Commentaries on a Divided Culture
The Space Between Us: Commentaries on a Divided Culture is the public face of conversations—arguments, really, and sometimes heated ones—between a small-c conservative with anarchist leanings and a centre-left progressive who thinks bureaucracies sometimes get a bad rap. We’ve spent two decades hashing out our differences in ways that have greatly deepened understanding and, sometimes, produced agreement between us. We perceive in our increasingly ideological, increasingly divided culture an inability to communicate across difference—an inability that has put the west in some peril. At a time when neofascist and ultraleft movements seem nearly aligned in their efforts to undermine liberal democracies, we think it’s time for the Centre to hold.
Peter is a retired lawyer and Humanities lecturer who was born in Ceausescu’s Romania and lived on multiple continents before landing in Canada as an adolescent. He has published poetry, essays and commentary in Burning Ambitions, Reading Toronto, GreenTOpia, and Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities.
Amy is a Toronto-born geographer whose work focuses on culture and identity in the contemporary city. She is the author of Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries, Spacing Magazine and The Routledge of Literature and Space, among numerous other publications.