Ethics https://www.thesunmagazine.org/rss en-us Practice Losing Everything I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28957 Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/604-practice-losing-everything 604-14-duval-preview.jpg 604 - Duval - Percesepe The Danish Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28898 Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/601-the-danish 601-40-began-preview.jpg 601 - Beban - Sparrow Wild Animals Swimming with whale sharks, hearing a mountain lion, refusing to eat a snake

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28871 Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/599-wild-animals 599-33-werdinger-preview.jpg 599-Werdinger-Wild Animals The Golden Door mcdermon@gmail.com Our nation’s founders attained political power by invading this land, killing most of the people who were already living in it, stealing large swaths of land from other countries, and then saying, “This is ours, and no one else can come in.” It’s hard to defend that moral claim.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28863 Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/599-the-golden-door 599-4-seimon-preview.jpg 599-Seimon-McDermon Sunbeams

In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.

Newt Gingrich

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28818 Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/sunbeams-political-wisdom-quotations-596 596-49-duval-preview.jpg 596 - Duval - Sunbeams Reason To Believe Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28734 Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:14 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/592-reason-to-believe 592-04-bonnet-preview.jpg 592-Bonnet-Cohen Speak, Memory Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23144 Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23144-speak-memory A Face In Judgment A young man stands at the lectern: nineteen years old, athletic, thick black hair down to his shoulders. I’ll call him Marco. Today my job is to decide whether to send him to prison.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23901 Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23901-a-face-in-judgment Become A Friend Of <em>The Sun</em> I’ve now been here for fifteen years. In that time I’ve been gratified to see that the values that drew me to The Sun years ago weren’t just words on a page. They’re reflected in every part of the magazine.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24653 Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24653-become-a-friend-of-em-the-sun-em The Carnivore’s Dilemma We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that because we went to Whole Foods and bought the organic product, we’re not participating in suffering and death.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24766 Sat, 30 Apr 2022 04:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24766-the-carnivore-s-dilemma Morally Indefensible It is often said of laying hens, veal calves, and dogs kept in cages for experimental purposes that this does not cause them to suffer, since they have never known other conditions. . . . This is a fallacy.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27694 Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27694-morally-indefensible Sunbeams

Natural law is the highest law, and it would be folly to figure that you can outwit natural law.

Winona LaDuke

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22513 Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22513-sunbeams February 2019 Featuring Danusha Veronica Goska, Kathleen Dean Moore, Van Jones, and more.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24363 Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24363-february-2019 October 2018 Featuring Philip Berrigan, Genie Zeiger, Daniel Berrigan, and more.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21460 Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21460-october-2018 Hospital Runs On my very first hospital run I picked up this long-faced, country white guy who’d survived seven surgeries in the last five years. He looked to be late eighties, all but dead, but friendly in a half-deaf way.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21903 Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21903-hospital-runs Sunbeams

True prophets sometimes, false prophets always, have fanatical adherents.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23230 Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23230-sunbeams The Good Samaritan Once a certain scribe stood up and said, “Rabbi, what must I do to gain eternal life?”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25329 Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25329-the-good-samaritan Sunbeams

What do you see when you look at an animal? A kindred spirit, a creature much like you; but possibly, the very next moment, a beast, a stranger, just an animal. Animals are like those pictures that we see as one thing and then another; the duck that suddenly becomes a rabbit; the wineglass that’s also an old woman in profile. Now the pig is a fellow creature, like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. Now he’s pork.

Jean Kazez

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23522 Mon, 01 Aug 2016 23:18:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23522-sunbeams The Sudden City The man who owned the dairy farm on which the Fair was held was named Max Yasgur. He was born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He owned 650 cows. He was forty-nine years old. When he saw how many people had shown up, he instructed his children to give away all the milk and dairy products on the farm to help feed the crowd.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22999 Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22999-the-sudden-city Sunbeams

The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.

Andy Rooney

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26424 Tue, 17 Nov 2015 16:48:34 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26424-sunbeams Selected Poems — from “Good People” | On the way to the wedding of his friend, his car struck a dog, and he had no time to stop, / but he’s a good person.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21631 Thu, 01 Oct 2015 14:50:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21631-selected-poems Sunbeams

Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Jon Stewart

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27815 Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27815-sunbeams The War Prayer “God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25909 Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25909-the-war-prayer Sunbeams

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.

Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22518 Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:48:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22518-sunbeams <em>excerpted from</em><br />Creating An Enlightened Society The premise of Shambhala vision is that, in order to establish an enlightened society for others, we need to discover what inherently we have to offer the world.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21865 Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21865-em-excerpted-from-em-br-creating-an-enlightened-society Confessions Torn pants, a little pink toothbrush, a C-shaped scar

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28210 Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28210-confessions The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24213 Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24213-the-long-bag-we-drag-behind-us The Communion Of Strangers Books lift us out of the smallness of the present and into history, out of the smallness of ourselves and into humanity. Most readers favor modern books, equating old with irrelevant. But just as a phrase in one’s native language jumps from a page of foreign text one is struggling to translate, familiar passions jump from the strange depictions of earlier times.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22303 Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22303-the-communion-of-strangers <em>excerpted from</em><br />The First And Last Freedom Obviously what causes war is the desire for power, position, prestige, money; also the disease called nationalism, the worship of a flag; and the disease of organized religion, the worship of a dogma.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21860 Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21860-em-excerpted-from-em-br-the-first-and-last-freedom Meat My friend Tommy Crotty, who was a terrific basketball player in New York and went on to play college ball and be a cheerful husband and excellent dad before the idiot who just died in Abbottabad murdered him and thousands of people on September Eleventh, used to call every big guy he ever played with Meat.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25119 Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25119-meat