Mark's Blog

I didn’t intend for it to be a self-imposed exile, but in some ways that is how it turned out.  When I graduated from college in 1973 I lived in Kyoto, Japan for two years on a fellowship that involved teaching and being the resident Fellow in a university dormitory....

On Sunday evening, July 6, the Braver Faith team of Braver Angels hosted a webinar entitled "Faith and Freedom Through Reflection and Prayer." The event was scheduled to honor the Fourth of July weekend. A link to the 75 minute webinar can be found  here.a link  It...

Many years ago I took my family to the July 4th festivities at Old Sturbridge Village,  an historical replica of a colonial town in central Massachusetts. The highlight of the day was the reading of the Declaration of Independence from a podium on the town common. A...

In the last few days the country, if not the world, has had a crash course in bunker buster bombs, ever since three of them literally crashed down on a nuclear weapons development facility in Fordow, Iran.  Delivered by a stealth B2 bomber, the pretext, subtext and...

No permanent allies. No permanent enemies. That was a foundational mantra of a ten day community organizing training that I received nearly 40 years ago.  It was a new idea for me, and I struggled with it. Growing up during the height of the cold war, I had been...

  I have recently engaged my mind in a paradox that both strengthens my resolve and soothes my soul.  Love more.  Resist more.  Normally it is thought that loving and resisting need to be kept separate from one another:  you can’t love someone or something you...

In 2008, toward the end of a three-day retreat in Canterbury Cathedral for about 700 Episcopal and Anglican bishops from around the world, Archbishop Rowan Williams finished his brilliant presentation on love and grace, and then asked us to reach out to another. Find...

“A preferential option for the poor” became a foundational component of Catholic Social teaching when the term was first issued by Latin American Catholic leaders and theologians in the mid-1960s. The phrase echoed the many admonitions from Jesus as recorded in the...

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...