I doubt few would disagree that we live in an age of media free for all. I do not mean by that that media is free for all, since it plainly is not; someone must pay for it, and they do with copious amounts of cash. I mean “free-for-all” in the wrestling sense; it is a battle royal, a slugfest of ideas, a veritable clash of titans and pygmies as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, among others, vie for billions of human... Read more

Immigration is a deeply fraught subject in the USA and around the world. Peoples across the globe are on the move more than they ever have been in all of human history. Literally millions of our fellow humans are moving from their homelands to other places, or are moving great distances within their own countries. The reasons are many: war and strife, economic exigency, loss of land, climate change, among others. Discussions of immigration into Europe from Africa and the... Read more

I have been at the top of the social heap for most of my life. I am white, male, heterosexual, and each of those realities has led me to enormous privilege. All I ever needed to do was to work hard, be moderately clever, and the goodies of the world would flow for me. Surely, I thought, anyone could follow my game plan—work hard, be clever, and all would be well. As I look at the Bible, I can easily... Read more

In more than a few of my essays over the six or seven years I have been writing them, I have taken up the question of anti-Judaism. Like some whack-a-mole carney game, the Jews have over many centuries been blamed for all manner of societal evils, from capitalism out of control, to socialism in its most terrible guises, to patently absurd ideas of ritual sacrifice, to international cabals against all God-fearing Christians, and on and on. The mere fact that... Read more

There are times in my life when only poetry seems to speak clearly yet elusively enough to capture something of the tenor of the day. I have long been a fan of T.S. Eliot’s spare and complex verse as a window on my world. Much of his very greatest work was written when he was quite young. Perhaps his most famous and influential poem is “The Waste Land,” written in 1922 when Eliot was only 34 and in the process... Read more

I have been given the opportunity to perform a wedding here in Los Angeles, the first one here I will have occasion to do. I have always enjoyed weddings, despite the extravagance and the worry, the vast preparations and the terrors of the couple, the control of the parents, the desire of the marrying ones just to have it all over at last. Couples still go through all this, though they know well that about 50% of all marriages, whether... Read more

For those of us who have given much of our lives, both personally and professionally, to the care and nurture of religious institutions, our relationships to the workings of the government have always been fraught with confusion, suspicion, and hope. And those of us in the more progressive end of those institutions have perhaps had the more complex time negotiating just what our role is when it comes to the dictates of our elected and unelected authorities. It will hardly... Read more

This week I had another birthday, making me 74 years old. I have now lived longer than my father, who died at 73, but not nearly as long as my mother who lived to be 92. I also have three living brothers, younger twins at 68, and an older sibling, nearing 79. When it was thought that genes had the most to do with one’s prospective age—and it still plays some important roles, we are told—my quite aged grandparents, one... Read more

The much-used term “gaslighting” has its immediate origin in a 1938 play of that name by George Hamilton. It was made into two movies in the 1940’s, the latter of which starred Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton, directed by George Cukor. It is a tale where a husband attempts to convince his wife that she is going insane by manipulating their environment in various ways and then denying that he is in fact doing so; for example, he slowly lowers... Read more

The Bible’s rich story is saturated with violence. As much as we enjoy saying that God is a God of love, and that God’s son, Jesus, embodied that unbreakable love in human form, there can be no denying the fact that endemic to both testaments, deep pools of violence are to be found. And though it is all too common to accuse the Hebrew Bible with brandishing its violent brush, and then proclaiming that with the coming of Jesus, that... Read more