Marilyn Sewell

For three days Rush Limbaugh verbally attacked a young Georgetown University law student who testified in support of the Obama administration's requirement that health insurance plans cover contraceptives for women. Among other pejorative terms, Limbaugh called the young woman a "slut" and a "prostitute."...

I do not have many regrets in my life, at least in regard to the big decisions: getting married, getting unmarried, having children, attending various schools, working first as a teacher, then as a psychotherapist, and most recently as a minister. These decisions have been to the good, more or...

I am weary of hearing well-meaning friends question the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. They ask, "What do they want? They don't have any clear goals -- how can they hope to bring about change?"

I want to ask:

"What was the meaning of Gandhi's...

Less than a year before his death, I interviewed Christopher Hitchens for Portland Monthly magazine. I didn't want to do the interview. As I told editor Randy Gragg, "I don't like Christopher Hitchens. He is rude. He is a bully. So why should I help get his work before more...

My sister Donna and I recently took a self-guided blues tour of the Mississippi Delta. It was an extraordinary experience. I grew up in the South, but never visited the Delta, the emotional heart of the blues, which runs from Vicksburg, Miss., to Memphis,...

I'm waiting to see what the religious response will be to OccupyWallStreet, which is a true revolution of the people. It is a cry from people who have been abused far too long by those who hold economic and political power. It is a...

Vera Farmiga, in her directorial debut "Higher Ground," about a woman who has fallen in with a group of Christian fundamentalists, gets all of it right: the language, the baptismal rites, the Christian "marriage counselor" and the attractive patriarchal pastor. I should know -- I grew up Southern...

Gary Haugen wants to die. Or at least that's what he says. He is a convicted killer who has repeatedly asked to have his appeals waived. Haugan beat to death his girlfriend's mother in 1981, and in 2003, killed a fellow inmate, who ended up with a crushed skull and...

When I was a young adult in New Orleans, I attended a prestigious church which fronted on elegant St. Charles Avenue. One Sunday there was a call from the pulpit for used shoes to be donated to the forgotten souls in the parish prison, one of the worst prisons in...

Once again, as I glance down the obituary column, wondering if any familiar names are there, I see a statement that occurs more and more often: "In keeping with Virginia's wishes, there will be no funeral service."

I am deeply disturbed by this trend. Ritual is the way cultures in...

It is an unfortunate truth that happiness and good fortune rarely deepen us spiritually. It is when we run into unbearable grief and loss we are unprepared for that we are stripped of our vanity and our pride and begin to see, rock-bottom, what is really important to us. These...

When did you give up God? Or did you?

I started doubting at an early age. My problem is that I never seemed able to access this God of love and mercy that the minister talked about. In the pain of my childhood and adolescence, my...

A dramatic moment unfolded on May 23, 1960, for Unitarians and Universalists, two small liberal denominations that had considered a merger for at least a hundred years. Simultaneous sessions of both denominations met in adjoining rooms in John Hancock Hall in Boston. They were connected with a public address system...

How many times have I heard people remark, "You can believe anything and be a Unitarian Universalist." Or someone might say, with no trace of irony, "I go to the Unitarian Universalist church because I don't believe in organized religion." Incredulous, I say to myself, "Gee, I try to be...