Category Politics/Culture

There was quite a bit that Bruce Jenner was unsure and halting about in “his” landmark interview with Diane Sawyer last week. He didn’t claim to know many of the hows or whys of his still emerging transgender identity, hadn’t yet come to terms with what happens from here, how it is all going to evolve.

But there was one aspect of his interview responses that was striking for its calm serenity, its obvious and apparent level of settled self-knowledge. It was when he referenced the inner female he had always identified with and seen himself as from his very earliest memories. That’s when his face glowed, his voice softened, and his body seemed to settle into the couch where he was otherwise squirming and shifting under some very uncharted conversational territory—before an estimated audience of 17 million.

“For all intents and purposes, I am a woman. People look at me differently...

What would Jesus think—and how readily would he climb a hill to discourse upon—last week’s vote by Congressional Republicans to repeal the estate tax?

I raise the question through the “What would Jesus do?” prism because of the surpassing irony that most of the “aye” votes came from self-proclaimed and often ardently professing Christian congressmembers who wear their faith heavily on their sleeves (and on the campaign trail).

This group often cites religious imperatives for their views on issues of the day that are dear to their hearts (such as fierce protection of gun rights and regular huge increases in the military budget). The fact that their vote was intended to provide tax-free wealth transfer to the top .02 percent of the population, affecting only those who inherit more than $5.4 million if they are single and $10.9 million if a couple, should not go unnoted...

The more deeply one looks into the life and times of Joan Baez, the less she seems to resemble so many historical figures whose portraits frequently emerge as complicated and contradictory, with tentacles sprawling across light, dark, and the liminal shadows.

Often, the only way to make ultimate sense of many lives is to acknowledge their disparate parts, to admit that they don’t always make sense, that there’s frequently a notable split between people’s inner and outer lives. MLK, JFK, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Steven Jobs—all people that Baez admired deeply—were also flawed characters, leaving a trail of greatness but also pain in their wake.

Say what you want about Baez—and many people have—but the salient aspect or characteristic of her 74 years on this earth, it seems to me, is how all of a piece it appears to be, how singular the thread is that weaves it together.

It is as if she emerged from...

How do murder and torture square with a religious point of view?

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, practicing Methodists both, expressed no hesitation recently in curtly dismissing the Senate investigation into the CIA’s torture tactics against suspected terrorists. Cheney called the entire report “a crock,” and Bush praised agents who approved and administered waterboarding and other torture methods as “patriots.”

Well.

One cannot read the actual descriptions of what takes place during euphemistically labeled “waterboarding” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” without cringing. To imagine yourself (or perhaps worse, your loved ones) on that table, suffocating, passing in and out of consciousness, or deprived of sleep for a week, hallucinating, is to enter a sort of hell, created and sustained by the darkest impulses and imaginings of human beings.

The God of the Old Testament and the A...

I don’t believe I know one person in my everyday orbit who has even one shred of doubt that Brittany Maynard wasn’t fully entitled to the self-determination she employed on November 1 as she ended her own life under Oregon’s Death With Dignity law.

At a heartbreaking 29 years old, she was making a clear, rational, and yes, spiritually mature decision to end her life on her own terms, in her own time, before the ravages of the inoperable brain tumor she had endured overcame her ability to make any decisions or make any sense whatsoever.

Let me be clear: I regard human life as a precious gift that we must hold in the tenderest, most exalted esteem. What a kick it is, yes? Inexhaustibly enriching, full of beauty, intrigue, challenge, high humor, endless curiosity and capacity for love, wonder and joy.

Except when it isn’t.

And when confronting the end point of the disease that was soon going to kill M...