It was our 30th anniversary. Dianne and I had found bargain flights to the Southwest. Arizona would be great we thought. And so we went. And so it was.

For our first eight days we rummaged through the central parts of the state - Prescott, Jerome - the abandoned copper...

Hey, people of faith! Here are ten concrete, no baloney reasons for supporting healthcare insurance reform now!

U.S. healthcare insurance reform is a moral matter. Hindu or Jew, Christian or Jain, Buddhist or Animist, virtually all share the belief that we are here to make a difference. To build up...

Smack...Sswwwaatt...Ssllappp...

Those were the not-so-sweet sounds of summer at bedtime in the days before universal air conditioning. In my memory, those night-time mosquitoes didn't zzzziinngg around the room, they screamed in my ear. Smack! I'd whack one strafing my cheek. Wack! Another on my thigh. (On hot summer nights, not...

For the last two weeks, I've been writing about the malaria crisis in sub-Saharan Africa and what folks in the U.S. can do to raise their awareness and support to BedNetsNow!. The second annual World Malaria Day was last Saturday (April 25) and on the eve of that, international leaders...

Every year, malaria disables a population size roughly equal to that of the U.S. population - 300 million people.

One of the obstacles confronting malaria control efforts is that, while we know the cause of the disease and how to prevent it, its presence in a particular region doesn't seem...

If you Google such phrases as "Flu in the U.S." (or similar phrases for the world), you will get hundreds of thousands of listings. Simply scanning those for 10 minutes or so provides a primer on the relationship between infectious disease and the "progress of nations" or the viability of...

Part II of a "meditation" on why we so often do not seem to act in the face of human need.

I'm sure many of us remember the movie Six Degrees of Separation. It was based on a rather fascinating thesis that none of us is more than six relationships...

How does "a moral person" escape the facts?

It seems that those of us counted among the upper-third of the world's wealthy (which even includes many folks receiving public assistance in Western Europe, the U.S.A. and Canada) have a major moral problem. It is within our power to save,...

Extraordinary as his contributions were to the cause of ending apartheid in South Africa, they can actually stunt our perception of the true greatness of Desmond Tutu. "Odyssey Networks Presents," a Sunday morning feature on Hallmark Channel, is the first to provide cable television viewers with perhaps their first glimpse...

It now seems abundantly clear: capitalism run only by capitalists equals catastrophe. Virtually all of the world's religions abhor this "purist" ideological stance and have preached against it for centuries.

A strong strain of "laissez-faire"capitalism has always run through the veins of the
American body politic: sometimes nearly...

I grew up south of Buffalo but went to high school in South Buffalo for three years. So, for nearly every school afternoon I'd wait for the NFT Bus right in front of Holy Family Church -- the parish where Timmy Russert with his family attended Mass every Sunday and...

On Saturday, May 31, Barack Obama publicly disassociated himself from the congregation (Trinity UCC Church in Chicago) that had served as his family's faith community for twenty years, almost half his life. He was wise to do it. He did it well. But, many will say, still, that he has...

In her May 31 Op Ed piece in the New York Times, Gail Collins shows how "the media" can act as the conscience of us all. She opened her piece, entitled, "What George Forgot" with a quote from one of the nation's would-be ethical icons, Bernard Kerick: "DISLOYAL, SICKENING,...

I remember it was the first time I'd ever heard real "keening" (the falsetto, high pitched wail sometimes used to describe the mythical sound of Irish banshees on the prowl). I was a member of a stunned and numbed congregation in a Catholic Church, in the South some 35 years...