I recently read Ron Chernow’s massive biography of General/President U.S. Grant. It awakened in me a renewed sadness over how long it took for a significant percentage of our citizenry to acknowledge the evil of how Native Americans and African Americans have been treated.  Thousands (yes, thousands) of our fellow-humans were murdered, while many more

I am a pragmatist and thus cremation of the dead has seemed to me to be the sensible way to avoid the cost and sometimes macabre aspects of funerals. My mother, though well-schooled in the reality of decay and the theology of resurrection, said she wanted to be buried, not cremated, because she wanted Jesus

“Compassion is not a snob gone slumming. Anybody can salve his conscience by (occasionally giving a dollar to a street beggar). Did you ever take a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend? To feel the sob of the soul – the raw, red crucible of emotional agony? To have this become