Rights and Relationships
Political arguments in America are being strangled by our preoccupation with rights to the exclusion of relationships as the focus of our ethics. Whether in arguments over abortion, gun violence, …
The Winding Cloth
The electronic revolution increasingly knits us all on planet Earth into a common consciousness, a common memory. It also makes possible an increasing degree of empathy across the barriers of …
Singing the Words
For many of us, the source and power of poetry lies in its oral performance. It is first of all an oral and auditory medium. Indeed, this power of the …
Mountains, Men, Mines and Minerals
We have just returned from six weeks in the Western Cape of South Africa and ten days exploring central Namibia, its neighbor to the north. While it is the people …
Homer, Chiefs, and Presidents
While visiting in Cape Town, I recently had the pleasure of taking a summer school course at the University of Cape Town on Homer’s Iliad, from Professor Richard Whitaker, who …
Titanic Revelations
Sometimes we don’t know where certain messages come from as we muse, fingering some words to give our intuitions substance. I think this poem comes from the haunting reverberations of …
Moving Midway: Toward Reconciliation
We recently saw an arresting documentary film entitled “Moving Midway,” a story about saving an old North Carolina plantation house and discovering the family histories behind it. Midway was a …
Rachel’s Weeping and Our Response
During the Christmas season we are confronted by two texts that not only speak to, but seem to arise out of, the grief that has swept this country in the …
Peace Conference 2012
Every Fall for the past five years more than 300 people have convened here for the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference. This posting is a report on that conference. This year’s …
Expanding Marriage
The reactionary impulses of the 2010 elections propelled the North Carolina Republican Party into control of the legislature for the first time in a century. One result was that we …
On Poetry, Moravians, and Public Life
Last week I joined my friend Michael Beadle to present a few of our poems to a recently formed group concerned with the relation of art to faith. Called “ArtGroup,” …
On Blogging and Publishing
Is a “blog,” which is what they call these items I post on this site, a “publication”? In confronting recent discussions of this question I began to wonder if there …
What’s a Person?
Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in “Citizens United…” that corporations are “persons” who must be accorded all the rights of free speech, non-corporate persons like myself have been …