January 2016 – • BOOKS FOR PEOPLE COMMITTED TO CHANGE •

Murder in the Cathedral: A Study of Power Relations

GAITHER STEWART, Political Philosophy No Responses »

Jan 312016

The Holy See

=By= Gaither Stewart

The worldwide influence of the Roman Catholic Church emanates from the Holy See,which is the Church’s central government headed by the Pope and physically located within the territory of the Vatican State inside the city of Rome with a population of 821. The Holy See has diplomatic relations with world nations which maintain two separate embassies in Rome: one to Italy and one to the Holy See. Now why the hell, one wonders, should Argentina or the USA, China or Gabon maintain diplomatic relations with a church? Likewise the Holy See has its embassies around the world, the nunciatures, while from day to day the Roman Church insists on meddling in Italy’s and world affairs. Today the Roman Catholic is effectively blocking new legislationon on same sex marriages and concommitant rights in Italy and other countries. One of the first demonstrative acts of each new pope is a triumphant cortege through the streets of “Italy”, just across the Tiber River from the Vatican.

OWL IN THE WATER PIT

GAITHER STEWART, SHORT STORIES No Responses »

Jan 292016

=By= Gaither Stewart

Martin was one of those persons to whom unusual things often happened. It was unclear whether he attracted the odd events or if the events attracted him. What is more, Martin implicated others in the things happening to him so that the singular occurrences of his life became a kind of complicity with other people. Wherever he went, whatever he did, people and objects and nature had a way of going haywire.

“Not By Bread Alone”: Concerning Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor

Exploration, PHILOSOPHY No Responses »

Jan 252016

One of a series of proposed images of Dostoevsky and of his works for a new Moscow metro station, postponed because of fears they could cause suicides.

=By= Gaither Stewart

In the first line of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s famous “poem”, often referred to as “the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother Alyosha that a preface is necessary to the unwritten story he is about to relate. Then in the third line of chapter V in Part Two of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Ivan asks rhetorically “For what kind of a writer am I?”, implying that although he, Ivan, is not even an artist, his creator, the author of the written book, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is the greatest of all.

Possibility—Probability of Nuking Russia

GAITHER STEWART, Political Philosophy 1 Response »

Jan 242016

=By= Gaither Stewart

By pure chance the two events occurred simultaneously: On a summer morning I read a reference to Aristotle’s discussion of possibility and probability in Meyer H. Abrams’ book, The Mirror and the Lamp, (in 1998 labeled by Modern Library one of the one hundred greatest English-language non-fiction books of the twentieth century). On the same day, I read several press articles concerning the demands of neocon madmen in the U.S. to “pull the trigger” on Russia, Iran and/or Syria

Protected: Steve Jonas’s Ending the “Drug War”, The Public Health Approach in prepublication stage.

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Jan 222016

Reading Lenin in Modern Rome

Featured, GAITHER STEWART, HISTORY, Political Philosophy, POLITIKON No Responses »

Jan 212016

Bogdanov, Gorki and Lenin, playing chess in Capri (1908)

=By= Gaither Stewart

A bit of Lenin before breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. (My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)

(Rome) Il signore Drin Drin, Capri fishermen called Lenin in 1910 and 1912 when the revolutionary and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya visited the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in his villa on the now famous island near Naples. Lenin did not speak Italian but he had heard the men he learned to fish with use a word he understood as drin drin (in Italian the onomatopoeia associated with ring or buzz) so the day he felt a bite on his pole, he shouted “drin drin.” Thus Vladimir Ilyich acquired his only known non-revolutionary nickname.

The Fiction Writer and the Biographer

GAITHER STEWART, PHILOSOPHY, Revolution No Responses »

Jan 182016

=By= Gaither Stewart

I just read the novel, EUPHORIA, by the young American writer, Lily King, a TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR in 2014, published by Grove Press, New York. Readers of this article do not have to worry; this is not to be a dry a book review. Instead, I have permitted myself to examine some of the ideas of this thought-provoking intellectual novel, loosely based on the life of famed anthropologist, Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

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