COMPASSIONATE PRACTICES
Mindfulness meditation offers us the invaluable opportunity to awaken to each present moment as it happens, sit with whatever arises in your life with acceptance and curiosity, and cultivate kindness and compassion for our fellow living beings. Here you can find my musings, dharma talks, and suggested practices for the mind and heart, as well as my courses and workshops.
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The Scouring of Samson: Incarceration and Corporal Punishment
One of the major assumptions of modern penologists is that prison, as an artifact of modernity, came to replace other forms of punishment: executions, maiming, etc. Overall, I think there
Professor Presbury Takes His Meds
One of the creepier, more Gothic stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon is The Adventure of the Creeping Man, in which Holmes and Watson are retained by the secretary of
Two Federal Rulings on Campus Protests
This week saw two federal district court decisions against Harvard and UCLA, respectively, regarding their failure to protect their Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic discrimination, which you can read
Joseph in the Joint: Fatalism, Transformation, and the Bible’s Most Illustrious Prisoner
In the last few weeks I’ve been sharing snippets from my new book in progress, Behind Ancient Bars. Chapter 2 of the book will be devoted to the Hebrew Bible’s
Dark Esther
My new project Behind Ancient Bars looks at several prominent incarceration stories in the Hebrew Bible. One that is often missed is Esther’s stint at Ahasuerus’s harem. Because most of
Political Incarceration Under Siege: Jeremiah in the Pit of Mire
An important question in the sociology of punishment is whether the social reaction to deviance/challenge becomes more ferocious during times of social and political turmoil. This question is often attributed