StocktonAfterClass

Send us Fan Mail I once visited a Salvation Army graveyard section.  It was a very interesting experience.  

Send us Fan Mail This is one of those episodes in life that descend upon you like a mosquitoe that just keeps buzzing around.  You can either let it ruin your night's sleep or you can view it as an opportunity.  I chose to turn it into an anecdote.  By the way, there was a time, not long ago, when there were people called "operators."  They were very helpful and were always availabl...

Send us Fan Mail Derek Peterson, Chair of the UM Faculty Senate, was asked to deliver remarks to the 2026 graduating class.  He focused upon the tradition of protest on campus, going back to the period after the Civil War.  Everything was ducky until he got to protests against the Gaza War.   Well, you can listen to what happened after that.  My approach was to read the statements of the various p...

Send us Fan Mail Being my family historian, I bump into strange documents from time to time.  A couple of years ago, I saw a will from 1717 that I thought might belong to an ancestor.  It turned out that it did not, but the will was so fascinating that I wanted to discuss it with you.  The logic and style are very different from what we know as a will today (although the goal is the same -- to all...

Send us Fan Mail This is a discussion of the historic context of this war, plus some thoughts on the strategic issues involved.  Note: At one point I referred to the end of the Gulf War when I meant to say the end of World War II.  Note:  At this point (March 17)  opposition to the war is about 53-41.  Republicans are very supportive, Democrats opposed. The general pattern in public opinion, is th...

Send us Fan Mail In 1981 Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book on suffering. He decided to write this when he learned that his beloved son Aaron had a terrible disease that would turn him into an old man even as a child.  Aaron died at eight.  Kushner reflected upon why an innocent child should suffer so much.  Could God have prevented this?  Kushner turned to the story of Job to try to understand.  ...

Send us Fan Mail On January 3 American forces went into Caracas and captured Venezuelan President Maduro.  He was taken to the United States to stand trial.  Is this a one-off adventure because of a corrupt leader, or does it suggest a broader set of actions of which this is just the first of many?  

Send us Fan Mail When I was in Turkey I visited a caravan serai.  It was a place where a caravan would stop along the way.  (And where travelers could find a place to spend the night).  When we read that there was "no room in the inn" and Mary had to deliver in the stable, what does that mean?  I suspect it was not nearly as harsh as I learned when I was a kid.  Two updates might be help...

Send us Fan Mail I am very cautious about predictions.  All the pundits are doing those, plus most of them seem to be chasing headines.   I have made an exception in this case, because I think Trump has peaked and is on his decline.   Am I just doing what others are doing and over-reading headlines?  Maybe.  But I think I see something worth noting.  You are welcome to spend 29 minutes see if you...

Send us Fan Mail Biden carried Georgia by just under 12,000 votes.  They had a Republican governor and Republican Secreatary of State.  Trump called them and asked them to "find" those votes.  I just need one more than Biden got to carry the state.  Trump threatened the Secretary of State with prosecution if he did not "find" the votes.  The county prosecutor Fannie Wills charg...

Send us Fan Mail After the catastrophic defeat at Charleston, the Patriot forces were on the ropes.  General Clinton, commander of the British army, was so confident of the outcome, that he left his deputy, General Cornwallis, in charge and headed north.   Cornwallis planned to link up with Tory militias from North and South Carolina, to crush resistance, and to  remove two more stars  from the fl...

Send us Fan Mail Christa Bruhn was my student back in the 1980s.  I remember very well the first time I met her.  She told me she had lived for a semester in Gaza.  I have been to Gaza twice and did not consider it a place for a young American woman to be spending a semester.  But Christa was never able to get Palestine out of her soul.   This is her own story of her life-long engagement with a la...

Send us Fan Mail I have been an expert witness in four deportation hearings.  The job of an expert witness is to given the judge reasons to permit the individual to remain in the U. S.  The cases were people from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine.  The Palestinian case was the most interesting because it dealt with a stateless person.   I also want to share with you a conversation I had with an...

Send us Fan Mail This is a bit different from my typical podcast.  This is four stories inspired by religion.   The story of Rachel and Rebecca, and the mandrake.  (You have never read this story so you know nothing about the mandrake (or even what it is).  The Story of my close brush with the Rapture.  (I will admit.  I brought it on myself).  The story of the first (?) female pope.  So you have...

Send us Fan Mail Bruno Bauer, an intellectual colleague of Marx, wrote two essays to which Marx reacted strongly. The first was called “The Jewish Question” (Die Judenfrage), the second “On The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free.”  Marx wrote two essays responding to Bauer’s work, using the same titles.  The group of intellectuals of which Marx and Bauer were a part were de...

Send us Fan Mail This is a public talk I delivered on the concept of genocide and the arguments presented in the South African genocide charge against Israel in late 2023.  Several people who wanted to attend but could not asked if it could be recorded. We tried, but somehow that did not work out.   To the extent possible I tried to be scholarly and  analytical in this talk.  But how can we be sch...

Send us Fan Mail There are extremist groups in Israel that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Today they control the balance of power in the Israeli cabinet.  Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the most prominent personalities.   Both are extremely violent and are determined to complete the  conquest of what they see as their homeland.  And the removal of what they see as alien populations.  Smotri...

Send us Fan Mail This is Part II of a project I developed for my Honors Class.  I typed up the opening paragraphs of scores of memoirs in my personal library. My students would read these and discuss them.  They really liked this assignment.  Part I (American authors) was posted earlier.  This is Part II, international authors.  If you listened to Part I, you can skip the first minute or two (intr...

Send us Fan Mail Jane and I recently went to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia.  This was the place where John Brown, in October of 1859, conducted his famous strike against slavery. Brown and all of his men were killed, which he anticipated might happen.  So why did he engage in such a seemingly-futile action?   In the bookstore I saw a biography of Brown written by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1909.  Du...

Send us Fan Mail I sometimes tell people that I am a recovering racist.  It is not really my fault.  I grew up in a culture (the 1950s in the border South) when that was just the way things were.  The outward and visible sign of our moral failure was that word.  You know the one I mean.  We used that word without even thinking of it.  It was just the word we used.  But as I went to college and had...

Send us Fan Mail Today, June 15, is not only Father's Day.  It is also Trinity Sunday.  To me, the concept of the Trinity is incomprehensible.  Which is why I am the perfect person to explain it to the rest of you.   This podcast started twenty years ago when one of my Muslim students asked me to explain it to her.  She should have asked me to explain E=MC Square. Oh, I can do that:   "M...

Send us Fan Mail In June of 2024 I spent eight days in occupied Palestine, i.e., the West Bank. It is now a year  later and I thought this report might deserve a reposting.    I went with a group of people who had religious connections.  I was the only secular academic.  I found this a valuable approach, to be with people who saw this conflict in such a different way.  This is a report on what I s...

Send us Fan Mail This is the last lecture I delivered in my academic career.  I discovered that I had miscalculated the end of the semester and that I had an extra class.  I did have a regular academic topic but my wife said, "You are a senior professor.  You have taught 48 years.  Your students see you as someone who has had a life time of experiences.  They will forget an academic lecture b...

Send us Fan Mail Why I Killed Gandhi  by Nathuram Godse  Two employees of the Israeli Embassy in D. C. were shot to death this week (May, 2025) . The Manifesto of the shooter shows him to be very distressed by the mass death in  Gaza.  He felt what is called "the moral imperative to act."  So did the person who killed Gandhi. This is a discussion of that person's manifesto.   Gandhi...

Send us Fan Mail I was amazed at how much information is available on the internet about this election.  Of course, biographical information is public, but the cardinals swear an oath of secrecy before they go into the conclave.  And yet somehow information leaks out.  I wish I could say I had a cardinal-friend who shared insights with me, but all of this 2025 Conclave stuff comes from the interne...