I suppose that there's a "niche" Mother's Day card for step-mothers, but instead I want to simply acknowledge that my, Carole my wife of 46 years, is a Mother, a Step-Mother to our daughter Valerie. I remember the first time... Continue reading

I write about the Serenity Prayer from time to time and still the idea nags at me, and there's one feature about the concept that I think we in recovery can get wrong, and sometimes do. The original version of the Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr as a sermon footnote, included the following words: "the courage to change the things that should be changed." Those words are not in the A.A. Serenity Prayer. I understand why it was modified to, "the courage to change the things that should be changed. In the A.A. prayer, written in the first person,... Continue reading

I write about the Serenity Prayer from time to time and still the idea nags at me, and there's one feature about the concept that I think we in recovery can get wrong, and sometimes do. The original version of... Continue reading

"Tiny, Bohemian" Bisbee, Civil Unions, our friends Councilor Gene Conners, Mayor Adrianna Badal, and brilliant artist Gretchen Baer all made Huffington Post today. What a difference gay marriage or civil unions have made for all of us. Continue reading

I once wanted to write a short story about a man who moved to a town like Bisbee and bought a blue house. In the story, the man didn't truly understand why he came to that town and bought such... Continue reading

A few days back we watched "My Darling Clementine," with Peter Fonda, Ward Bond, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, and others, a 1946 movie by John Ford, in black and white. This is a superb movie, so much better than "The... Continue reading

One of the best ways to understand the relationship we call praying is to understand the relationship the Bible calls ‘waiting for God.’ Waiting for God is a very important idea in the Bible, in both the Old and New... Continue reading

In 1958 and 1959, I was stationed in Korea, as part of the 321st Army Security Agency Battalion, located in Ouijeongbu, otherwise known as Camp Redcloud. I was a sergeant and I had attended the year long Army Language School in Monterey, California. Our job was to monitor low level intelligence from over the line, in North Korea, troop movements and the like. It was fairly boring, routine work. Korea in those days was still pretty wrecked from the war that had ended in a cease-fire, one that holds to this day. No treaty has ever been signed. One of... Continue reading

Speilberg's "Lincoln" is the best movie I've seen in years, and a wonderful lesson on democratic politics when it struggles to a powerful and consequential result. Far more than powerful cinema, it is film that captures a pivotal moment when the Civil War was coming to an end, a time when Lincoln and his allies pushed the House of Representatives to embrace the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, forever abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude. (The Senate had passed the proposed Constitutional Amendment the year before.) Daniel Day Lewis "inhabits" Lincoln as Geoffrey O'Brien argues in the New York Review of... Continue reading

From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic. Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and act. Here is still another way of looking at Carse's ideas. Those who do no accept the idea of God will find this puzzling or wrong. Those who believe that God is constantly speaking will also find it simply wrong. For me, Schubert Ogden, in his essay, "The Reality of God," in his book by the same name, offers another... Continue reading

From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic. Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and... Continue reading

I'm reading Henning Mankell again, this time his novel, The Troubled Man. The novel features Wallander, who tracks a former high navy officer who mysteriously disappeared, and his wife was found dead, and murder is suspected. The question is, was... Continue reading

Given that I last wrote about "serenity" and "acceptance" as' being in the world differently,' I thought I might provide the link to an earlier post recounting the rather astonishing connection between labor history in Bisbee, the famous Deportation Strike... Continue reading

You have read "The Alcohol Alibi," from Transaction Magazine, and in that short and early piece I summarized the per capita consumption of alcoholism. This was 1975 and people were really not ready to read that there was a link between per capita consumption of alcohol and alcohol addiction, and so forth. That sounded too much like Prohibition and public health is not about Prohibition, right? What is the per capita consumption thesis? It's very much the same idea expressed in Geoffrey Rose's "Sick Individuals versus Sick Societies." This article is reprinted in our reader, Public Health Ethics, edited by... Continue reading

The post originally appeared in 2009; I think it might be a good way for me to start again thinking about serenity and acceptance. What is serenity? We talked about this last night at a meeting. Most agreed that serenity,... Continue reading

Of all the experiences of my long life, nothing comes close to my two years of serving as an attendant, really a guard, at the Texas State Mental Hospital in Austin, from 1960 to 1962. After six months as an attendant in an older male ward filled with many patients suffering from end-stage syphilis, I was transferred first to the white maximum security ward and, after a year, to the black maximum security ward. These were still the days of segregation and the hospital wanted me on the security wards because I was 6'5" and a veteran. I was finishing... Continue reading

Read this scary article by Kevin Drum on the stumbling blocks to agreement on avoiding going over the fiscal cliff. Apparently, the GOP has dug in against raising taxes against the rich, the very rich and the super rich. Drum... Continue reading