May 10, 2016 edition
There are more and more gods...
Mustofa Bisri's poems never arise from angry statements. His poetry can even be funny. Mostly, his verses are anxious-an interesting anxiety: the Muslim teacher from Rembang, a wise man viewing the flawed situation around him without feeling self-righteous. Whenever his poems are critical of society, he, too, feels the stab in part of his own life.
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
May 3, 2016 edition
Pardon' cannot be separated from memory, but can memory be everlasting? Is it possible for us to speak about 'pardon' outside of history?
In Milan Kundera's novel The Joke, Ludvik seeks revenge for the pain his friend inflicted upon him in the past, when, just because of a joke, he was ostracized by the ruling Communist Party. He succeeds in his revenge, but this does not make him happy. It turns out there is another 'joke': people are deceived if they think that memory can be eternal, and deceived to think that mistakes of the past can be set right. In the end, Kundera writes, vengeance and forgiveness "will be taken over by forgetting." Once vengeance is gone, forgiveness is no longer important.
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April 26, 2016 edition
The poor sometimes resemble luckless gods: Their voices should be heeded but the world often listens to them via go-betweens.
Go-betweens usually feel they have the duty to represent them-and more often than not, they feel they have the right to do so. Public officials. Lawmakers. Political parties. Candidates for governor who are serious or pretend to be. Those busy with Twitter and Facebook. NGOs. Activists with a strong, or sometimes strong, sense of justice. Islamic teachers, priests and pastors. Or the media-including television stations owned by big business with their commentators who announce, "I was once poor."
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April 19, 2016 edition
Religion and science keep on clashing, even in the 21st century. So it was in another century, on April 12, 1633 when Galileo, an old man of almost 70, was held for two weeks by the Inquisition, the Church's tool for probing and investigating the conviction of one's faith.
The Vatican considered Galileo a heretic. He had to admit that he did believe in the Copernican theory of the earth and the sun, even though 17 years earlier he had promised to abandon it. That day, Galileo recanted: he would adhere to the theory that the earth circled the sun and not the reverse. He recanted and for this he was imprisoned. Eventually though, he did confess his sin, apologize and express his doubt of the Copernican system, and returned to the path determined by religion: "I hold the opinion...that the earth does not move and it is the sun that does."
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April 12, 2016 edition
Ecce homo! What did he mean? What did the Roman Imperial Procurator, speaking in Latin, want from the people of Jerusalem crowding impatiently beneath the balcony? Was his shout directed towards Caiaphas and the other religious leaders present, who were demanding that 'this man' be sentenced to death?
Ecce homo! Look at the man! But what for?
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April 5, 2016 edition
With this dramatic sentence, the Communist Manifesto in 1848 depicted the arrival of an era when capital enters social life. Marx and Engels were not predicting the future: They were merely describing how astonishingly the bourgeoisie change the world. And set it quaking.
But in the 21st century, the sentence has become a kind of prophecy.
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March 29, 2016 edition