By James Aitchison It was called “the shot that went around the world”. On 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a fervent Bosnian nationalist, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian…
By: John Robinson Francis Bellamy did not intend his publishing gimmick to turn into a national ritual, nor did he intend his words to be taken up in the mouths of those seeking asylum or new beginnings in a democratic…
By: Judith Ferster One day in November 2019, when I was traveling with a group in Israel and Palestine, we were walking along the wall separating Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. There was much to see because…
By James Aitchison Courage in a society controlled by secret police was a rare commodity. In Nazi Germany, the party controlled the news media, police, armed forces, judiciary, travel, and all levels of education from kindergarten to university. Indoctrination started…
By: James Aitchison On 21 September 1914, a seven-stanza poem appeared in The Times of London. The First World War had begun in July that year as a glorious Boys’ Own adventure, a chance for every young lad to see the…
The essay that follows reflects my understanding of these extraordinary stories through the lens of a literary reading, i.e., setting down the baggage that comes from reading the texts as sacred and instead engaging with them as literature, as suggested by the literary critic Harold Bloom in his “The Book of J.”
By: James Aitchison The debate rages in scholarly circles: what language did the ancient inhabitants of Scotland speak? Did the Picts possess a lost language, was it an Indo-European dialect, or was it simply Celtic? Our first clues can be…
By: Caleb Park Music is a noun. Here’s what Google says about music: “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” So obviously, it doesn’t really…
By: Idoko Jennifer Uloma What if we become more realistic? What if we put pretence to stop? What if we dispose of our masks and become our true selves? What if we become carefree and unapologetically ourselves? What if we…
Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” promotes compassion to counteract racism, as illustrated by Atticus Finch’s advice to his daughter Scout. Research from Stanford and the University of Texas reinforces the importance of compassion and self-compassion for psychological and social well-being. Kindness and compassion also have contagious effects that benefit society. However, global happiness is declining, a phenomenon that can be remedied by fostering compassion, which is crucial for a content and connected society.