Rev. Peter Laarman

On Labor Day we honor work and workers. But what happens when the job market is in such turmoil that the very idea of stable, sustaining employment begins to evaporate before our eyes? What happens when the degradation of the contemporary workplace makes a mockery of the idea of "honoring"...

I took part recently in a convening of progressive Christian leaders from across the country that followed the usual script for these affairs. We looked at aspects of our internal culture and capacity, at our tools and strategies, at core unifying issues and themes. The conversation was illuminating and helpful...

Winter started early this year, with snow slicing down "like needles" across much of the country. But the unkindest cut this winter is coming from big U.S. employers that have decided they just won't fund employees' 401(k) plans to save costs.

The New York Times ran this story in...

It's interesting that while no one knew exactly what the consequences would be if the U.S. Treasury failed to ride the rescue of mismanaged big banks, everyone pretty much DOES know what the consequences will be if Congress stiffs the mismanaged and cash-strapped domestic auto industry. Yet a significant portion...

Never people to spend time reading history (what with the time required for makeup/costume and schmoozing), our corporate media "election team" guys and gals have at least taken some note of McCain's move to out-outrage Obama on the Spoliations of the Speculators, the Peculations of the Privileged, the Avarice of...

I am sure that others besides me remember the extreme weirdness of learning about a 1300-page USA Patriot Act that had already been drafted and thoroughly honed for the express purpose of gutting the United States Constitution well in advance of the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001.

It probably had to happen. Maybe better now than later. But still profoundly depressing to see that the practical effect of The Speech was to push down Obama's numbers significantly among Democratic voters, according to Gallup.

I do not fault the candidate for campaigning on the premise of a post-racial...

So nice that the FDA now says it finds no real difference between (or should we say "among") the meat and milk of cows, pigs, and goats that are bred naturally (sheep have been mysteriously excluded for now: what do they know and when did they know it?) and the...

There was never any question that religion would play a huge role in the electoral pageant now fully unfolding as those frozen Iowans at last begin to caucus.

After everyone saw how the well-organized voting faithful on the Right gave Bush his margin of "victory" in 2004, the Democrats...

So thanks to Feinstein and Schumer, we'll be getting a new attorney general who can't say straight out that waterboarding is torture. What makes us so sure that if voters a year from now choose to put a Democrat in the White House, this new blue chief executive won't endorse...

There he was, too pale and much too chubby to pass as an old salt but nonetheless perched proudly on the foredeck of his sparkling new Newport yacht, the aptly-named Numbers: one Daniel M. Meyers, a founder of First Marblehead Corp. and one of the leading players in the $20...

So, yeah, I got drawn into the memory hole just a little bit last Friday when the folks who keep track of such things reminded us all that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was released on June 1, 1967. My wonderment (has it really been forty years?) intensified on...

Lots of thumbsucking about the death of Jerry Falwell and what it might portend. I don't think it portends much of significance. Along with his health, Falwell's stock had been declining for years. Repellent but by no means stupid, Falwell had been reduced to making ever-more-outrageous statements in order to...

So the headlines tell us to prepare for the worst. Whole neighborhoods blighted because of shuttered and foreclosed properties. Up to 20 percent of homeowners in some areas finding themselves on the street, with all of the humiliation and anger such a fate entails. Punctilious and qualified borrowers in heavily-impacted...

Holiday Reflections of a Christian Who Almost Hates Christmas

He doesn't even cry. There's a clue. "Away in a manger the sweet baby wakes; the little Lord Jesus no crying He makes." No wonder women especially received Him with hosannas as the long-awaited Lord of Glory. Everyone should have...

This might be a good time to look again at why serious Christians have no choice but to be part of the fearless opposition to the way U.S. society is organized. Tom Friedman recently described conditions in Iraq are Hobbesian--but so are conditions here, albeit with fewer explosions. Why characterize...

OK, let me say I thought Pelosi was pretty great on her first day as second in the line of presidential succession. She was succinct, composed, unwilling to retract her harsh descriptions of Bushian ineptitude, and clear that proper governance forward cannot occur without at least some hearings on past...

OK, we should definitely thank Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt and the editors of The New York Times for leading the paper Monday with a very solid report on the two economies dividing the life prospects of today's Americans. Reviewing and digesting multiple data sources, Greenhouse and Leonhardt gave...

The news yesterday that Wal-Mart Corporation has hooked up with the national Gay/Lesbian Chamber of Commerce can only mean trouble. Not to be excessively coy, I use the terhttp://dev.huffingtonpost.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=27984&blog_id=3ms "hooked up" and "trouble" in their ur-gaymalespeak sense implying energetic sexual congress. I speak of what I know as an incurably...

As Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman, and the Republican noise machine start to lash out at the al Qaeda sympathizers who voted for Ned Lamont, all the people standing in horrendous airport lines today and tossing their shampoo bottles away should remember that they owe their frustration--and their fear--to Cheney and...