Moral fault lines are everywhere we look and serve as a muse for my writing. They are the underlying fissures that can fracture societal cohesion, fragment our understanding of what is right versus wrong, and threaten to break us under severe stress. In my novel, The Peccadilloes of Filamena Phipps, Filamena Phipps, née Ferayinskela, doesn’t ‘fit’ in North Chelsea, an affluent community which prizes homogeneity. A clique consisting of Filamena’s neighbors drive informal, but ultimately rigid, community decisions such as where they shop, what they wear, with whom they socialize. Filamena tries to accommodate her neighbors but to them, she’s different; she’s a threat. They want her to conform, forget her own customs, dress and cook and raise her children like they do. Confronted by her neighbors’ bullying, she must decide how much bullying she should tolerate. What happens when she dissents? How can she dissent effectively and still remain a part of her community?
Continue reading Moral Fault Lines as Muse – by Linda Drattell
Far from being abstract research on the dynamics of resilience, Deborah Levine has provided us with a life story, and highly relevant biography, an ethnography if you will, of the struggle for resilience lived out, day by day. It is filled with the challenges to resilience from health, work, environments, and relationships. Today we speak of the cost of intersectionality on oneself. The term is extremely relevant here, as Deborah herself is bundled into her white female identity, her Jewish ethnicity, the cultural marks of her places of upbringing, her immigrant status, her health vulnerability, and her religious belongings. Each of these shows up repeatedly both as a liability and an asset in her resilience narrative.
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told Congress the following about hate groups: “A majority of the racially motivated violent extremist domestic terrorism is at the hands of white supremacists.”