Mark's Blog

It is a moral obscenity.  It is said by some that white Afrikaners in South Africa are the victims of genocide, but there is no data to support the claim. It is said that the cohort of Afrikaners coming to America are refugees, but there are indications that they are...

Several decades ago, a national debate raged over a question that helped launch America’s ongoing culture war:  who can you love? One side was insistent that love – which would involve intimate sexual expression – should be confined to a man and a woman. A popular...

In April of 1970 the United States decided to invade Cambodia, thus expanding the Vietnam War. I was nearing the end of my freshman year in college. Campuses around the country rose up in angry indignation. Protests were planned, strikes were proposed, marches were...

It is becoming harder and harder to achieve emotional, spiritual and in some cases physical distance from what is happening in this country.  I hear more and more people saying that they are reluctant to buy, sell or make changes to their home because the economy is...

For more than two hundred years we have been pulling former life out of the ground to heat our buildings, power our cars, run our machines, illuminate our lights. Fossil fuels, so named because they are the remnants of plants, animals and living microbes which, over...

They came into the city through separate gates, almost at the same time. The first was a procession that demonstrated power: Pontius Pilate’s power, backed by all the forces of the Roman Empire. The second procession was smaller, feeble by comparison, and it...

“Personal racism has gone down”, a wise colleague told me recently, “but institutional racism has gone up.” This is both good and bad news.The good news is that over the decades of my lifetime more and more people have become increasingly sensitive to the issues of...

“The secret to white privilege is that if you don’t want to hear something, you don’t have to,”  my mentor Ed Rodman said in a video retrospective:  “A Prophet Among Us”...

I was about six strokes from the finish of a 100 yard butterfly race in an age-group competition this past weekend when my arms gave out.  The last two strokes looked like I was drowning. I could barely get my arms out of the water.  Fifty-five years ago I was a...