Blog Archives
Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Post-Modern World
Scott Gibbs’s Toward the Turning is an ambitious work of philosophy, religious studies, psychology, and political analysis centered on a difficult question: why do groups keep repeating destructive cycles of blame and violence? Gibbs argues that conflict grows from our often-unconscious attachment to identity systems, which he calls spiritual and secular “faiths.” He examines two families of identity: the traditional religious (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and the modern secular (including several strands of American identity and Zionism), the latter rooted in modernity itself. All identity systems, including these, give people the social worlds they inhabit, anchoring and orienting them within those worlds, but they can also harden into rigid worldviews that divide humanity into righteous insiders and threatening outsiders. Gibbs presents conflict as a “deadly dance” in which identities, fears, grievances, and reactions continually shape one another.
The book’s range is impressive. Gibbs spends substantial time examining the beliefs, promises, demands, values, and historical experiences that shape major religious and political traditions. He’s especially interested in the ways people respond to vulnerability, uncertainty, humiliation, mortality, and social change. His treatment of modernity is central because he sees scientific progress, individualism, capitalism, nationalism, and globalization as liberating forces that also disrupt traditional structures, take competing institutional forms, and create new sources of anxiety. The chapters on American identity show how Christianity, exceptionalism, and the pursuit of success combine into national worldviews across both the political right and left that can inspire reform while also encouraging self-righteousness and domination. His discussions of Islam, Judaism, Zionism, and Western power then bring these ideas into the charged territory of 9/11 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where competing claims to justice, security, dignity, and historical innocence feed each other.
Gibbs’s greatest strength is his determination to look for common structures beneath sharply different ideologies. He refuses the comfort of assigning all responsibility to one religion, nation, or political camp. Instead, he shows how fundamentalism can develop on the left or right and in religious or secular settings when fear turns identity into something absolute. That approach produces moments of real insight, as when he describes public conflict as an unspoken conversation about vulnerability, worth, and safety. The writing is intellectually serious and extensively researched, though it can be demanding. Gibbs frequently builds long chains of philosophical concepts, revisits earlier claims, and uses specialized language drawn from existentialism, theology, and psychology. Readers who stay with his framework will find that the repetition gradually creates coherence, but the book rewards patience and close attention.
The “turning” of the title is a change in how we understand both ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Gibbs asks readers to see identity as a living, contingent process. He believes greater self-awareness can loosen rigid identification, help people tolerate uncertainty, and make room for mutuality, accountability, and genuine problem-solving. The book closes with a hopeful but measured vision of transformation, one that begins through patient recognition and can spread outward from individual lives into larger communities. I’d recommend Toward the Turning most strongly to readers interested in existential philosophy, comparative religion, political psychology, conflict studies, and the intellectual roots of contemporary polarization. It’ll also appeal to patient readers who enjoy big, synthesis-driven books that try to connect private anxiety with public history.
Pages: 450 | ISBN : 978-3838217666
My Love of Languages
English Upgrade is a practical grammar workbook that helps Spanish-speaking learners recognize persistent mistakes, understand why they happen, and communicate in more natural, precise English. What inspired you to create this book?
My students! My love of languages and passion for empowering others brought me to the ESL field. A lack of good resources compelled me to write English Upgrade (¡Para Hispanohablantes!). I set out to create a potent and effective tool for Spanish-speaking English learners and their teachers, and I’ve done just that. I hope to one day create a similar guide for native speakers of Haitian Creole, Bahasa Indonesia, and other languages.
How did you decide which grammar problems and language patterns to include in the sixty-one lessons?
I hold a BA in the Spanish language, studied at the Autónoma of Guadalajara, Mexico, and spent years interfacing with native Spanish speakers in bilingual customer service roles before becoming an English as a Second Language teacher. This mixture of experiences has given me unique insight on the most consistent and predictable mistakes that native Spanish speakers make and why they make them. The list is not exhaustive, but I tried to include the grammar structures, vocabulary, and pronunciation challenges that have the greatest impact on learners’ ability to communicate effectively.
What makes direct comparison between Spanish and English especially effective for language learners?
With a side-by-side, red/green, ❌/✔️ format, readers get an effective and easy-to-understand visual. This structure makes English Upgrade accessible, even to beginner and intermediate learners.
How would you recommend that independent learners and teachers use the book differently?
There’s no wrong way to use this book. (But please don’t use it as kindling! 😊) It can be used as a classroom textbook, read from cover to cover, or independent learners can use it as a quick reference guide. The index at the back of the book makes it easy for readers to find the grammar point, vocabulary, pronunciation pattern, and idiomatic or fixed expressions they’re looking for. The book is intended to be written and highlighted in and includes a lined Notes section ideal for independent study. I wrote it for you; please make it your own!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Award-winning bilingual author and seasoned English as a Second Language teacher, Maria L. Hinders, presents English Upgrade: The Advanced Learner’s Guide to the Most Common English Language Errors: (¡Para Hispanohablantes!). Hinders has compiled over 170 of the most common and predictable English language errors made by native Spanish speakers and, in English Upgrade, addresses each of them with concise and easy-to-understand explanations. English Upgrade is a practical guide that’s geared toward advanced learners, but with its simplistic X/Check format, beginners will find it useful, too. English Upgrade features 51 chapters comprising 171 error corrections, hundreds of examples, over 100 idioms and fixed expressions, and over 500 practice questions. Upgrade your English today!
Their Ethical Obligations
FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court reveals how secret surveillance, confidential leaks, institutional loyalty, and political pressure entangled the FBI and the Supreme Court, and how one lawyer’s persistence uncovered buried evidence. What inspired you to write this book?
My belief that the FBI directed a counterintelligence program against the liberal Earl Warren Court as it had done against other perceived enemies such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and progressive political figures.
How did you decide what ethical boundaries to observe when discussing sexual allegations gathered through invasive FBI surveillance?
I didn’t reveal the surname of the teen with which Justice Abe Fortas allegedly had a sexual relationship.
What do the Fred Black records reveal about the vulnerability of Supreme Court deliberations to executive-branch influence?
The private deliberations of the Supreme Court are only as secure when the justices live up to their ethical obligations.
After decades of FOIA litigation, what reforms would make it harder for agencies to conceal records through inadequate searches or denials?
The federal courts must enforce the FOIA sanctions when in cases such as mine the FBI misled the court about the documents it held in secret.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
A follow-up to Cloak and Gavel. FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court (Univ. of Illinois 1992). “The FBI’s scandalous techniques ranged from illegal wiretapping to disinformation campaigns, to using Justice Abe Fortas as a Bureau informant.” Harvard Law Review, Vol 106, p. 812. “Cloak and Gavel” . . . is the product of an eight-year struggle to force the FBI to reveal its Supreme Court snooping. Charns got . . . hard evidence that Hoover attempted to monitor the court’s private deliberations and manipulate some of the justices.” Wall Street Journal, A13, 9/1/92. “[A] bonanza of Supreme Court history, providing depth and perspective to some great cases of our time.” St Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/18/92.
Intervention in Church Conflict
Dorothy R. Dann’s Intervention in Church Conflict is a practical theological case study of congregational healing. Adapted from her Doctor of Ministry project, the book recounts Dann’s appointment to a divided church and her development of an intervention model combining family systems theory, narrative therapy, pastoral care, and biblical reflection. Its central premise is that a congregation should be understood as a living network of relationships rather than a collection of isolated individuals. Accordingly, conflict becomes a systemic condition shaped by history, anxiety, leadership patterns, and the stories members tell about their common life. Dann’s stated goal is to help congregations develop internal resources that can stabilize their relationships and support a healthier future.
The book’s strongest contribution is its integration of theory with a detailed account of ministry practice. Dann draws from writers such as Peter Steinke, Edwin Friedman, Ronald Richardson, Michael Nichols, Richard Schwartz, Paul Stevens, and Phil Collins, but she consistently translates their ideas into congregational terms. Concepts such as self-differentiation, emotional systems, shared leadership, and preferred narratives become concrete through listening sessions, leadership development, Bible study, planning exercises, and a weekend retreat. Her emphasis on “wholeness, not oneness” captures the model’s respect for difference within a connected community. Rather than seeking forced agreement, the intervention helps members recognize their distinct gifts, accept shared responsibility, and recover a common sense of mission.
Dann’s narrative of the leadership retreat gives the book much of its practical value. Participants examined the congregation’s history, assessed existing ministries, identified strengths, and began constructing a more hopeful account of their future. The process encouraged leaders to separate the church’s identity from its conflict-saturated story. One participant observed, “We realized that we were far better off than we had originally thought,” a statement that illustrates the intervention’s central movement from discouragement toward recognition of existing capacity. The reported results include better-attended meetings, clearer priorities, renewed lay leadership, expanded youth and adult ministries, greater openness in discussion, and increased confidence in the congregation’s mission. These outcomes make the book useful as both a ministry narrative and an adaptable resource for organizational leaders.
The book’s academic origins remain visible in its repeated explanations, extensive summaries of supporting authors, and careful documentation of the project’s stages. This structure gives readers a transparent view of how the intervention was conceived, implemented, and evaluated. The final model gathers the book’s insights into a sequence of practices: create safety, remain present and nonreactive, listen for systemic patterns, make room for a preferred story, support transformation, record appropriate plans, and equip laypeople for mission. Dann’s most persuasive insight is that constructive change begins when leaders shift attention from blame to responsibility, motivation, and available strengths. Intervention in Church Conflict is therefore a thoughtful professional resource for pastors, counselors, mediators, and church leaders who want to understand conflict as a relational reality and guide communities toward renewed purpose.
Pages: 97 | ASIN : B0CW1L7FG2
FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court
Alex Charns’s FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court is a compact work of investigative legal history built from FBI memoranda, court records, archival materials, and the author’s decades of Freedom of Information Act litigation. Its central subject is the relationship among FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Justice Abe Fortas, President Lyndon Johnson, and FBI official Cartha DeLoach. Charns argues that Hoover’s Bureau collected damaging sexual allegations about Fortas while also benefiting from the justice’s willingness to share confidential information and influence deliberations involving illegal electronic surveillance. The book presents this relationship as part of a broader campaign to monitor, cultivate, and manipulate the Supreme Court.
The book’s strongest chapters reconstruct the Fred Black litigation, in which the FBI’s warrantless bugging captured conversations between Black and his attorney. Charns traces how DeLoach privately briefed Fortas, how Fortas discussed the Court’s internal deliberations, and how he helped shape arguments that could redirect blame from Hoover toward Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department. The account gains force from specific records. Hoover’s instructions and Fortas’s reported conversations create a disturbing picture of executive influence reaching into judicial decision-making. Charns’s judgment is severe, but it’s grounded in a clearly stated ethical principle: confidential Court deliberations and pending cases shouldn’t become instruments of political or institutional self-protection.
Charns writes with the urgency of an advocate and the precision of a practicing lawyer. His prose is most effective when documentary evidence carries the narrative, as when Fortas tells DeLoach that “Kennedy would be completely destroyed” if responsibility for the bugging became public. The book’s rhetorical flourishes and repeated moral conclusions make the argument feel more prosecutorial than analytical. Still, the author regularly distinguishes allegation from proof, particularly when discussing the sexual claim against Fortas, and acknowledges the ethical difficulty of publishing information about people whose privacy the FBI had already violated. That self-examination gives the closing section an important measure of restraint.
The final chapters broaden the book from a historical exposé into a study of government secrecy and archival accountability. Charns recounts how the FBI denied the existence of relevant records, resisted adequate searches, and released crucial documents only after years of litigation. His description of FOIA as an elaborate information game is humorous, but it also clarifies the practical obstacles facing researchers who challenge secretive institutions. The result is a focused and unsettling book about judicial ethics, surveillance power, institutional loyalty, and the persistence required to recover suppressed history. Its lasting contribution lies in connecting misconduct inside the Supreme Court with the bureaucratic systems that kept the evidence hidden for decades.
Pages: 118 | ASIN: B0CTD15W6D
Secrets and Trauma
The Words She Left Behind tells your story as you become the caretaker for your estranged aunt and uncover, through journals, letters, and the devastation of Alzheimer’s, a more complicated woman than anyone understood. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written with the intention of creating a timeline of events leading up to my aunt’s diagnosis. After unexpectedly finding my aunt’s journals, I realized there were profound secrets between the pages. I felt an intense urge to get to the core of her anger and hatred towards my family. Through the process of reading, interviewing, and research, I was able to find secrets and trauma, which then led me to build empathy and forgiveness. With an understanding of what had happened in my aunt’s life, I was able to share the details of my discoveries with my mother, her sister. We eventually all found healing due to the words she left behind in her journals.
When you found Toni’s journals, letters, and stored belongings, did your understanding of her change all at once or slowly over time?
The healing happened over time. At the same time I was reading her journals, I was also forming a relationship with my aunt–a relationship I never had with her. Through both experiences, I found compassion and empathy for her. This journey of forgiveness took over a year because there was so much hatred built up for almost twenty years.
How did caring for Toni reshape your relationship with your mother, Mary, and your understanding of their history as sisters?
My mother and I have always been close. Mary also never gave up hope that one day she and her sister could rebuild their relationship. At first, it was very difficult for my mother, but she eventually got to a place where love was able to grow between her and Toni again. It’s now a beautiful relationship. This was my goal all along–a gift to my mother.
Author Links: Linktree
