• Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    On Paying Attention: Ryan Lochte and Media’s Junk News

    August 21, 2016 - By 

    So we are at the end of these Olympic Games. Mammoth undertaking, nearly the entire world enthralled to some degree or other with these contests reflecting intense passion, competitive fire, and, for the most part, a sense of universal brother-and-sisterhood, human solidarity writ large across nations and cultures and even religions of the world, oh my… All of it reflecting years of effort and training and dreaming for a select few fortunate enough to make it to this pinnacle of the sporting world. (Yes, I know it also reflects rampant commercialization, politicization, fraud and influence peddling etc.; I’ll get back to…

  • Personal Reflections

    In Praise of Mourning: the Assisted Suicide Party of Betsy Davis

    August 14, 2016 - By 

    For many years now I have been both pleased and troubled by the trend of turning funerals and memorial services into “celebrations.” Pleased because the “celebratory” theme does justice, in a profound way, to the whole of a person’s life and character and resounding impact upon those who still live. Troubled because I fear it can easily lapse into denial and suppression of the honest, healing emotion of grief. Case in point: the altogether remarkable tale of Betsy Davis, the 41-year-old woman with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease who took her own life last week, but not before she threw an extravagant…

  • Personal Reflections

    A Happy Birth Day Adoption Memoir

    August 5, 2016 - By 

    I’ve had a stack of black book personal journals occupying various spots in back bedrooms for many years now. They are the product of an effort for the first five or so years of my daughter’s life to provide a record, a kind of daily diary, of not only what happened, where we went, what we did and who we saw, but more importantly for two people who came very late to parenthood after long efforts to first prevent pregnancy, then to become pregnant, then to become adoptive parents, to provide a chronicle of the heart, of the vast reservoirs…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    Reverend William Barber’s Ancient Progressive Religion of the Heart

    August 1, 2016 - By 

    Amidst the many soaring/pointed/Trump-eviscerating speeches that piled atop one another throughout last week’s Democratic National Convention, even the powerful call-out by the Muslim couple who had lost their soldier son in the Afghan War didn’t quite match the moment for me when a hulking African American minister with a congenital spinal condition limped out on stage in his clerical collar and in a sonorous voice intoned: “Good evening my brothers and sisters. I come before you tonight as a preacher, the son of a preacher. A preacher immersed in the movement at five years old. I don’t come tonight representing any organization, but I come…