Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and forgiveness without limit. Then it says none of this can be done by effort alone. From the Good Samaritan to a Charleston courtroom, an essay on a command that follows a gift
In 1943 a Muslim family in the Albanian mountains hid a Jewish family from the German army, and the whole neighbourhood knew. The code they kept took no interest in what they felt. Judaism and Islam build kindness the same way: as a debt, owed before it is felt, and tested at its edge.
To understand Accra’s ecological metabolism is to trace the flow of water, air, and humanity through a rapidly shifting coastal topography. Positioned on the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana’s capital is a delta city grappling with the intersecting forces of breakneck urbanisation, compound flooding, and a warming equatorial climate.
Adelaide is the driest capital city in the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has known this about itself for long enough to have developed some genuinely instructive responses. Its investment in recycled water infrastructure, its early and serious engagement with urban heat as a public health emergency, and its stewardship of one of the great metropolitan parkland systems in the Southern Hemisphere all represent hard-won lessons rather than inherited advantages. Whether those lessons are being applied at the speed and scale that a warming Mediterranean climate demands is a more complicated question — and one the city is still in the process of honestly answering
Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and forgiveness without limit. Then it says none of this can be done by effort alone. From the Good Samaritan to a Charleston courtroom, an essay on a command that follows a gift
In 1943 a Muslim family in the Albanian mountains hid a Jewish family from the German army, and the whole neighbourhood knew. The code they kept took no interest in what they felt. Judaism and Islam build kindness the same way: as a debt, owed before it is felt, and tested at its edge.
Buddhism treats kindness as something you practise rather than something that visits you. On mettā as a trainable skill, Buddhaghosa's near enemies, and what happens when the most developed doctrine of loving-kindness in the world is set beside its own record
"Is kindness merely a feeling, or is it a load-bearing structure for society? Kevin J Parker, author of 'The Backbone of Kindness: Restoring Our Oldest Virtue', explores the profound intersection of Theosophy and modern ethics, examining how compassion functions as the 'Law of laws' and the essential backbone of human arrangements."
Hawkins's computer was too literal. But his instinct — that Stonehenge handled information — survives every test the sixty years since have thrown at it. An investigation through stone provenance, isotopes, ancient DNA and landscape archaeology, ending with a named, testable hypothesis: the Gathering Engine.
Cities ran sewers and traffic computers long before anyone sold them the word. Around 2008 “smart” acquired an owner. Four product cities show what it cost.