A Call for Compassion

Our greatest threat is not the atomic bomb. Our greatest threat is the callousness to the suffering of man. – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

We live in a dangerously polarized world, full of division and hatred, suffering and violence. Conflict rages in places as diverse and far off as Afghanistan and the Middle East, Chechnya and the Sudan. Although the chief causes of these conflicts are political and territorial, they are cloaked in religious terms. The world’s major religions – I speak here of the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have failed miserably at countervailing the forces of injustice. In many parts of the world, religious fundamentalists, including many self-proclaimed Christians in this country, have sowed the flames of prejudice and ignorance. Muslim extremists have used their faith to justify and commit atrocities that violate Islam’s most sacred values. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been allowed to fester for generations, turning a secular and political conflict into a “holy” war in which reasoned compromise and pragmatic solutions are victim to intransigence and intolerance.

Every day the news is filled with stories of tragedy and conflict; of school shootings, suicides, and murders; financial institutions in crisis; the growing and shameful gap between the richest and poorest among us. People have lost faith in the political process and have stopped talking and listening to each other. Many young people today are beset with feelings of alienation and helplessness, as the religious and secular institutions around them seem impotent, incapable of solving the world’s problems.

Even the quality of our political conversations has suffered. When I was in college and law school in the early 1980’s, I often argued with my Republican friends and other students about current events. We debated many of the same issues that today continue to divide liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans – the government’s proper role in alleviating poverty and putting people to work; the need for social welfare programs; the pros and cons of government regulation. But even in the most heartfelt and animated discussions, there existed mutual respect and goodwill between us. It was understood that, though we disagreed on the means, we sought common ends; it was an accepted truth that each of us desired a peaceful and prosperous world. We struggled in different ways with issues of fairness and equality, productivity and individual responsibility, but we understood that our arguments were made in good faith. Sadly, in today’s environment, such civil discourse seems less possible.

Something is missing in American political life today. It has been festering like a sore for the past two decades or so, when compromise became a dirty word and the conversation turned bitter and ugly. Political disagreements are no longer principled differences, but instead reflect one’s integrity and worth as a human being. The cultural divide also has carried over into mainstream religious institutions, in debates over gay ordination and marriage, and in disputes over religious orthodoxy and biblical inerrancy. Lost in the political and religious culture wars is the concept of compassion.

In some circles, to speak of compassion is suspect, an indication that one is soft. For persons of power and influence, presidents and senators, civic and business leaders, speaking of a compassionate society suggests weakness. For most of us, in our everyday lives, compassion takes a back seat to cold realism. We do what we must to get through each day, to satisfy the demands of our jobs and of life’s competitive pressures.

Albert Einstein foresaw that as our society grew more modern and technologically advanced, we would need the virtues of our traditions more, not less. He described such tradition-based figures as Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi, as “geniuses in the art of living – more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge.” In an age of atomic warfare, Einstein knew that the future of humanity demanded compassionate applications to the world’s problems, whether scientific, medical, economic, or political.

In November 2010, Krista Tippett, the host of NPR’s Speaking of Faith (now called On Being), lectured on compassion at a TED conference, rightly noting that compassion is a word of great meaning, one possessed of transformative powers. If properly understood, compassion has the power to change us, individually and collectively. Compassion is not, as is sometimes believed, sympathy or pity for the less fortunate. Rather, compassion consists of genuine expressions of kindness; of empathy for the sorrows and joys of others; of forgiveness and reconciliation, generosity and hospitality. Compassion is not a feeling or an emotion, but is physically manifested, and must be cultivated and practiced in everyday life. Compassion is curiosity without assumptions, a willingness to see beauty in others, including the child with Down’s syndrome, the mentally disabled man in a wheelchair, the toll collector, the police officer, the soldier; all of the strangers in our midst.

Compassion brings us into the territory of mystery and allows us to see the face of God in each other, in the members of our families, our friends, our co-workers; in the homeless women begging for change by the subway grate, and the drug addict huddled beneath the bridge. Compassion is tenderness.

One of the chief tests of our generation is whether we can build a global society that allows people of all religious and political persuasions to live together in peace and mutual respect. Where are the voices of compassion in the world today? The major faith traditions, which often are part of the problem, should be leading the way in helping to make a more just and compassionate world a reality. Historically and theologically, principles of compassion are embraced by all of the world’s religions. It is the essence of the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Judaism teaches tikkun olam, to repair the world; Jesus teaches to love thy neighbor as thyself; and Mohammed instructs, “That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.” And yet, too often the voices of religious extremists drown out the voices of compassion.

Whether in the public pronouncements of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, the bishops of Rome, or the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim in the West Bank, lately one hears few appeals to compassion; instead, the focus tends to be on matters of sexual conduct or ancient doctrinal disputes, implying that a “correct” view of these issues are the true criterion of faith. “Man has often made a god out of dogma,” admonished Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “a graven image which he worshipped. . . He would rather believe in the dogma than in God . . . [and] be ready to take other people’s lives, if they refuse to share his tenets.”

It is difficult to think of a time when the compassionate voice of religion has been so needed. Krista Tippett has said that she once believed “that all of the important and interesting problems in the world were political, and all of the solutions, too. But I changed my mind.” She has since realized there “are places in human experience that politics cannot analyze or address, and they are among our raw, essential, heartbreaking, and life-giving realities.” The really important things in life, as in death, “how to love, how we can be of service to each other . . . are the kinds of questions religion arose to address.” Have our religious institutions lived up this challenge?

How do we restore compassion to the center of our civic and political life? How can we make it the essence of religion, morality, and civic virtue? Theologian and historian Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Ballentine Books, 1993), and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the history and traditions of the Abrahamic faiths, helped formulate the Charter for Compassion, an important and potentially transformative document drafted in November 2009 by the leading voices of six faith traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). The Charter, which affirms that compassion “lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions,” calls upon people of all faiths “to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; [and] to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings – even those regarded as enemies.”

Until we are able to see the humanity in each other, to set aside ego and transcend selfishness, to see the world through the eyes of the Other – the strangers among us, those with whom we disagree, our enemies and our friends; until we are able to feel empathy and seek genuine understanding, we are doomed to repeat the divisions and hatreds of the past. “There is no human being,” wrote Heschel, “who does not carry a treasure in his soul; a moment of insight, a memory of love, a dream of excellence, a call to worship.” True compassion breaks down the boundaries of politics, dogma, ideology, and religion. The practice of everyday compassion helps us recognize our interdependence and our shared humanity. “We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion,” says Karen Armstrong, “or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings.” The choice belongs to each of us.

A Matter of Perspective

When I was first married, my mother-in-law sat down at her kitchen table and told me about the day she went to confession and told the priest that she and her husband were using birth control. She had several young children, times were difficult – really, she could have produced a list of reasons longer than your arm.

“You’re no better than a whore on the street,” said the priest.

This was . . . a long time ago. It’s just an explanation of why the bishops are not the only Roman Catholics who are touchy about the issue of contraception. – Gail Collins, The New York Times (“Tales From the Kitchen Table”).

There is nothing like a culture war to get people’s juices flowing. Some of the rhetoric coming from the Republican presidential candidates this past week has been, to say the least, over the top. Newt Gingrich accused President Obama of waging a war on religion. Mitt Romney said the President was trying to “impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.” Rick Santorum, who is personally opposed to contraception, suggested that Obama was a step away from bringing the guillotine to America.

Relax guys. There is no war on religion. There will be no guillotines. There is no attack on the Catholic Church, or any church. President Obama is not anti-religion. As I have pointed out before on these pages (“The President on Prayer, Humility, and the Search for Wisdom” and “The Role of Faith in the Public Square”), Obama is a committed Christian who possesses a compassionate and refreshing Christian orientation that is far more Christian than anything I hear coming from the mouths of Gingrich and Santorum. Although the Republicans won’t pass up any chance to shout inflammatory rhetoric and accuse Obama of trampling on the rights of believing Christians, I am quite certain that Jesus of Nazareth would be far more comfortable with the President’s brand of religion than with the hypocritical Newt or repressive Rick.

Somehow lost in most of the discussions and finger pointing this past week are the facts. The HHS regulation at issue simply requires that preventive health care services, which must be covered by employer health insurance policies without co-pays under the Affordable Care Act, include contraception. It does not require anyone to use birth control. It specifically exempts churches and any religious employer that primarily hires and serves its own faithful. Although it applies to religiously affiliated hospitals and universities that serve the public and engage in interstate commerce, no Catholic hospital must itself provide contraception or family planning services to their employees or patients. They simply cannot opt out of insurance policies that cover the cost of birth control to their employees, but must in fact offer the minimum level of insurance coverage for preventive health services as do all other employers under the Affordable Care Act.

Much overlooked is the fact that Catholic hospitals have complied with similar rules concerning contraception coverage already in place in 28 states. It has been the law in New York state for the past ten years. Fordham University, a Jesuit college in the Bronx, has a health plan for its employees and students that cover contraception, though it does not distribute birth control at its student health center. Manhattan College, founded in 1853 by the De LaSalle Christian brothers, a Catholic religious order, carries an insurance policy that covers birth control prescriptions. Many other Catholic health care systems and universities provide similar coverage to their employees. Somehow, none of these state requirements have inflicted the slightest blow to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

As Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times noted, the 629-hospital Catholic health care system, which employs 765,000 people, constitutes 14 percent of the entire U.S. health care industry and serves one out of every six patients. Of the top ten revenue producing hospitals in the United States in 2010, four were Catholic. Catholic Health Initiatives, for example, in Denver, Colorado, operates 78 hospitals in 20 states and has revenues of $8.2 billion a year. Catholic Healthcare West in San Francisco is the fifth largest hospital system in the United States, with over $11 billion in assets. Ascension Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, runs 67 acute health care centers in 20 states and the District of Columbia. As Greenhouse writes, “These institutions, as well as Catholic universities – not seminaries, but colleges and universities whose doors are open to all – are full participants in the public square, receiving a steady stream of federal dollars. They assert – indeed, have earned – the right to the same benefits that flow to their secular peers. What they now claim is a right to special treatment” as a result of religious doctrine.

These hospitals and schools hire hundreds of thousands of Catholic and non-Catholic employees alike – nurses, doctors, teachers, administrators, secretaries, and janitors – all of whom are entitled under the Affordable Care Act to preventive health services, including contraception, without having to pay costly co-pays. So, what is all the fuss about? Is it a violation of religious freedom to require Catholic hospitals and universities to provide their employees with insurance policies that cover contraception?

Under the Constitution, the Catholic Church has the absolute right to preach that birth control is immoral. While I believe the Catholic Church’s position on contraception is archaic, inhumane, and has contributed historically to human suffering and poverty, particularly in poorer countries where the doctrine is more likely to be followed, I respect the right of the Church to preach its version of the Truth. But when an institution engages in commercial and secular activities, its mere affiliation with the Catholic church, or any other religious group, does not give it the right to exemptions from laws and regulations that apply to everyone else. Nor does a religious affiliation entitle a hospital or university from depriving its employees of their rights under the law as citizens.

A religious body that does not like a public policy that affects its members is free to advocate and work to change such policies. But it cannot claim a special exemption from the law. In the case of Catholics and contraception, how principled is the opposition? I cannot help but think a large part of what is going on is political spin and a loss of perspective. Yes, the Catholic Church officially teaches that contraception is a sin, but 98% of American Catholics have at one time or another violated that teaching. So, is it really a matter of conscience? Would these same voices support the right of a school run by Christian Scientists to deprive its teachers and janitors of a health care plan because they do not believe in medications, surgery, or medical intervention, and instead believe only in prayer as a way to heal? If a church is opposed to blood transfusions, are they entitled to remove this procedure from its university health plans for the employees who clean the labs and mow the campus lawn? If we were talking about a sincere religious prescription against antibiotics instead of contraception, would the same people arguing over the Affordable Care Act be coming to the defense of these religious institutions? I think not.

The Catholic Church does a lot of great work in this country, and throughout the world, in providing social services, health care, and aid to the poor, all consistent with its view of the Gospels, to care for all of God’s children. I disagree with the Catholic Church’s rigid position on abortion, but I have always respected its pro-life consistency in opposing abortion and capital punishment alike and advocating economic justice for children and the poor; they don’t abandon the children after they are born, but advocate for governmental aid for poor children, and work to assist poor families through the many good works of Catholic Charities and other church-based organizations. Complying with the Affordable Care Act and the HHS regulation, which as modified by the President later this week is endorsed by the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities, violates no one’s religious freedom.

Irrespective of the religious freedom issue, underlying much of the opposition from the right is a deep-seated hostility to the concept of birth control as preventive health care, as well as a belief that the government simply has no business in ensuring that American citizens have a right to basic health care services. Is contraception a legitimate health care issue? What business does the government have in making contraception affordable and accessible?

There are many compelling reasons why contraceptive services are properly included under the definition of preventive care, and it is, frankly, a shame and a disgrace that the Catholic Church, the Republican presidential candidates, and many Evangelical Christians who, while not agreeing with the Catholic Church on birth control, nevertheless see an opportunity to accuse Obama of being anti-religion, fail to acknowledge the positive impact contraception has had on the health of women. It is a matter supported by countless studies and painstaking research. For example, according to a January 2011 report submitted by the Guttmacher Institute to the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, contraception is a crucial component of preventive health services for women, helping to avoid unintended pregnancies, reduce abortions, improve birth spacing, and increase the overall health of women and children. A national study in 2006, for example, found that nine million clients receiving publicly funded contraceptive services resulted in 1.94 million fewer unintended pregnancies and 810,000 fewer abortions. A 2007 study in California showed that publicly funded family planning services resulted in 287,000 fewer unintended pregnancies, including 79,000 to teenagers, and 118,200 fewer abortions.

The positive health benefits of contraceptive services extend well beyond merely preventing unintended pregnancies. Short birth intervals between pregnancies, which occur when contraception is not easily accessible or affordable, often lead to lower birth weights, preterm births, and small size for gestational age. Women who become pregnant without planning are less likely to recognize a pregnancy within the first six weeks or so, resulting in fewer prenatal care visits to doctors and more damaging behavior (alcohol and tobacco consumption, poor nutrition) during the early stages of pregnancy. Oral contraceptives have been shown to help women reduce the risk of developing endometrial and ovarian cancer and to provide short-term protection against colorectal cancer. Condom use among males prevents sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, and may also reduce the risk of cervical cancer for women.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the development of and improved access to contraception are among the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century, along with the development of smallpox and polio vaccines and public health campaigns to reduce tobacco use. Access to contraception has “contributed to the better health of infants, children, and women, and have improved the social and economic role of women.” Indeed, the use and coverage of contraceptive services as part of preventive health care services has been recommended by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.

Then why the need to provide contraception coverage free of costly co-pays? Because the costs associated with contraceptive use, while minimal for more affluent members of society, can be considerable for those of lesser means. Average costs for contraception, particularly women using the pill, and other devices, can exceed $100 a month. A 2010 study found that the out-of-pocket expenditures for a full year’s worth of birth control pills amounted to 29% of the average woman’s annual out-of-pocket expenditures for all health services.

Moreover, when it comes to reducing the overall costs to society of health care expenditures, contraceptive services are extremely cost effective. According to the Guttmacher Institute, every dollar invested by the government for contraception saves $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures for pregnancy-related care related to births from unintended pregnancies. This is a huge savings. In 2008 alone, the services provided at publicly funded family planning clinics saved over $5 billion in health care expenditures. Savings to health insurance companies and employer provided health insurance plans are equally dramatic.

None of this, of course, matters to those on the right who oppose the President on every action he takes, every policy he pronounces. When they see an opportunity to claim that “Obama is out to get your momma,” then by God, they are going to play that card. After the outcry from the Roman Catholic bishops and others, including Democratic allies in the Catholic community, the President revised the rule on birth control coverage so that religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities could shift the cost of contraception coverage to their insurance companies. Some on the left have criticized the President for caving to tyrannical bishops and right-wing zealots; many on the right are just as unhappy with the compromise as with the original regulation. So be it. Unlike his political opponents, Obama has proven once again that he is serious about governing, not political pandering; that he is willing to accommodate the concerns expressed by Catholic institutions while assuring universal access to contraceptive services.

There is no war on religion. The First Amendment remains an enduring and essential element of our constitutional democracy. The Catholic Church can continue to preach against contraception and its hospitals and universities will not be forced to provide contraception services. But the people who work for those institutions, and all other Americans, are entitled to an essential component of health care reform that is good for women’s health, reduces unintended pregnancies and abortions, and enhances the lives and health of millions of Americans. The only remaining question for conservatives is to what are you really opposed? Any principled “religious freedom” argument is gone. So, is it contraception you oppose? Affordable contraception? Access to affordable contraception? Expanded access to preventive health care services for all Americans? The rights of women? Or are you just cynically and politically motivated to oppose the President’s every move? What kind of religion is that?

Why Poetry Matters

The world is too much with us: late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.

--William Wordsworth (“The World Is Too Much With Us”)

I have never been good at small talk. I sometimes experience physical pain at cocktail parties and so-called “networking” events, as I try to feign interest in what some self-important person has to say about yawn-inducing stuff that is destined not to matter or be remembered. I tend to talk very little at these events and try to leave early. When I am lucky, I find a kindred spirit, someone who shares my disdain for triviality, who believes that life is too short to ignore that which makes life worth living; someone who shares my passion for the world of ideas and would rather discuss religion and philosophy, history and politics, or something really important, like baseball. It is a rare moment, it seems, when serious conversations occur, when we genuinely reflect with each other on ideas and notions that touch the human spirit, or endeavor to address the world’s problems. “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” This inspirational statement, urged by the character of John Keating in Dead Poets Society, is why I write these essays. I do not always have the answers and sometimes have the wrong ones, but at least I ask the questions. It is my attempt, however feeble, to develop deeper insight into the diversity of life.

I do not suggest that we must always be serious. God only knows that we need a little more light-hearted humor in this world. Laughter, especially the gut-wrenching, roll-over-and-fall-down variety, is an essential human emotion that makes us feel alive. Sometimes we need a little more Rodney Dangerfield and a little less quantum physics. (Rodney Dangerfield grabs his necktie and jerks his head, his eyeballs popping out of his face. I don’t get no respect, no respect at all. The other day I went to see my psychiatrist and he told me I was crazy. I said, "I want a second opinion." He said, “You’re ugly, too!”). But, as Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be. . . . It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility. . . . Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

Let’s face it, being human is a difficult and complex endeavor. We do what we must to earn a living, take care of our families, and meet our financial obligations. But we often forget or ignore the things that should demand more of our time and attention. When we engage with the beauty of our surroundings, explore the miracles of science and nature, and open our minds to great works of art, we more meaningfully connect with our humanity. It is why I so like baseball which, for me, like good drama and great literature, captures the emotions and passions of my youth.

It is easy to ignore the majesty of the world around us, to become caught up in our day-to-day struggle to master an ever more competitive world, the demands of work and the pressures of life. The world has a way of beating us down that, over time, causes us to appreciate less the intricacies of life and the wonders of nature; the red-wing blackbirds nesting in the oak tree bordering the fence in my backyard, or the playfulness of the squirrels climbing and jumping from tree-to-tree in search of food. It is not our ability to sell a new product or land a new contract that makes our lives meaningful. Instead, science and theology, poetry and the study of history, art and music, genuine human interaction, these are the ways we share in the great human quest for truth and understanding.

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,” Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Physicist and astronomer Adam Frank, who writes for National Public Radio’s Cosmos and Culture, asks, “When that eventual moment comes and we prepare to slough off this mortal coil, will we be able to look at our years on the planet and feel that we created real meaning for ourselves and those around us?” Frank suggests that being aware of the wonders of the universe, to the mysteries of science and the beauty of the natural world, are what help us to feel alive:

[T]he process of trying to honestly enter into a dialogue with the world establishes a context for my own life that sometimes allows me to rise above the petty day-to-day squabbles of broken washing machines and general knuckle-headedness. By entering into that dialogue with great effort and earnestness, the world ceases to be something merely “at hand,” something merely there for distraction or entertainment.

Instead, it’s fully alive and present. The ever-opening sky, the wheeling stars and even the nightly stream of crows I watch heading to their evening roosts all become poignant mysteries that speak of greater powers than I will ever fully understand.

Like many professional people of my generation, my work and career are important to me. It is, after all, how I spend the majority of my waking hours. But as the years progress, I am less tolerant of competitive, ambitious, get-out-of-my-way people, interested only in self-aggrandizement, the size of their bonus, and landing the next big contract. I have observed clients, former classmates and colleagues work 70 to 80 hours a week for companies and firms that produce nothing of value. Sales targets, quotas, revenue origination, become the measured worth of the individual. The world of ideas, of passion and poetry, is something for which many have little time or interest.

“Being human is never easy,” writes Umair Haque, a refreshingly innovative thinker who authors a blog for the Harvard Business Review. “Perhaps as an unintended consequence of our relentless quest for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now, we’ve comfortably acceded to something akin to a minor-league contempt for the richness and grandeur of life unquenchably meaningfully well lived.” Technological advancements have made the U.S. workforce 25 times more productive than it was 100 years ago. And yet, more and more jobs are moved offshore as companies hoard record profits; in the process, we seem to have produced a shortage of, in Haque’s words, “living, breathing, well-rounded humans; with a moral compass, an ethical core, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and a long view born of historicism. What we’ve got plenty of are wannabe-bankers whose idea of a good life goes about as far as grabbing for the nearest, biggest bonus – what we’ve got less of are well-rounded people with the courage, wisdom, and capacities to nurture and sustain a society, polity, and economy that blossom.” We need more people who can master the art of “nuance, subtlety, humility, and grace.”

Perhaps we need more poetry and less measuring sticks, more reflection and less cold, calculating reaction. Our politics have become mean-spirited, lie-induced, nightly responses to an increasing alienation infecting the populace. Our businesses and corporations have become impersonal, button-pushing, computer voice-overs that sacrifice human beings to save three cents on the dollar or to earn an extra 0.5% return on investment. Poetry, like literature, art, and music, provides “a language adequate to our experience,” explains poet and writer Jay Parini, author of Why Poetry Matters (Yale University Press, 2009). “It teaches us how to live our lives, how to locate and describe the inner life. . . . enhances our sense of the spiritual world by attaching us closely—almost physically—to the material world. . . . [and] refreshes our lives by refreshing our sense of language, making reality visible in unique ways.” Without poetry, Langston Hughes may never have written, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Poetry helps us to clarify and make sense of things, to see things in a more perfect light. Hopkins described poetry as “common language heightened,” for it refines the language of ordinary life. To ignore the power of poetry is to be indifferent to all of the things that make life worthwhile. “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history,” said Aristotle, “for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

I realize that poetry doesn’t matter to most people. Admittedly, I am neither a poet nor a student of poetry. But I understand its importance, even if I don’t practice its art. Perhaps if we paid closer attention to the poets, we would have less tolerance for war, torture, and human depravity. “To have good sense,” wrote Horace, “is the first principle of writing well.” When I see my youngest daughter write poetry as a means of making sense of a chaotic world, and of expressing herself in ways and on topics she otherwise refrains from discussing, I see firsthand its power to transform. Poets, like writers of great literature and composers of powerful and emotionally compelling music, give us context, language and meaning. Poetry has the power to open minds and alter lives. In a world without poetry, we would cease to be fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords.

Ultimately, poetry, like science, theology, art, and philosophy, is a quest for understanding, a striving for excellence. By reaching for a higher plane and challenging our assumptions, we remain attentive and awake to the everyday miracle of our existence. “Let us remember,” said Christian Wiman of Poetry magazine, “that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”

Caught in the Middle: Women's Rights and Coming of Age in the Seventies

Men weren’t really the enemy, they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill. – Betty Friedan.

I was born in 1959, when Eisenhower was President and men wore business suits to baseball games. The civil rights movement was still in its infancy, Americans had yet to conquer the moon and Vietnam was a distant, far-off country that few people had heard of. The Cold War was in full bloom, the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered like a dark cloud above, and men ruled the world.

John Kennedy was elected President in 1960, in the Age of Camelot. With a young, handsome President and his glamorous wife on the cover of Life magazine, America was filled with optimism and youthful energy. Sophisticated and regal, Kennedy was, like his predecessors, surrounded almost entirely by men, the Best and the Brightest they would later be called, men who had been educated at Harvard and Yale, Andover and Choate, who promised to “pay any price [and] bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” They possessed an upbeat, optimistic view of the world and of America’s place in it. Although it all ended a few years later at the hands of a lone assassin, it remained a man’s world.

Kennedy’s men, and later Johnson’s and Nixon’s men, would embroil us in a difficult, messy, unjust war and struggle to make sense of changing times, but as a young boy growing up in suburban New Jersey, it seemed perfectly natural that men made the decisions and held positions of power and influence. Virtually all of my role models, the persons I wished to emulate, whether politicians, ballplayers, musicians, or actors, were men.

For the first decade or so of my life, American society had clearly defined roles for the sexes, or so it seemed. Boys were expected to pursue careers in law and medicine, run our companies, make our laws and, when necessary, fight our wars. Girls were expected to get married, have children, and provide emotional support for their families. It was almost that simple. Men were CEOs, Senators and Presidents, doctors, scientists and lawyers. We ran the corporations, the banks, the universities, and the government. Women labored in service-oriented and subservient positions, as nurses, teachers, librarians, and secretaries. The status of women, as explained in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971), was “the result of a slowly formed, deeply entrenched, extraordinarily pervasive cultural (and therefore political) decision that . . . woman shall remain a person defined not by the struggling development of her brain or her will or her spirit, but rather by her childbearing properties and her status as companion to men who make, and do, and rule the earth.”

By the time I entered high school in 1974, the Supreme Court had ruled for 100 years that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to women, who only a half century before had earned the right to vote. Indeed, women were confined to second-class citizenship in most aspects of law and economic life. And while a growing percentage of young women attended college, it was a common refrain even in the mid-1970’s said only partially in jest, that most girls went to college for their “MRS” degrees.

I grew up when Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best filled the screens of American televisions, part of a powerful socialization process reinforced by churches and schools, textbooks and the mass media. Before the advent of Title IX, society encouraged boys to play sports and girls to be spectators and cheerleaders. We were bombarded from infancy with portrayals of stereotypical sex roles, with advertising images of women as housekeepers and mothers, happily folding the laundry and cooking dinner in service to husbands attending to more pressing matters.

And then everything changed.

In 1963, Betty Friedan, a suburban housewife who supplemented her husband’s income by writing freelance articles for women’s magazines, published The Feminine Mystique. Several years earlier, Friedan had surveyed her Smith College classmates at their 15-year reunion and found that this highly educated and talented group of women, mostly housewives in their mid-30’s, were deeply dissatisfied with the state of their lives. From these and other interviews, and drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, Friedan wrote what would become one of the most influential books of the 20th Century. The Feminine Mystique described Friedan’s insights into the soul-draining frustrations of educated, stay-at-home women in the 1950’s. She called it “the problem that has no name”:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”

The Feminine Mystique shocked middle class America and became an instant bestseller. It exposed the myth of the happy housewife, an ideal promoted by television, Hollywood, and mass advertising, and helped transform the expectations and roles of American women virtually overnight. With Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and others leading the way, the women’s rights movement pushed for equal pay for equal work, gender-neutral help-wanted ads, maternity leave, child-care centers for working parents, legalized abortion, safe and accessible birth control, laws prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace, and other issues often deemed radical by the standards of the early 1960’s.

I witnessed first-hand the growing consciousness and political empowerment of women in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. However little I may have paid attention to these issues in my younger years, intellectually and rationally, I understood exactly what women were demanding and why, for I wanted the same opportunities for myself. Black Americans and other minorities were properly demanding equal rights in all spheres of American life, so it was only appropriate that women would want these same things. The women I went to school with were just as bright and hardworking as me, so why should they not also be entitled to the same opportunities?

There were times, of course, when I reverted back to socialized sexism, when my competitive instincts and male role models did not easily reconcile to an imagined society in which the sexes were completely equal. I wanted to be respected and admired as a man of importance. I wanted to accomplish big things and be looked upon as someone special. Like any red-blooded American male, I wanted to slay the dragons and be greeted by admiring females. I wanted the women in my life to look at me with pride and affection as I battled the forces of evil and saved the world from destruction. I wanted to be Superman carrying Lois Lane to safety.

But then the rules changed. All of a sudden, women my own age and education level wanted a chance to slay their own dragons and hunt their own prey. They wanted to be Superwoman and didn’t need no stinking Superman. Men were no longer entitled to instant respect. We now had to compete not only with each other, but with women as well.

Had you asked me in high school if I was a feminist, I may have answered, “Sure, I dig chicks.” But I’m a fast learner. By the time I graduated college and entered law school, where I studied alongside lots of really smart, ambitious women who made up nearly half of my law school class, I genuinely embraced and acknowledged the merits of true women’s equality. My female classmates wanted the same opportunities as my male classmates – an interesting and satisfying career. And just like the men, the women saw no reason why they couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to combine a good career with a family.

Of course, American society was divided on the merits of a woman trying to do too much. “What about the children?” was a common refrain. Some contended it selfish and foolhardy for a woman to think she could do what needed to be done to advance in a pressure-filled, demanding legal career and still have time to raise a family. Men were not, were never, in my experience, asked these same questions. And yet, since the industrial revolution, a large percentage of men had failed miserably in mixing ambition with fatherhood. My female classmates understood this, which is why they wanted husbands who bore a greater share of responsibility for child rearing and house chores, who understood instinctively that an even distribution of responsibilities was only fair and just.

In all of my professional life since, I have worked for and beside many bright, talented women. It has always seemed quite natural, as if a continuation of college and law school, when women coexisted as equal partners in education. I have watched many of my female colleagues negotiate the constant struggle of balancing the demands of children with the desire to excel in their careers. When I first joined a large law firm in Washington, D.C., in 1986, a strong push was then being made for fair-minded and liberal family leave policies. It was debated regularly in offices and conference rooms of law firms and corporations, as employers sought to find ways to attract and retain highly qualified women professionals, and to provide the appearance of a family-friendly work environment. But inevitably, stories rolled-in about those who actually took advantage of these policies, who took time off to spend with their newborn infants and paid a price in stifled advancement and delayed career gratification. It could be no other way, really, the economic realities what they are in corporate America. There was still a long way to go.

Many of my friends and spouses, often two career couples, found the demands of toddlers and child care to be equally draining. The frustrations expressed by 1950’s housewives and Betty Friedan’s Smith College classmates were replaced by the frustrations of women (and some men) who, wishing to have it all, found that it was not so easy, that choices and sacrifices inevitably had to be made. Although the opportunities available to women have greatly expanded since The Feminine Mystique was first published, many women discovered that happiness can be elusive, whether pursuing a rewarding career or choosing the undervalued and underappreciated role of housewife and mother, or something in between.

Twenty-six years later, I wonder how many of my classmates have been disappointed with their careers and choices. How many underestimated the deep-seated socialization process that embedded traditional notions of home life in men, even those who seemed to be more progressive minded than most? How many had hoped that corporate America would more quickly adapt family friendly work environments?

The world is today more complex, if not necessarily more advanced. Advertisers and women’s magazines continue to portray the ideal Superwoman as super-thin and sexy, as someone who can wear a size 4 dress and flaunt a Barbie-doll figure while negotiating a merger and spying on the Russians. Pick up any issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and you will see nothing but photographs and articles on fashion, sex, make-up, weight loss, and tips on how to please a man. Meanwhile, American women and girls continue to face a body image crisis, with constant attacks on women’s self-esteem and self-worth. Women today are supposed to want it all, and when life comes up a bit short, when their careers or family lives, or both, do not match the glamorous images of the mainstream media, a crisis of confidence creeps into the mindset of many professional women. Women are now expected to have a career, many by necessity require financial independence, and yet they continue to bear the lion’s share of child rearing and housekeeping responsibilities.

In many ways, the advances made by women in the professions have been both a curse and a blessing to them. Despite the ever present glass ceiling, some women have successfully competed with men for the highest positions in business, law, medicine, and government. Those willing to sacrifice a rich family life, or cherished time with children – the same sacrifices ambitious men have been making for a century – can advance to positions of power and influence. And yet, for many women, a lingering dissatisfaction remains, the reality that merely emulating the life of a high-charging, career-driven man comes with many spiritual and emotional sacrifices, which even for a growing proportion of men, is not worth the cost of lost time with children and families.

Although I have occasionally looked with envy on the societal privileges (white) men enjoyed prior to the sexual revolution and The Feminine Mystique, I am today a better person, a better father, and a better co-worker because of the women’s rights movement. American society has made strides in the right direction. The big law firms, prestigious universities, and some major corporations today offer extended family leave plans, in-house child care options, and flexible work schedules. For my two daughters, I very much desire a world that provides women with the same opportunities and career options as men, that treats men and women with an equal degree of respect, and which allows everyone to pursue their dreams in ways that best fit their talents and skills. But I also hope that my daughters, and all young men and women, recognize that ambition has consequences, and that the dreamed-of career may not alone provide a fulfilling life; that it is important to explore what it means to live fully and passionately, with a sense of purpose and humility, authenticity and simplicity, and to drop preconceived ideas of who and what we are. "Our lives are a mixture of different roles,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . . . For me, that balance is family, work, and service."

The women’s movement will have succeeded if, as a society, we steadily seek a more compassionate and humane world that permits women and men to balance their lives in ways that are good for everyone; that allows us to enrich our spiritual and creative lives, to see the potential in ourselves and in others. For as Greta Crosby advised, “If I could give you one key, and one key only, to a more abundant life, I would give you a sense of your own worth, an unshakeable sense of your own dignity as one grounded in the source of the cosmic dance, as one who plays a unique part in the unfolding of the story of the world.”

Forgotten People: The Nameless, Ignored Victims of War

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm purse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. --Mark Twain

As I watch the nightly news, I am struck by the lack of moral inquiry and heartfelt concern over the consequences of America’s state of permanent war. Too often we are content to divide the world into good and evil, black and white. It is less taxing that way, for complexity and nuance require thought and judgment. Perhaps we have too much on our minds, a weak economy, the Republican primary circus, the next set of contestants on Dancing with the Stars, to expect us to think deeply and sincerely about the human consequences of America’s involvements in foreign wars, past and present.

For all of our news and noise, talking heads and 24/7 updates, we rarely examine the humanity of those we kill. We call them insurgents or terrorists, enemy combatants or collateral damage. To us, they are always the "Other," for which we display a frightening lack of concern. We keep precise track of U.S. forces killed and wounded in action, but spend very little time counting, much less contemplating, who and in what numbers we kill. Perhaps it must be this way, for if we really considered the actual consequences of our killing, we might become soft and compassionate, or worse, begin to question the necessity and legitimacy of war. For when “war is looked upon as wicked,” noted Oscar Wilde, “it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”

How many innocent civilians did we kill during the War in Iraq? How many children have American bombs, guns, and drone missiles killed or maimed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen? To merely ask such questions in the wrong company may render one rude and impertinent, even disloyal and unpatriotic, as if the sacrifices of American soldiers are devalued by a search for truth and transparency. As free and open a society as we pride ourselves of having, on some topics, genuine intellectual inquiry is subversive. At the very least, it makes those in privileged and powerful positions deeply uncomfortable.

We have become immune to killing, it seems, having delegated it to a professional military class, unmanned drones, and aerial bombing campaigns which allow us to inflict maximum damage at minimal loss, as if we are putting together a financial statement for a public corporation. The power of modern weaponry allows us to keep our hands clean as military technicians “target” our enemies with a high degree of precision. We consider ourselves ethical, because we intentionally try to minimize “collateral damage” and avoid, whenever possible, unnecessary deaths, errant bombs, and the killing of innocents. But we are told by those in power that war is a dirty business that is by nature imprecise. We must balance the dangers to our country and our troops against the risks of killing some people we have no quarrel with – innocent children, women, the elderly, and the fathers, brothers, and sons who have not taken up arms against us. We must accept that innocent people will get killed, or so we are told, in part because the enemy is adept at hiding and commingling among the civilians, who themselves are often unwitting accomplices. Collateral damage is thus unavoidable.

There are some things we rarely talk about as a nation. Our media outlets either do not care to discuss them, or are afraid to make waves. Corporate dollars are at stake, after all, and the media plays a large role in sustaining the military industrial complex and in exploiting the entertainment value of war. During the early days of the Iraq War, live television reports gave us a glimpse of the thrill of war and provided us with a sense of national purpose. But in these and other telecasts, we are protected from the bullets and shrapnel, the bombs and after-effects, the tank and artillery rounds. We are not shown the blood and ripped apart body fragments, exploding skulls, or the stench of death. As noted by journalist and former Harvard seminarian Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010), “The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear.”

The myth makers in Hollywood and the media have become war’s accomplices, romanticizing the true effects of war. “If we really saw war,” writes Hedges, “what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences.”

The disparity between what we are told about war and what truly occurs on the battlefields is vast. It seems to me that most Americans do not pay attention. Many of our veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, grateful to be home with friends and family, are quickly taken aback at the gulf that exists between their military and civilian lives. The rate of suicide for returning vets is at an all-time high, with an epidemic of diagnosed cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. We train our soldiers to be efficient killers, to defend one nation by annihilating the "Other." But is it possible that, when we teach our soldiers to dehumanize the enemy, we corrupt their souls and destroy all that is beautiful and sacred about life? Is this not another tragic, yet ignored, consequence of war?

We care about our returning veterans, or at least I hope we do, but we have remained remarkably acquiescent and apathetic as a nation about the reasons, the causes, the consequences, and the effects of our military excursions. The churches are particularly disappointing. A Gallup poll in 2006 found that the more frequently an American attends church, the more likely he or she was to have supported the Iraq War. It reflects a remarkable failure of the institutional church to provide true moral guidance to its flock. As we enter the eleventh year of the War in Afghanistan, the institutional church remains strangely quiet. After all, Jesus was a pacifist and the core Christian principles of love and forgiveness are radically opposed to war and violence. Walk into most churches on Sunday morning, though, and you would hardly know it.

Meanwhile, the victims of our bombs and guns remain faceless and nameless. The destruction and violence committed in the name of American liberty remains unseen.

Take for example our growing use of drone missiles in places like Pakistan and Yemen, countries with which we are not officially at war. Shrouded in secrecy and lacking accountability, decisions of who to target are made by CIA officials in Langley, Virginia, often with direct input from the Pakistani military, a price we pay for Pakistan’s consent to allow us to kill within its borders. Despite Executive Orders barring the CIA from engaging in assassinations dating back to the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, and despite several key principles of international law, there has been almost no debate in this country over the use of drones in non-combat regions. The use of drone technology, of course, is very tempting, for it eliminates immediate risk to American forces while enhancing the precision to which they strike their intended targets. But does not their use in certain circumstances raise many troubling ethical concerns? When real life killing becomes strikingly similar to a video game -- the controls operated remotely in places like Nevada and California -- and when killing is perceived as “costless,” war becomes seductive. Should it not be at least a matter of moral deliberation and debate in a democracy?

In 2009, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker interviewed a former CIA officer who had witnessed live drone strikes while serving in Afghanistan. He described what it was like to watch from a small monitor in the field: “You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff.” It had become such a common sight to see human beings running for cover that a slang term was developed for the ant-like humans on the video screen: “squirters.”

If we killed only the bad guys, and we could be certain they were the right bad guys, and even more certain that the effects would not, in the long-run, be counter-productive, perhaps there would less need for moral angst over our actions abroad. But according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the United Kingdom, our first 309 drone strikes (257 of which have occurred under President Obama) have killed 175 children and up to 780 civilians. For family members of the innocent victims, it is small consolation that America means well. After all, we only wish to kill terrorists, those who would harm us. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,” asked Gandhi, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?” What we fail to consider is that, for every drone missile we fire into a distant landscape in Pakistan, every bomb we drop on a mountain village in Afghanistan, we create another “ground zero” for the people who live there.

According to the Iraq Body Count (IBC), which provides the most verifiable (and conservative) documentary record of civilian deaths resulting from the War in Iraq, over 114,000 innocent civilians died in Iraq during the eight years we engaged in that war. This figure is only of innocent civilians, and does not include the deaths of insurgents, armed combatants, the former forces of Saddam Hussein, or any other non-civilian Iraqi. U.S. led coalition forces were directly responsible for 14,704 of these civilian deaths, according to the IBC, nearly 30% of which were children. The actual figures are almost certainly higher, as additional deaths not counted in the IBC have been established in data released to WikiLeaks. We know as well that thousands of Afghan children have died during the war in Afghanistan, more than half of their deaths caused by U.S. and NATO forces. But whatever the total numbers, “before you support war,” says Chris Hedges, “especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women, and children who know it.”

Are we killing terrorists or creating them? I am not sure anyone really knows the answer to that question. But the moral and human consequences of our actions as a nation are too important to stand idly by without asking questions and demanding answers. For in the words of John F. Kennedy, “War will exist, until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

The Role of Faith in the Public Square

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one. – Thomas Jefferson

On September 12, 1960, then Senator John F. Kennedy, hoping to dispel concerns over the role his Catholic faith would play in the event he became President of the United States, gave a speech on the role of religion in public life before a group of protestant ministers in Houston, Texas. “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Kennedy said. “Whatever issue may come before me as president – on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject – I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”

Although he did not say how his moral conscience or personal ethics may have been shaped or molded by Catholicism, Kennedy assured his audience, and ultimately the American public, that his personal religious beliefs, whatever they might be, would not play a role in fulfilling his duties as president. In his official actions, on issues as wide ranging as the economy and foreign affairs, from policies addressing poverty at home and economic aid abroad, to prayer in school and matters of war and peace, President Kennedy would not be influenced by his religious convictions.

Kennedy’s view on the public neutrality of government in matters of faith has been the standard liberal position for most of my lifetime; whatever a candidate or elected government official may believe or not on matters of faith should have no role in how the nation is governed. It is a uniquely American belief, embedded in the nation’s founding and reflected in our Constitution. The separation of church and state as set forth in the First Amendment is as essential to American notions of freedom as any constitutional doctrine upon which our democracy is based.

For Thomas Jefferson and many of our Founding Fathers, the ideals of religious freedom were more important than one’s specific religion. In Jefferson’s time, and for the next 150 years or so when the religion of most Presidents deviated little from mainstream Protestantism and religion was not used as a wedge issue in presidential politics, it was easy to maintain a principled and neutral view regarding a candidate’s faith. For me personally, and for most liberals (and many others), the principle that religious faith is a private matter, which should have no bearing on a candidate’s public responsibilities, has always been accepted wisdom.

Kennedy’s presidency put to rest the unfounded fears concerning a Catholic president. Not until Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 did a candidate’s religious beliefs again become a matter of some notoriety. Indeed, Carter’s brand of born-again Christianity made certain segments of the Democratic Party uncomfortable, particularly the secular left and many Jews, 40% of whom broke from their historically Democratic leanings to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Although I believe that this was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding of Carter’s faith -- which emphasizes a concern for all of God’s people and is what motivates his passion for human rights -- and a failure to distinguish Carter’s brand of Christianity from the more conservative elements that dominate evangelical Christianity today, it was also a reflection of America’s ambivalence toward expressions of religion in public life.

Ironically, it was Reagan’s presidency and the ascendancy of right-wing conservatism in the 1980’s that introduced a more aggressive form of politically inspired religion into the public arena. It was during this era when we witnessed the rise of the Moral Majority and the prominence of televangelists such as Pat Robertson, who advocated a conservative political agenda and founded the Christian Coalition and other socially conservative “Christian” groups that advocated a reversal of Roe v. Wade and the outlawing of abortion, pushed for a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to between a man and a woman, and called for the re-establishment of prayer in the public schools and public displays of religious symbolism.

As someone who was raised in a mainline protestant denomination, one which engages in public advocacy in a manner more respectful of America’s diverse religious and ethnic makeup, I am continually perplexed that conservative, often fundamentalist, Christians so dominate our public discourse. That the media makes little effort to point out the many misconceptions these self-proclaimed Christians have concerning their own religion and their lack of respect for the religious diversity and pluralistic traditions of American democracy, only adds to my frustration.

But while religious conservatives tend to dominate discussions of morality in the public square (particularly on issues of personal morality, to the exclusion of issues like economic justice and peace), liberals too often fail to understand the significance of religion in public life and are often reluctant to openly connect religious and moral principles to the issues that most matter to them. On this, our current president is different.

On June 28, 2006, forty-six years after Kennedy’s speech in Houston, then Senator Barack Obama reflected on what he perceived to be the role of religion in public life and how his personal faith has guided his own values and beliefs. Unlike Kennedy, Obama argues for the relevance of religion to political argument, declaring it particularly apt for liberals and progressives. For Obama, it is a mistake for progressives to “abandon the field of religious discourse” in politics. “The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms.” Obama contends that religion is, historically and culturally, a source of political rhetoric that resonates with many Americans, who comparatively speaking are a religiously inspired and devout people. He recognizes that the solution to many policy issues, from social and economic problems to issues of war and peace, require consideration of the moral dimensions of those problems.

“Our fear of getting ‘preachy’ may . . . lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems,” Obama said. But to address problems like “poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed” often requires “changes in hearts and a change in minds.” Obama believes it a grave mistake to insist on a complete separation of religious conviction from public life, or to insist that moral and religious convictions are irrelevant to one’s views of politics and law.

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

As different as Obama’s and Kennedy’s statements are concerning the role of religion and public life, they actually concern two different notions. For Kennedy, it was important to emphasize that a President’s duty is to his country and the Constitution. He was attempting to counter the concerns then being expressed in some parts of the country to a Catholic president. Although some of this concern was simply anti-Catholic prejudice, there was at the time a sincere worry as to whether a Catholic president would be beholden to the Vatican and Catholic doctrine in the conduct of his public affairs. Similar concerns have been raised, and properly dismissed, of the potential influence the Mormon Church may hold on a candidate such as Mitt Romney. Indeed, Romney, who holds a position of importance in the Mormon Church and who proudly identifies as a Mormon, gave a speech in 2007 not dissimilar from Kennedy’s.

That Obama believes one’s religious convictions are relevant to politics and policymaking, however, does not mean he disagrees with Kennedy’s view of the official separation of churchly influence on public policy. What Obama contends is something altogether different – the notion that one cannot truly separate out the moral and religious influences on a candidate’s life and, ultimately, his or her policy positions. As I watch from afar the Republican presidential primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, I believe it is important to know something about what the candidates believe, religiously, morally, and spiritually, and how those beliefs may affect their actions should they become president. Personally, any candidate who believes that evolution and creationism are worthy of equal treatment in our public schools, or who doubts the scientific efficacy of climate change and its importance to our planet’s future, is not a candidate I can trust to have a reasonable conclusion about anything. If a candidate’s brand of Christianity is one of judgmental piety, or is based on a literalistic misinterpretation of the Bible, it is a candidate I cannot support.

Although I do not care what religion our past, present, and future presidents are (or are not), I do care what moral and religious influences motivate their positions on matters of policy. One’s religion (or lack thereof) is an important part of one’s worldview and should not be off limits for any candidate. President Kennedy’s youngest brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, who symbolized and articulated a consistent vision of political liberalism for over forty years after his brother’s death, noted late in life that his politics were very much influenced by his Christian beliefs, specifically in the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Matthew 25: 44-45 (Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you? [Jesus replied,] I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.) This religious underpinning of Christian social justice, which molded the likes of Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day, and which forms the basis of Catholic social statements on economic justice, is what motivated Senator Kennedy in his lifetime to work for laws and government programs that benefitted the poor and the working class, to fight for human rights around the world, and to oppose discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. It is this kind of morality, not one’s personal moral shortcomings, which are of greatest concern to me in how a candidate will govern a country as diverse and complex as the United States.

Of course, one need not be a Christian to share Kennedy’s political vision, or to believe in equality, justice, and the fundamental right of all Americans to have access to quality health care, adequate housing, and economic opportunity. There are certainly many other moral and ethical influences to his brand of liberalism and a belief in the common good. But whether one is motivated by Christian or Jewish or secular ethical principles, I believe it relevant and important to know what religious and moral influences underlie a candidate’s positions.

The separation of church and state is a fundamental aspect of American constitutional democracy, and must never be diluted. A free society depends on a proper distinction between theology and law, between the free exercise of religious belief and the imposition of religious doctrine. But the personal influences and beliefs of our political leaders is always a relevant consideration in deciding whether they can effectively lead the nation in times of turbulence and despair, and whether their vision of America is one I can abide.

Climbing the Verrazano

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss, but that it is too low and we reach it. – Michelangelo

For most of my life, I have been afraid of heights and small enclosed spaces with no windows. Last week, as part of a work related tour of bridges and tunnels in New York, I overcame both fears to stand on top of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. A beautiful and clear sunny day, the temperature a mild 51 degrees, I stood atop the Brooklyn side tower with my arms outstretched. As I breathed in the slightly chilled air above the New York Bay, I embraced the Manhattan skyline and enjoyed a bird’s eye view of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Life offers a fresh perspective from such heights. The world looks a little different from up there; it opens the mind and forces one to take stock of life. Standing atop the Verrazano, I understood the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle, who said, “The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.”

The opportunity to climb the Verrazano was presented to me by chance and without planning, as part of a security assessment my firm is conducting for a government agency. Accompanied by a police captain, a maintenance worker, and a colleague, we stuffed into a very small, very old Otis elevator, with rusty metal gates, the kind of elevator one normally avoids at all costs. When I asked if it ever broke down, the maintenance man replied in earnest, “Just don’t jump up and down.” It was at about this point that my palms began to sweat and my lungs contracted. I questioned my sanity. Feelings of panic set in as the elevator moved slowly, creakily, upward, ascending into an abyss of heightened darkness. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, imagining the rescue efforts required to excavate us from a metal box dangling 1,200 feet above the channel where the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic Ocean. I was fairly certain that my cell phone would not receive service from up here, though I was not anxious to test it.

After what seemed like several long minutes, the elevator came to a stop. Naively believing we had reached the top, I quickly realized after the metal gate opened that our ascent was only partially completed. We now had to step into another small, tightly-constricted enclosure and climb four stories of metal ladders affixed to the wall of the tower. Each ladder led through a small tank-like hole. As there were no open spaces or windows, I had no idea precisely where we were at this stage. I sensed only that we were very high off the ground with but one way down. After climbing the ladders and pulling myself up through the fourth hole, I was relieved to find open space expanding the full width of the tower. My claustrophobia slightly receding, I breathed easier as we walked up four normal flights of stairs before reaching yet another ladder and hole. We finally reached what I thought was as far as they would allow us to go, where I glanced through a small window and looked out onto Staten Island, the roadway and New York Bay a long distance below.

The police captain then unlatched a door that opened onto a small ledge with a metal railing. Stepping out onto the ledge, suspended high in the air, I experienced a sensation simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. While peering down the cables that held up the bridge, I became slightly faint and quickly remembered my fear of heights. I stood there anyway for a few moments longer, staring at the wide expanse of the horizon with the Manhattan skyline in the foreground, acknowledging the uniqueness of the experience.

Mistakenly thinking that our “climb” was completed, I was somewhat surprised when the captain led us to yet another ladder, this one thirty feet high and leading to another small hole through which, I was told, was the top of the bridge tower. Did I mention that I am scared of heights? My disdain for tall ladders? I thought good and hard about sitting this next phase out, but after witnessing the 55 year-old police captain and my colleague climb up the ladder, I did what any self-respecting, stupid, testosterone-filled man would do, and I said, “Fuck it.” So, up I went, refusing to look down and tightly gripping each prong of the ladder as if my life depended on it. To eliminate the concern over my sweaty palms, I had put on a pair of work gloves that the maintenance man had offered to me. Finally, I reached the top, climbed up and through the last hole and pulled myself to the platform. I stood straight up and looked all around, in wonderment.

The view of New York from atop the Verrazano is breathtaking. From there, one experiences a panoramic view of all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Coney Island, and Staten Island. I looked around and soaked it in, feeling fresh and alive. Although my knees were weak and I could hardly believe I was doing it, I savored every minute of the experience, recognizing the rarity of this once-in-a-lifetime moment of overpowering proportions.

* * * *

There are times in one’s life it is important to take stock, to examine how one’s journey is progressing. Standing on top of the Verrazano, I thought of the many things I desire to do before I die. Travel to Israel and pray at the Western Wall; tour the Vatican and stroll quietly through the many small towns and villages of the Italian countryside; visit with my distant relatives in Denmark; view the Northern Lights on a clear night in Iceland; go whale watching in Alaska; spend a night at a medieval castle in England; learn to play the guitar; walk atop the Great Wall of China; and hit live batting practice at a major league ballpark. Although climbing Mt. Everest is not (and never was) on my list, I can at least find satisfaction that I “climbed” the Verrazano.

With the possible exception of live batting practice, there is no reason I cannot eventually do all or most of these things during my remaining time on earth. But for most of my life, something has often stood in the way – obligations of school and work, the strictures of time and family, and the many other distractions and excuses that so often prevent us from ever achieving that which we most desire to accomplish. But perhaps there is more to it than that. As nice as these experiences will be, how essential are they to a good and meaningful life? How important a contribution do they really make to a life filled with purpose, connection, and fulfillment?

When I returned home last week, still flying high from my experience on the Verrazano and having just parked my car in the driveway, I received a call from my very good friend who was distressed over another friend’s sudden illness. I knew his friend, Jerry, as someone I had worked with many years before in Washington, D.C. A former college basketball player and, until about two weeks ago, a very active and healthy person, he woke up one day unable to walk, and he quickly lost his ability to stand, sit, or even talk. Suddenly bedridden and fed intravenously at the hospital, the doctors completely mystified as to the cause of his condition, he confronted the possibility that he may be paralyzed forever, that he may no longer be the man he had always been, and could not be the father, husband, and man he wanted to be. “All I could think about,” Jerry said a few days later, “was how am I going to live my life in this condition?” Thankfully, Jerry has since recovered most of his physical capacities, and he is now walking (with the assistance of a walker), and trying to rehab and regain his full strength. The doctors still do not know what caused his sudden demise, but I am in awe of the immense courage and strength Jerry demonstrated in refusing to give in or give up. For the rest of us, “There, but for the grace of God…”

A very wise person once stated, “The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.” Hearing of Jerry’s health problems and learning of the many tragedies and heartbreaks that people face every day, I regret not the failure to achieve certain of life’s goals, my bucket list of sorts, but in having failed to pursue a more perfect life, one full of love and laughter, passion and joy. One that constantly strives, in some small way, to assist others in finding the strength to imagine a life filled with inspiration and hope. I would like to believe it is what motivated me to start this blog and to publish my book, Eat Bananas and Follow Your Heart (Bookstand Publishing, 2011), to build a lasting legacy that will remain long after I have departed from this world. But I am never satisfied that I have done enough, because I know that I can always do more, that I am constantly constrained by the practicalities of life and the strictures of conventional thought.

“We all have two choices,” said Jim Rohn, “we can make a living or we can design a life.” When my friend told me of Jerry’s physical ailments, he confessed to his own spiritual crisis of sorts. The demands of his career, his long commute to New York, and his everyday obligations, left him with little else to give. “I’m existing, but I’m not living,” he said. It is a statement that strikes at the heart of the American conscience, a soul wrenching crisis that most of us, at some point in our lives, must confront. How often do we truly make a difference in someone’s life? What have we really done for others, for those less fortunate than ourselves, for the lonely, the sick, the poor? How many simple acts of random kindness have we initiated? Is it only when things are going well, when we are in a good mood that we do for others? How committed are we to our cherished principles and values? These are difficult questions to ask and even more difficult to answer.

“Everyone who got where he is,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “has had to begin where he was.” It is a comforting thought, for it explains a lot and lessens my own disappointments in not achieving greater things. When I think back from whence I came, I am often astonished at how far I have traveled – college and law school, a career as a trial lawyer and federal prosecutor, a managing director in a worldwide risk management firm, living and succeeding in two major metropolitan areas – not too bad for a small town kid from central New Jersey. And yet, I think back on the many things I probably could have accomplished, and the places I could have been, if only I had the courage and insight to follow my heart and pursue my dreams. “If we did the things we are capable of,” wrote Thomas Edison, “we would astound ourselves.”

Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.” As the year comes to a close and a new year embarks around the corner, I vow to examine my life more carefully, to better understand my sense of purpose, and to appreciate the everyday blessings that have been given to me, my health and my family. I vow to live and not simply exist. As Diane Ackerman wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”