I talked last week about my journey from Protestant to Catholic and back again, and as I look back on experiences that shaped my life, I count the study of culture, especially the interweaving of politics and religion as a major force. Sociology and anthropology […]
What is it about extremes that draw us so irrevocably toward our doom? For four years, we were ruled by a man whose love of power and belief in his own greatness took him, and us, to the verge of insanity. Now we watch Putin pull the world with him toward the same […]
One of the greatest gifts of writing fiction is the ability to create characters and worlds, resulting in new perspectives that change your understanding of the people and the world around you. I remember inventing Carla in The Inheritors, then puzzling over her familiarity. I woke up one morning realizing that she sprang from […]
What is the American Dream? The most common definition we hear is the economists’—a wife, two kids, a home of your own and a car in the drive. That definition may serve its economic purpose, but it isn’t, to me, the […]
I ended the last blog by saying that the current race movement is carrying the country toward extremism and further and further from changing racial attitudes. Radical positions like condemning whole civilizations may sound noble, but it accomplishes nothing—except ridicule, perhaps. Consciousness-raising, making America aware that it has a race problem, has been going […]
I don’t know how to start this new year that feels already old. The usual resolutions seem irrelevant, the questions bewildering, the answers out of reach. I don’t know how to fix the mess the country has gotten itself into, a mess that is heading toward another crisis on Election Day. I can only […]
Browsing through old blogs, I found this seven-year-old blog (Dec 5, 2014) that seems to sum up my feelings today pretty well. Here, with some revisions, it is: I watch today’s protests and feel very old, very frustrated, and very discouraged. I watched the same explosions and protests in the 1950s, 1960s, and […]
I’ve been hard on identity politics and its role in polarizing the nation, so I want to be clear. Race is a critical issue for the country, and one that needs to be addressed. I understood and supported Martin Luther King and the peaceful protests of the Sixties Civil Rights movement of the […]
High time to take time out from spouting opinions and say thank you. Thank you to all who have read my blogs and read my books. Thank you to my daughter for her strength and caring. Thank you my writer friends, particularly my critique groups, past and present for the attention and care […]
Last week I talked about unlocking our brains from the media’s toxic fixation on the battle that goes nowhere and instead viewing the values of the two sides as differing in priorities, not in kind. If you’ve unstuck your brain now, take a moment to walk in the other fellow’s shoes—a longstanding habit […]
I pondered the title of this blog, then decided to leave it alone. Everyone will know what I mean. Strange, isn’t it? But I think the state of the country is on everyone’s mind. Which is good. It’s high time we stopped taking democracy for granted and give civics—the behavior necessary for the […]
I’m a writer. I believe in the power of language—for good and for evil. Words matter. In the last decade, the nation has been swept by masters of language, first to believe in itself, then to terror and rage at a huge and overwhelming enemy. […]
Judith Kirscht lives and works in the beautiful Puget Sound area. She is the author of four published works of fiction with more to come soon!
