Sunday, December 29, 5:30-6:30pm
Old First Presbyterian Church, 1101 Bryden Rd., Enter the church via the rear door.

A twenty-to-thirty-minute silent meditation will be followed by discussion and refreshments. The benefits of meditation are innumerable. These include greater mental clarity, a reduction in stress, improved emotional balance, and increased spiritual development. Meditation benefits everyone. Different meditation practices will be presented, throughout the year, by practitioners of those traditions. This group will meet each Sunday, 5:30-6:30pm.

For more information, call or text 614-619-0784.

Hosted by Old First Presbyterian Church.

The story of the Israeli war on Gaza can be epitomized in the story of the Israeli war on Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of the Strip.  

 When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which killed thousands. 

 Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024. 

 Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend. 

 Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was supposedly 'conquered' earlier, still leading the fight. 

Haga clic aquí para español
The first installment (“I’m just a consumer”) closed with two admonitions. One said we should value people instead of tossing them aside as “mere hands,” and the other is confident we can cast aside propaganda that justifies inequity by the age old trick of blaming the victim. This installment scrutinizes a couple of those victim-blaming urban legends that twist our outlook to see our colleagues as disposable implements.

Like that previous piece, this one springs from reflections on chapters 15 and 16 of Beyond Capital by István Mészáros. I encourage you to read them for yourself to make up your own mind.

There’s Something Special about this Place

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Grim-faced rescuers were tying ropes to the stiff, jutting legs and arms of bloated corpses floating in the Andaman Sea, and bringing them to shore after an earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered the giant pulverizing waves of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami.

Tourists were thronging Thailand's gorgeous southwest coast where Phuket island and the granite-studded, sandy beaches of Khao Lak became the hardest hit zones amid estuaries, mangroves, and sea cliffs.

The doomed coast's exquisite Buddhist temples crumbled. Five-star resorts, tropical villages, and virtually everything else became smithereens when the tsunami hit.

Rare surviving Buddhist temples became storage grounds for bodies smelling of formaldehyde and packed in dry ice, shrouded, and left outdoors next to stacks of plywood coffins awaiting cremations or burials.

"The horrible thing about this is, we could tell that they were male or female, but beyond that it was very hard to differentiate whether they were Asian or foreign," Canadian volunteer Scott Murray said in an interview at the time after collecting the dead.