Painting Fakes

Following reading and writing for my series of posts on the long-running war on Palestine, I followed up on a recommendation from a friend* to have a look at Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and read his book, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, published in 2017. Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954, and studied and taught history at the University of Haifa.  However, his writings led to personal attacks in the media and threats to him and his family, so he left Israel and now teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK.  To say he's not a fan of Zionism is an understatement.  He is on record as supporting a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians have equal citizenship, and the right of return for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. The Biggest Prison on Earth  examines the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  But first of all he provides a quic...

In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation.  Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves.  He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value.  Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.   Reading and discussing this book led me back, once again, to my favourite Ursula LeGuin novel, City of Illusions.  This book has featured in this blog before, but like all favourite books it continues to speak, and there is more...