Category: Café Sentido


Cafe Sentido has gone through various incarnations—first ContourNews, then Sentido.tv, including two supplements: CafeSentido.com, an art and exhibits forum, and The Global Intercept, a headline-linking and rapid-review forum—before taking on its current format as the broadsheet online magazine CafeSentido.com, which combines all of the prior incarnations in one forum. On Tuesday, July 19, we reached our 400,000th reader.

Cafe Sentido is still a small, independent publication, with a vision to grow, over time, and establish a new kind of online news source, integrating culture, commentary, science, economics, political analysis and straight news reporting. We look forward to continued growth and thank our readers for their participation, their interest and their attention, respect for which we hold as a sacred commitment. We believe a free and vigorous press is the frame on which a democracy is built.

IndependentsOfPrinciple :: We will not fall magically into a rising tide of job creation, just by depriving ourselves of services and privileges we have built into our way of life and on which our prosperity depends. And we will not create jobs by privileging those industries that are doing the least to innovate. Innovation is the American way; it is what the nation has always struggled to accomplish, and it must be the cornerstone of a new job-creation boom.

It may be that moments of grave economic pressure put grave strain on a culture’s ability to give voice to and to share a common understanding of core values. It may be that after the financial collapse that struck in 2007 and 2008, the US is facing a crisis of conscience and a struggle to regain its identity. We need to remember that we can take the reins of the 21st century economic landscape, and build the economy of tomorrow.

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CafeSentido.com :: “One person alone cannot push an elephant.” The proverb tells us a great deal about how this film explores the crisis in human connection that comes with conflict. How pervasive, how multifaceted, how horrifying, to find that all sense of community has unraveled in the worst assaults and intensities of a save-no-soul total war. But from there, from the aftermath of this horror, even in the midst of it, Rose Mapendo would tell us we can plant the seeds of something better, nobler, more generous.

Pushing the Elephant, an Arts Engine film, explores loss, and the unique ways it comes to people whose world is dissolved in the chaos of conflict. It is also, however, an exploration of the complex journey that comes with having actively sought to plant those seeds, to be better, to be more generous and to shape a more humane future.

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In a speech to a packed room at Villanova University, during the university’s three-day celebration of the legacy and work of St. Thomas of Villanova —a celebration that includes scholarly presentations, community gatherings, this keynote address and a day of service in which thousands fan out across the region to do charitable work—, E.J. Dionne called for a politics rooted in conscience and compassion for our fellow human beings. The acclaimed journalist, scholar and Washington Post columnist rooted his talk in Catholic Social Teaching and spoke of an historical drive, in the US, toward comprehensive social justice.

Dionne asked the problematic question: Is the Catholic political vocation to make everyone feel guilty about something? Villanova’s president, Father Peter Donohue, noted with good humor that his staff were worried about the topic, but seemed not at all worried himself: indeed, the university seemed very much tuned into Dionne’s message. And that message? Guilt, he said, is not a bad thing; in fact, “guilt actually contains the seeds of hope, because it contains the idea that we can do better, that we should do better.”

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The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Joseph Robertson, Cafe Sentido’s editorial director, with Davoud Geramifard, a Persian mixed-media artist and filmmaker living in Toronto, Canada, whose documentary Voices of the Unheard was screened at this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York City…

CafeSentido (editor Joseph Robertson): Was it a difficult choice to film undercover in Iran knowing you might not be able to return as a result?

Davoud Geramifard (director): Going back to make this film was a conscious decision. I knew that I might be arrested, or even killed, as it happened before to many Iranians who tried to do the same thing. The saddest case was Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian who was murdured and raped just for taking pictures outside the notorious Evin prison. But how could I live in peace if I had chosen to be indifferent or silent about the brutalities that I felt for many years in Iran. Someone had to do it, and I hope others continue on this path, because unless we expose these critical issues, we would not be able to gain what our people has been fighting for.

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germenes-obstaculos

Café Sentido

Café Sentido se plantea como un local que incorpore a la vez, bar, cafetería, escenario musical, galería de arte y centro cultural, lugar de encuentro y tertulia, donde se montan seminarios y charlas, estrenos de cortometrajes, mesas redondas y debates. Los temas pueden recorrer toda la gama de asuntos tan dispares como los idiomas en peligro de extinción, la posibilidad de llevar un amor serio, profundo, en el mundo de hoy, y las fricciones políticas del momento. Y, se imagina que se integrarán algunos de estos eventos en las exposiciones de arte y fotografía que se hacen.

Algunos de los proyectos que se han hecho hasta la fecha, sin local y de forma itinerante, se encuentran en CafeSentido.com

Amar es descubrimiento, es atreverse y navegar sin miedo, es duende al atardecer y disonancia que enorgullece la danza de luces del alba, es viaje al absurdo y vuelta con toda la sabiduría que ahí habita, es especia y dilatación de propósitos, esfera triangular y constancia fragmentada en la que cada pedazo quema en cada costado a los demás pedazos, una red de cantos ígneos que trata de ser un universo nuevo que brinda su propio fracaso y fragilidad…

es un sueño y un extramundo, una amplitud y un enfoque, es más y es menos y reclama que se tiren abajo fronteras y barreras y claro, en su infinita paciencia, padece en lo más común una impaciencia tan productiva-comunicativa como peligrosa-viciosa : es la ley del más bondadoso, donde el ser humano intenta encontrar la parte más generosa de su vida interior, a la vez que intenta alimentarse consumiendo contactos exteriores…

amar es sufrir abiertamente algo que no tiene por qué ser sufrimiento, algo más hermoso que cruel, más fuente de fuerzas insospechadas que pozo sin fondo : sufrimos queriendo ser más, y mucho más, que nuestro sufrimiento, pero sin querer dejar atrás esa épica interna que nos trae el sabor de un padecer específico, vinculado a un ser o a una situación específica, un sueño o un proyecto de difundir sueños…

 
El mundo está escrito sobre una tela de voces que ninguna puede ser en sí más que un hilo, un cruce, un fortalecimiento muscular del éter. Está construido de gestos y formas, figuras tanto desnudas como revestidas para otro fin… en cada escena se ve una ráfaga de trasparentes incertezas que proponen a su manera y en el ritmo que les consten las circunstancias, texto que es también cuerpo, sangre, oxígeno, hierro, ley, contratiempo, y sagaz paciencia.

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