At first I thought that David Brooks was on to something in his New York Times editorial, August 8, 2017: “Getting Trump Out of My Brain.” I nodded in sympathy with Brooks’ observation: “For the past two years Trump has taken up an amazing amount of my brain space. My brain has apparently decided that […]
If the Answer is “Yes.”
October 18, 2016 by 25 Comments
I have resisted the temptation to weigh in more than I already have on the Donald Trump phenomenon because we are saturated. Television news and the newspapers can’t keep their eyes off of him and I confess that I watch the 7:00 a.m. news because I don’t want to miss the latest outlandish thing he […]
Building Walls instead of Bridges
February 29, 2016 by 15 Comments
I simply do not know what to say about Donald Trump. I grew up in a home where what was going on in the world and in the nation was talked about regularly at the dinner table. Politics was often a spirited discussion between my father, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and conservative in almost all his […]
Love Has Good Manners
February 14, 2016 by 6 Comments
Among the voices I rely on to be honest, intellectually stimulating and morally grounded is David Brooks’. In addition to reading his New York Times editorials, I try not to miss the “Shields and Brooks” segment of the PBS News Hour on Friday evenings. Brooks is a thoughtful conservative who regularly drops references to the great […]
Thoughts on American Democracy
August 7, 2014 by Leave a Comment
The most rigorous academic challenge I have ever experienced was a college course on Constitutional Law. It was required for my major and because of its fearsome reputation I put it off as long as possible. The text book itself was forbidding, 1,000 pages with hundreds of pages of footnotes and cross references. We read, […]
Doing God’s Work
June 1, 2014 by Leave a Comment
For several years I met with a group of Christian and Jewish leaders to discuss how Christians and Jews can talk together about the Middle East. The underlying concern of the Jewish participants was why Mainline Protestant Churches seem, to the Jewish community, to be so unbalanced in their attitudes about Israel. Christian participants wondered […]
Hold to the Good 
A Celebratory Dance of Gratitude
I cannot remember being this concerned about my nation and its immediate future. An American political party, which began with the election of Abraham Lincoln and stood for staunch anti-communism, a robust international American leadership, a commitment to democratic values–freedom of speech, freedom of the press, open participation in self-government, free trade, and above all, […]