“Happy New Year!” is the salutation we use to greet each other around the turn of every year. We talk as if what is past has...
‘Tis the season of miracles. That’s not a phrase that sits easily with the modern mind. Nevertheless, the stories with which we mark this time of...
“Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life.” D.H. Lawrence said that almost a century ago. Now we can read...
So an Ohio Walmart started a food drive among its employees to help its lower income workers get a decent Thanksgiving. “Please Donate Food Items Here...
As every resident of the Southland must know by now, this month marks the centennial of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. When, in 1913, the valves were...
Rich and poor — two sides of the same coin. That “coin” meaning money and how much you have. While Americans seem to love money and...
“Can Google Solve Death?” read the cover headline of a national news weekly. It cleverly enticed readers to read the story inside. The question also represents...
Social justice activists often think that when things are terrible, people will rise up and protest those conditions until they see significant change, and sometimes they...
My friend Allison is a United Methodist minister. Her husband, Andy, pastors a United Church of Christ congregation. Both serve churches in Pasadena. Both of them...
Fifty years ago, just a year out of high school, I sat in my parents’ small living room engrossed by images on the flickering black and...
It’s summer and gasoline prices have peaked — a certain sign that it’s vacation time. Except for those who don’t get vacations or, worse, get them...
Big Oil says we ought to be supporting fracking because it causes less air pollution than other forms of energy, such as coal or even conventional...
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving especially high profile cases have garnered all the legal headlines. The Court’s watershed decision rejecting Proposition 8 and restoring...
My friend, mentor and colleague, Rev. James Lawson, calls our economic system “plantation capitalism.” Lawson was the nonviolent strategist for Martin Luther King Jr. during the...
Last Friday, my wife, Susan, was out where Santa Monica meets Brentwood to tell the President not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. No one caught...
A friendly and regular reader of this blog wrote me that she recently spent a week sitting in on the trial of a teenaged girl in...
Some 53 percent of Americans say that the second Iraq war was a mistake. A recent Los Angeles Times article asked if the war brought change...
My cousin and I have stayed in touch over the years despite the distance — he grew up in a Texas border town and has lived...
With a trumpet blast from the sources of conventional wisdom, the Keystone XL pipeline charged through the news sources last month. When the State Department released...
Spring equinox always arrives in what feels like the middle of winter. Snow falls in the Northwest while the Northeast tries to dig out from under...