This is the sermon, or most of it, that I gave at the draft-card turn-in ceremony in the Arlington Street Church, Boston, on October 16, 1967. It led to my indictment for conspiracy to violate the draft law, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin.
Read moreDavid Dellinger, William Sloane Coffin: A Personal Memoir
Two great activists for peace and justice and what they meant to me.
Read moreGandhi, the Gita, and the Transfiguration of War
An article of 2012 or so, intended for a journal that no longer exists, about Mahatma Gandhi’s reading of the Bhagavadgita and various parallels and implications.
Read moreIn Memory of Marc Raskin
A brief memoir of another great activist and one of my “co-conspirators.”
Read moreThe New Nonviolence
A speech of 2009 summing up what I think are three phases of the history of nonviolence.
Read moreAstronomy for English Majors
This long essay, in many short parts, is an attempt to explain what readers of literature, and especially of poetry, should know about what happens in the sky, especially at night. It is often important to get the sky right in order to get the poem right.
Read morePoem Words: Etymologies of Terms for or about Poetry
A list of about 200 words or phrases from the domain of poetry, from “poetry” itself to “rhyme,” “metaphor,” and “haiku,” and where the words came from. Their genealogies are often curious and surprising.
Read moreThe Comma Question
A brief defense of the so-called “Oxford” comma. It is never wrong to put it in, and it is sometimes wrong to leave it out; therefore, always put it in.
Read moreHapax Legomena
This is a Greek phrase meaning “things said once.” Scholars use it, for example, to refer to words in Homer that occur only once, and whose meanings are therefore often obscure. Two old schoolmates and I have concocted a list of new words in (more or less) English, and we’ve been calling them hapaxes. They’re meant to be funny, but a few of them, such as “generocide,” have turned out to be useful, alas.
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