Originally published in Japanese in 1982, the novel
Sachiko by Shūsaku Endō, perhaps Asia’s best-known Catholic author of fiction, has been recently translated into English by Van C. Gessel. In part a conventional love story of star-crossed lovers ripped apart from their embrace by the tragic whirlwind of the history of the twentieth century,
Sachiko is above all a powerful and inspiring account of the moral dilemmas and tenacious faith of Japanese and Western Christians amidst the depravity of World War II, one whose outlook surprisingly contrasts with the pessimism of Endō’s best-known novel
Silence.
Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) was one of the best-known Japanese novelists in the West. His popularity outside Asia has often been attributed to the fact that he deals mostly with Christian themes, which are not esoteric to the Western reader. In 1994, he was a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but lost to another Japanese, Kenzaburō Ōe. Born in Tokyo an
AAP PROSE Awards: The 2021 Category Winners
From biological science and ‘The Ethical Algorithm’ to legal studies and ‘Demagogue for President,’ the AAP PROSE category winners embrace 45 fields of study.
The apse mosaic of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna’s patron saint. Judith Herrin’s ‘Ravenna: Capital of Empire Crucible of Europe’ from Princeton University Press has won the 2021 European History category PROSE Award. Image – iStockphoto: Sergio Delle Vedove
Swann: ‘Exceptional Scholarship’
You’ll remember
Today (January 28), we have the winners in those 45 subject categories in this, the 45th year of the PROSE Awards’ operation. And that puts us halfway through the selection-announcement cycle of this long-running award program.
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jan 27 2021 (IPS) - Occasionally some of us might suffer from a feeling of maximal overload, overwhelmed by COVID-19 and the reign of Donald Trump. It can maybe be conceived as far too euro-centric to be concerned about the disastrous situation in the U.S., with media stuffed to the brim by news about Donald Trump while the global environmental crisis is steadily getting worse and war, injustices and famine continue to agonize people in places like Darfur, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria.
First Lady Melania Trump decorates Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Persistence of Hate In American Politics
After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past and why some fail.
JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images
The historian Joan
Wallach Scott started thinking of the judgment of history when the
Charlottesville riots took place in 2017. The appearance of a large number of
marchers chanting antisemitic slogans (such as “Jews will not replace us”) and
displaying Nazi paraphernalia ran counter to her assumption that history had rendered
its final judgment on the Nazis. She had thought that Nazism had been banished
forever from the political stage. How could she have been so wrong?
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The education reform bill HB 2170, passed by both chambers of the Illinois Legislature, includes the creation of a Freedom School Fund. Jon Hale, a professor of educational history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wrote the 2016 book “The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement” (New York: Columbia University Press). In an interview with
News Bureau education editor Sharita Forrest, Hale discussed the roles of Freedom Schools in promoting civil rights and educational equity and the implications for Illinois in funding Freedom Schools statewide.
When did Freedom Schools originate and what were their objectives?