Topics | Compassion | The Sun Magazine #6

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Compassion

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What Little She Had

It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.

By Doug Crandell October 2018
One Nation, Indivisible

October 2018

Featuring Philip Berrigan, Genie Zeiger, Daniel Berrigan, and more.

October 2018
Quotations

Sunbeams

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

Karen Armstrong

October 2018
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Cure For Racism Is Cancer

This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.

In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.

By Tony Hoagland September 2018
Fiction

When A Guy Helps You Out

You are sitting in the mail room on that armless gray swivel chair with the duct tape on the seat, sorting the mail, and he’s telling you that corporate life . . . well, it’s a life, is what it is, and you can adapt to it and even start to enjoy it if you just adjust your perspective.

By Cary Tennis September 2018
The Dog-Eared Page

Where We Start

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidate — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

By Barack Obama September 2018
The Sun Interview

Our Grand Delusion

Norman Fischer On The Tyranny Of The Self

We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.

By Corey Fischer August 2018
Quotations

Sunbeams

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

R.H. Blyth

August 2018
The Dog-Eared Page

Calling Him Back From Layoff

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause

By Bob Hicok May 2018
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hospital Runs

On my very first hospital run I picked up this long-faced, country white guy who’d survived seven surgeries in the last five years. He looked to be late eighties, all but dead, but friendly in a half-deaf way.

By Lee Durkee March 2018