The Useless Tree

Sam Crane

  • Friday I Ching Blogging: China’s Chernobyl?

        The horrific chemical spill in the Songhua River in China is an environmental disaster of gigantic scale.  Harbin, a city of 3.8 million people, has had to cut all of its public water supplies.  An untold number of… Continue reading

  • A Taoist Thanksgiving

        It is a perfect Thanksgiving morning here in Northwestern Massachusetts: a light snow, about 2 inches on the ground; a chill air; great conditions to be inside and cooking and eating all day.  Aidan and I are here… Continue reading

  • Good-bye Kitty, Hello Chuang Tzu!

        Two articles in the People’s Daily reveal, once again, the anxieties of maintaining "Chinese culture" in a globalized context.  The first, a front-pager in today’s Overseas Edition, compares China’s "culture industry" to that dominating producer of "American culture:"… Continue reading

  • Philanthropy and Tradition

        The China Daily runs a story and an opinion piece today on the relatively low levels of philanthropic giving in China.  In an odd sort of way, the opinion piece tries to argue that there is a grounding… Continue reading

  • Sunday “Modern Love:” A Father’s Struggle

        Richard Reiss writes a powerful and moving piece about how he has to deal with his teenage son’s aggressive and self-destructive behavior.  At the age of 3 he began to show a temper. At 6 he developed an… Continue reading

  • Someone please tell the lady in the green headgear…

         "The final inevitable major trend is that China’s peaceful rise will, in the process of intersection with world civilizations, bring about the great rejuvenation of Chinese civilization on the basis of socialism."      –  Zheng Bijian, director-general… Continue reading

  • Confucian care of the Elderly

        There are a couple of stories in this week’s Beijing Review that deal with the care of elderly people in China.  The first thing that struck me was the honest engagement with the problem: Beijing Review is a… Continue reading

  • Friday I Ching Blogging: The US will pull out of Iraq in 2006

        The statement yesterday by US Representative John Murtha that the US should pull its troops out of Iraq in the next six months has had a significant  effect on the public debate on the war.  His announcement overshadowed… Continue reading

  • Liberal Arts and Ancient Chinese Thought

        There’s a good series of posts over at Slate this week centering on higher education.  Several of the pieces engage the question of what a liberal arts education ought to be.  Since I teach at a liberal arts… Continue reading

  • Our Incapacity to Care for One and Other

        Here is a haunting story about a man who, as a child, had a lobotomy.  It did not blank out his personality, as we might think when we hear the term. As he says, it didn’t "touch his… Continue reading