Mark's Blog
A Series of Paradoxes
Like many, I am deeply distressed and disheartened by the recent Supreme Court rulings, the first which removes restrictions on where people can bring loaded guns in public, and the second which reverses Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to seek an abortion. ...
How can they believe that? How can they say that?
The national gun debate has become more intense, if not strident. Some proposals for gun reform, already passed in the House of Representatives, are soon to come before the Senate. There is an array of potential provisions in the various drafts of the Bill: red...
Battle for our National Soul
In 1990, Ken Burns produced a documentary on the Civil War. It ran for several weeks, and generated no end of conversation. A friend of mine reflected that the Civil War was a battle for the national soul. The documentary exposed serious flaws in the republic that...
Comfort and Convenience: Challenges to the Practice of Love
While living in Japan after college, I remember taking an overnight ferry from Pusan, Korea to Shimonoseki, Japan. I traveled third class, which meant that I had about a seven- foot by three-foot space on a carpeted platform on the lowest deck. The platform was...
Fear Transfer Machines
“Will you drape yourself over me, or should I drape myself over you?”, a teenage girl asked her friend as they walked the halls between classes at their high school in New Jersey. She reported her statement to a group of teens who gathered with me shortly after the...
The Power of Hospitality
As I near the end of my backpacking trip across the Highlands of Scotland, I find that I can’t stop thinking about hospitality. Which is rather odd, given that my feet, having carried my weight plus an extra 35 pounds on my back over 200 miles of bogs, hills, endless...
Silence is the World’s Common Language
Many years ago I did a weeklong retreat at the Taize Community in southern France. Known for its captivating chants, the ecumenical monastic compound attracts thousands of people each week from all over the world. The community hosts three services a day, mostly...
The Supreme Court on Abortion: An Invasion of Privacy
Years ago, when I was receiving training in community organizing, we wrestled with the tension between personal and private. Expressing the challenge of being a parent of teenage children was personal, and appropriate; but going into the details of that challenge,...
Drilling Down on Justice
There is a lot of public wrestling these days over the issue of justice. What is it? Who should receive it? Who is regularly denied it? My favorite definition of justice comes from scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann, who has said that justice is sorting out what...