All posts tagged: Teach

The 3 colors: What folktales teach about how to grow wise

The 3 colors: What folktales teach about how to grow wise

Published by Jenni Sidey

European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a white horse. In the Norse tale “Tatterhood,” a red flower and a white flower grow side by side in the dark earth. This week, I interviewed the mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw for Mini Philosophy. Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild, makes the case that folk stories and myths can help us understand ourselves and life more broadly. And in these colors, we find a map of human maturation. The colors correspond roughly to three modes of being. Each has a gift and a shadow. Each belongs most naturally to a particular season of life, though we can move in and out of all three depending on what’s happening to us. And most of us, Shaw argues, are deficient in one …

Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire”: An Illustrated Video Narrated by Viggo Mortensen

Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire”: An Illustrated Video Narrated by Viggo Mortensen

Published by José Betancourt

“Through­out U.S. his­to­ry, our mil­i­tary has been used not for moral pur­pos­es but to expand eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and mil­i­tary pow­er,” says a car­toon Howard Zinn in Mike Konopacki’s 273-page com­ic book A People’s His­to­ry of Amer­i­can Empire. Writ­ten with Zinn and his­to­ri­an Paul Buh­le, the book adapts Zinn’s path­break­ing his­to­ry from below, A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, and his auto­bi­og­ra­phy You Can’t Be Neu­tral on a Mov­ing Train in a direct exam­i­na­tion of the U.S. Imperi­um. Konopac­ki calls the book his “answer” to the text­books of “the pow­er struc­ture.” Above, you can see a short video adap­ta­tion of some key text from A People’s His­to­ry of Amer­i­can Empire. Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen, the video gives us a nut­shell ver­sion of Zinn’s cul­tur­al, polit­i­cal, and moral education—what the Ger­mans used to call bil­dung—as he grows from a some­what naive WWII bomber pilot, to a col­lege stu­dent on the G.I. Bill, to a grad­u­ate stu­dent, then pro­fes­sor, of his­to­ry. Along the way he notices that the map in every text­book labeled “West­ern Expan­sion” shows “the …

What tragedy can teach us.

What tragedy can teach us.

Published by Sam Flores

Charlie Kirk! That name says so much, now. I am sure that we should be very careful about adding our comments to the sad story of a recent killing. I have a neighbor who is a Christian, like me, and he liked to follow information from and about Charlie Kirk, before he was killed. My neighbor is now very sad, and I respect him. In general, Charlie Kirk was a successful activist and a persuasive speaker, and now that he is dead, there are some huge arguments. There are many people who seem to be happy that Mr. Kirk is now dead, and they seem to be celebrating. That is not my opinion. There is at least one website where people can report ghoulish people who are making happy comments about the death of Charlie Kirk. You can find more, with a search, but it’s a topic I don’t want to drill into. I can report that many people have lost their jobs, and are facing other serious consequences, because they seem happy that another …