I suspect most people aren't going to buy a book like Rye Barcott's It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace. (Sorry Rye, that's probably not the high-minded endorsement you wanted.) It's not because this coming-of-age memoir isn't well-written...

I wouldn't presume to know whether or not Iraqis protesting en mass were better off with Saddam Hussein dictating to them. Or if they are better off now with a transplanted democracy forced down their throats like some sort of political water-boarding. As an American it's not my place to...

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, New York City, May 31, 1954

Watching C-SPAN's live coverage of Washington's mindless partisanship reminded me of how the blind loyalty that prevents agreement on health care reform is not an affliction unique to Capitol Hill. Group thinking retards evolution at all levels of American life, e.g. race, religion, sexual orientation. You don't have to be...

Whenever Eastern University professor-filmmaker Betsy Morgan discussed with classes her 1994 documentary, El Salvador: Portraits in a Revolution, at least one student, Jamie Moffett, had questions that couldn't yet be answered. In the years that followed, the questions grew in number and intensity.

Exactly how culpable were U.S. taxpayers for...

For ten days last month I visited the Holy Land of our warring monotheistic faiths and heard political and biblical lectures alongside Christian/spiritual authors, artists and activists such as Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne and David Wilcox. In nearly every lecture by a Palestinian (and...

The first time I watched anonymous, naked bodies entangled in sweaty sex was during my junior year of college. My flushed-face was riveted to the screen. The psychology course called "Human Sexuality" was so popular at Virginia Commonwealth University I'd taken the class during summer break. Fall and spring semesters...

When Kung Fu star David Carradine died last Thursday, I wasn't surprised. He was 72. When I read how he'd died -- hanging naked in a closet with a rope tied around his genitals, wrist and throat -- I was surprised only at the suspected cause of death: auto-erotic asphyxiation....

Can you imagine President Bush delivering a speech to Muslims and quoting seamlessly from the Bible, the Quran and the Talmud? Any reconciliatory words from a born-again Christian who declared after 9/11, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," would carry no echo from Cairo.

"As-Salamu...