it is the most important study on or about Judaism produced in our era. It is also a major contribution to the study of Martin Heidegger and the Humanities more generally. This work contributes to how we read traditions of inquiry to both critique and then reconstruct moral possibilities and excavate metaphysical hazards. This book will join a very narrow canon of major Jewish philosophical works in the twentieth and twenty-first century including Hermann Cohen’s
Art by Matt Chase.
The law of imitative representation, aka mimesis, reigned supreme in Western art for so long that its resistors sometimes found
it hard to stop battling it, even when and where it had lost its grip. Consider, for example, some responses to so-called concrete poetry on the part of advocates of so-called conceptual art. The writer and critic Lucy Lippard differentiates between concrete poetry’s naive strategies of linguistic resemblance “where the words are made to look like something, an image” and conceptualism’s more sophisticated liberty “where the words are used only to
avoid looking like something, where it doesn’t make any difference how the words look on the page or anything.”
Our American family my family survived one Civil War. Can we make it through another?
With Confederate soldiers on one side and Union soldiers on the other, my family shows how our differences don t have to divide us.
Daniel H. Lee
Opinion contributor
My maternal great-great grandfather finished the Civil War at Hart Island Prisoner of War camp, just off New York City in Long Island Sound.
Confederate Army Private John Edward Jackson was sick, wounded, and a long way from his home in Petersburg, Virginia. His father seems to have held slaves, but records list John as a clerk in civilian life.
Edited by Dr. Robert W. Hefner
The Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs looks forward to the release of its new book,
Shari’a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World. This greatly welcomed work is a collection of leading experts’ reflections on the implementation of shari’a in Muslim-majority societies.
One of the most important developments in Muslim politics in recent years has been the spread of movements calling for the implementation of shari`a or Islamic law. Shari`a Politics maps the ideals and organization of these movements and examines their implications for the future of democracy, citizen rights, and gender relations in the Muslim world. These studies of eight Muslim-majority societies, and state-of-the-field reflections by leading experts, provide the first comparative investigation of movements for and against implementation of shari`a. These essays reveal that the Muslim public’s interest in shari`a does not spring from an unchang