Tag Archives: Arizona shootings

Searching for a Light in Death’s Cave

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2011

Spiritual Sunday Today’s post I dedicate to those who lost loved ones in the Arizona shootings—and to everyone else who has lost someone close in the past year or so. I offer up a poem by the 17th century poetry Henry Vaughan that gets at some of the mood swings that the mourners can expect [...]

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A Gritty Child in a Tough World

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2011

Film Friday (Warning: The following essay contains spoilers) I watched Ethan and Joel Coen’s remake of True Grit last Friday and now can’t help but think about it in terms of the Arizona shootings. Will our young people, faced with all this violence, grow up as tough as 14-year-old Mattie Ross? Yesterday’s Washington Post had [...]

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Hope: Invisible before Us and Still Possible

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2011

At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin [...]

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What Would Alyosha Karamazov Do?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 12, 2011

I continue to turn to The Brothers Karamazov almost as a meditational practice to guide me through the turmoil I am experiencing over the Arizona shootings. Yesterday I quoted Zosima, the elder in the book, about how we must look to ourselves if we want others to change. I spoke approvingly of those who, rather than [...]

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Dostoevsky and the Arizona Shootings

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2011

When I posted, on Saturday morning, my blog entry for Sunday, I little realized that I would be turning for help later in the day to the work I was discussing. Doestoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is guiding my response to the horrific shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Ball, and 16 others, including a child. [...]

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