In this new section, launched in August 2025, the Upstream Journal welcomes thoughtful and informed contributions providing critical reflection on human rights and social justice.
The Artist as Preacher: James Baldwin’s Sacred Task. Yahia Lababidi considers the role of the artist as understood by James Baldwin. “To read Baldwin, today, is to uphold this time-honored task of the writer: to transform perception. For this reason, his words continue to pierce, console, and instruct. In a time when language is often twisted to conceal, Baldwin restores its capacity to illuminate. He summons us to see, to feel, to reckon, to recover our shared humanity.”
Israel’s crisis of identity, of purpose, of faith in the state itself. Valentine Matta looks at aspects of what she calls the country’s “existential inflection point”, and a society that has “learned to partition its moral concern—to grieve Jewish suffering while remaining largely indifferent to Palestinian pain”.
Photo: A granite statue at the Rosecliff Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. CC0 licensed photo by Jonathan Desrosiers from the WordPress Photo Directory.