To Joan (wherever you are), and the sun at 00.00 today

“We do not know the reason Union extended its hand to Brother West, but given the institution's silence on the issue of Palestine it is my conclusion that it has more to do with West’s fame and academic prowess than his fervent support for Palestine. Yet, despite these covetous intentions, West’s presence at UTS embodies a prophetic call to action.“

“As a half-white, half-Asian daughter of immigrants, I am familiar with these limits. My mixed racial ethnicity has often left me without words to describe my contradictory existence. My parents’ conservative politics leaves me unsure where to place myself within a progressive party that is meant to support family stories like our own. I am unable to comfortably locate myself and my family in the mainstream narratives about immigrant communities and race.”

“In the 18th century, the philosopher Hegel worried in one of his religious works, “the death of God haunts this age.” Long before Nietzsche began to write, Hegel had already seen into the future; today, the sentiment lingers on and most developedly in the Death of God literature made famous by theologians -- or rather theothanatologians -- in the mid twentieth century. Despite all of the attention the Death of God theme got during its heyday, many subthemes of the genre remain under-probed and unchallenged.”

“I am coming to a realization similar to one that Dr. Martin Luther King had in the last years of his life: ending poverty in America is one of the foremost civil rights issues of our time. Why hasn’t this “dream” of ending poverty been realized? What has gotten in our way of realizing it?”