On a trip to Atlanta this week, amid the same-sex marriage debate in my home state of New York , I had an opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr, memorial site for the first time. Watching footage of lynchings and segregationist racism, from the perspective of the...

Kabbalah is a centuries-old body of literature, but for those who study it today -- whether in its classical form or contemporary ones -- it is not simply read, like a novel or a blog. Rather, like yoga or meditation, there's a perception that Kabbalah is meant to do something:...

Last week, in part two of our introduction to Kabbalah, we suggested that in Jewish mystical theology, "God does not exist -- God is existence itself." But then we ended by asking if this is true, if everything is God, why do things appear as they do? And...

Last week, in part 1 of my Guide to Kabbalah, we began at the beginning, asking the simple question of "What is Kabbalah?" and providing four parallel answers: literal (a "received" tradition of mystical and esoteric thought), spiritual (a system which enables "receiving" of more of the world, or...

I first encountered Kabbalah eighteen years ago, as a student at Columbia College. I had no idea that its obscure texts and abstruse concepts would one day become a central part of my life -- let alone Britney's, Madonna's, and Demi's.

Despite all the fame, or maybe because...

Marching today in Washington with tens of thousands of other gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people, and tens of thousands more straight allies, it was easy to see reflected on a large scale what I've known on a smaller scale for years: the gay generation gap is widening.

In...

Will American spirituality get serious? Those of us who do regular spiritual practice -- whether it's meditating every day or giving our time to the less fortunate, spending focused time with our kids or going to church each week -- have long been vilified by the cynical press as narcissists,...

The vibe has changed at the airport. In the first years after 9/11, there was a tension in the security lines: each time we took our laptops out of their bags, we remembered what happened in September. Whatever our politics, we grimly adjusted to the new reality.

Then came the...

"Really?" the guy at the Alamo Rental Car place said, when I'd told him about Burning Man. "I heard it was just a lot of naked people running around on drugs."

Coated in gypsum dust, and still high not on drugs but on the altered consciousness of radical creativity...

If tomorrow, you could completely free yourself from guilt -- if you'd never feel guilty again, no matter what you did -- would you do it?

Americans today give diametrically opposed answers. On one side, there are those -- primarily conservative, religious, and traditional -- who would say no: they...

This hit the wires on Friday....
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Statement of Leaders of LGBT Jewish Synagogues & Organizations
in Response to the Attack on the LGBT Youth Center in Tel Aviv on August 1, 2009

On behalf of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) synagogues and Jewish organizations, we...

I called him Shakey, because he couldn't sit still. About forty-five or fifty years old, with thick white hair up front and a bald spot on the crown of his head, Shakey sat near me in the meditation hall for forty days. He moved constantly: shifting his posture, moving his...

Most of us, when we hear about meditation, picture someone sitting calmly on a cushion, hands held just so. Well, that is one form of meditation, but there are many, many others -- some of which are a lot easier to fit into a busy schedule than the traditional forty...

One of my best spiritual teachers is a dog. I met her on a silent meditation retreat a few years ago. On that retreat, as, alas, on many others, I had been struggling with one of the petty irritations that meditators work with all the time: restless yogis making noise....

For months now, gay rights advocates in New York have been pulling strings, marshaling forces, and lobbying moderate state senators to make 2009 the year the Empire State finally passes marriage equality. Two weeks ago, all our dreams seemed to come crashing down in the midst of a legislative circus...

If you're like many Americans, you may be finding yourself overeducated and underemployed as the recession enters its second year. Maybe you've had well-meaning voices tell you what an opportunity this is for personal growth, to get into shape, or a thousand other good things. Maybe some of those voices...

The appointment of Harold Hongju Koh, Dean of the Yale Law School and an official in both the Clinton and Reagan administrations, to be Legal Advisor to the Department of State should be a no-brainer. He is a former Marshall scholar and Supreme Court clerk, a leading expert on international...

It matters that Adam Lambert, the heir apparent as the next American Idol, is apparently gay -- precisely because it doesn't matter.

First, whether Lambert is homosexual or not, he definitely is "queer," a word many GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) people have reclaimed from the dustbin...

I have been a law professor, magazine editor, and the director of national nonprofit organization. I went to Yale Law School, founded a successful dot-com software company, and have written three books and 200 articles. My childhood nickname was "Chatterduck." But last year, I decided to spend five months...

Yesterday, I took a flight from Nashville to New York. A week earlier, my flight to Tennessee had been packed, but now the plane was almost empty. I knew why, of course: The Swine Flu Pandemic, and the fear it has brought in its wake.

As of this writing, there...