beyond magazine

Freedom to Read Week: Feb 24 - March 1

FREEDOM TO READ WEEK 2008
February 24–March 1, 2008

Celebrate your choices, contemplate the challenges

To their defence.

Someone sent this quote from this article to me:

"Mr Bush says expanding public funding goes against the principles of private health care, and that subsidising it creates a disincentive for people to buy private care themselves."

And I thought of the way many political leaders in certain cultures, American being one, who try to align themselves with religion to make people feel like they can vote for some kind of God-ordained human being who will make everything right.

And this quote comes to mind when thinking of all the huffing and puffing about bringing justice to the world:

And that wasn't the end of it. There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

Freedom to Read Week

      It's that time of year again.

February 25 to March 3, 2007 Freedom to Read Week is an annual event that encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

          

Daily Lit.

      

The thought of more email in my inbox makes my eyes twitch and I cannot read more than a few paragraphs at a time online. I love the book as an object. Beautiful, beautiful offline books. Despite the twitching and paper worshipping, this appealed to me. It seems like chance to work through something slowly over the first cup of morning Earl Grey hot.

Daily Lit:  

# Why read books by email? Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it!

I've picked the poems of T.S. Eliot to begin with. I have a complete works somewhere on my shelf and I never get to it. So I'll try it and see if I like it.