The Unclad Soul

I would encourage every American to watch the Ken Burns series, The West. It is available on Netflix and PBS. What you learn from this extraordinary documentary is that the White Man has, from the beginning of his presence here, done everything in his power to prevent first, the Native American Indians, then the Mexicans, then the Blacks, then the Asians, from ever being given the right to be legally assimilated into the free function of American society. The White Man is an immigrant. Unless you have Native American blood in you, you did not come from this land. Your ancestors brought you here from somewhere else. Whites came to this country from Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. This land did not belong to them, they stumbled onto it and then they took it to be their own. Many came here fleeing religious persecution, poverty, disease, lack of economic opportunity, and the freedom to build a life for themselves and their families. ...

The news photo of a defenseless 92-year old Mexican man who was recently beaten with a brick by a woman and kicked by men, haunts and torments me. The woman, whose toddler daughter watched the whole thing, told the bleeding and battered old man to “Go back to Mexico.” He was visiting his family and was simply taking a walk near the house when the woman assaulted him. 92 years old. I watched a lengthy video on Facebook last week by a young Latina woman at a Chicago park who was verbally taunted by a drunk white man who kept getting in her face while a white police officer stood by and watched, doing nothing, even though she kept asking the officer to intervene. She and her family had rented a space at the park for a birthday party. But the drunk man and another white man were sitting in their space and wouldn’t leave. He then began harassing her because she was wearing a shirt that read, Puerto Rico on it. Eventually, several other police officers arrived but they let the drunk man ...

The election in Alabama yesterday to replace Senate Republican Jeff Sessions ended another high profile, tawdry political race, one that reminds us of how far our political system has fallen into disgrace. Roy Moore, a controversial evangelical firebrand, a man who had twice been removed from office as an Alabama Supreme Court justice, for blatantly ignoring federal laws, and who reportedly was banned from a mall for spooking teenage girls, and who was accused by various adult women of having made inappropriate advances toward them when they were teens, centered his campaign, unbelievably, on Christian principles. Moore made a career of using religion to bolster the support of Christians for his political ambitions. And for years it worked. But apparently many voters got tired of the hypocrisy and the manipulation and rejected him. Including a large number of Black voters who courageously stood up to Moore’s shoddy politics that were often prejudicial and intolerant of minorit...

I visited with my brother Jim yesterday and, as always when I see him, I left deeply reflecting on life. “The world,” Helen Keller once said, “is full of suffering; but also, the overcoming of it.” It is difficult to watch the news and see the horror in the Middle East. There is so much suffering and death there. And yet, people somehow survive it. Refugees walk hundreds of miles, pile their families and a few belongings into small boats to cross treacherous waters in hope of finding safety. They enter strange countries where now they are often unwelcome, mistreated, harmed or sent back to the nightmare they fled. How do they do it? How do they go on? The human spirit, though fragile, often shocks us with its undeterred courage. And here, in our country, minorities still struggle to be free. Free of discrimination, injustice, abuse, and hate. That our black friends still, after all these years, have to fight for basic rights is a stain on our democracy. Yet, they carry on,...

I am a liberal Democrat. I am a Christian. I am a humanist. I believe in Choice. I support Gay Marriage. I believe in gay rights. I believe in reasonable gun laws including background checks at Gun Shows before a purchase is made. I believe in children. I believe in grand parenting. I believe in laughter and kissing and hugging and love. I believe in thinking, in using your mind and not just your emotions, which are often accurate, but can be easily manipulated. I believe in books. Books are guides into mystery and morality, into wisdom and insight, into gratitude and generosity, into acceptance and endurance, into risk and living, and we need all of that. I believe in pets because whether it’s a dog or a cat or a bird or a turtle it invites compassion from us and can make us a more decent person if we treat it with care and affection. I believe in the sacred which has the power to move and even transform us. Nature is sacred. Seasons are sacred. So is the ocean. Quiet worship before ...

I have once again subjected myself to tedium and irrelevance by watching Meet the Press. Chuck Todd, the host, grilled the Mayor of Baltimore. Grilled her over and over about protestors, people in the streets who rioted and looted. But he has no grilling for the police. He showed a clip of Baltimore’s police commissioner saying the six police officers charged with crimes against Freddie Gray did nothing wrong. Really? The man committed no crime. He was in possession of a legal knife folded and in a holster not a switchblade as the police and the media announced. He asked for medical help right after he was handcuffed. They drove him all over Baltimore banging around in the back of a van with his hands and feet shackled. He asked over and over while in the van for medial help and was denied it each time. He lost consciousness in the van. He went into a coma at the hospital and died. But the police did nothing wrong? What happened in Baltimore is not about black poverty. It’s not ab...

Michael Brown “Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right.” – John Hartung, Physician/Author

Religion, if it’s any good at all, has always been under attack.  Not because of its claim of righteousness, or its attempts at some lofty holiness, or because of its fundamentalism.  Historically, the best religion, the healthiest and courageous and most dangerous religion, has been attacked because of its struggle against systems of corruption, of injustice, of brutality, of exploitation and other crimes against humanity. Jesus was crucified for these very reasons.  People of religion over the years created these elaborate and complicated and puzzling and sometimes preposterous doctrines and ideologies about salvation and atonement and the rapture and the second coming and eternal damnation and so forth as a way of attempting to interpret scripture.  But Jesus was not killed for any of that.  He was killed for attempting to stand against the cruelty and injustices and inhumanity of the Roman Empire.  He was killed for his impatience with institution...

Carl Sagan, the brilliant and eloquent astronomer and astrophysicist said not long before his death, "I worry...that pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.  Where have we heard it before?  Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose  or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us--then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." He did not live to see how prophetic his words would prove to be. Today, with a small but vocal and hostile segment of our population incensed over the re-election of President Obama, we see people stuck in old mindsets of fear and hate trying desperately to grab for the controls. The Tea Party wants a recount of the election.  Some extremist Republican politicians want the pr...