Just hours before the death of 70-year-old Kim Jong Il was first reported in this country, Parade Magazine placed him at number one in a list of the world's ten worst dictators. The article, which said, "While Kim dines on lobsters with silver chop sticks, his people live in misery," is titled "Here Today, Here Tomorrow?"
I received strange glances and expressions of doubt when I said that I would be fasting for Ramadan this year. What business does a non-Muslim have in fasting for Ramadan? What is there to gain from depriving yourself of food and water during some of the hottest and longest days of the year? Why should I care?
Three decades after the famine in Ethiopia, very little has changed in Eastern Africa. Every year thousands of people die whenever drought hits the region. This year the number may reach millions. Have we learned nothing in 30 years? How can we pretend like everything is all right? Go to work, go to church, go to school? "Thank God I live in a civilized society."
It has taken me a while to sit down and write this entry. I feel as though words will only take away from the experience I have had, and yet, I feel that it is necessary to articulate this reality in some way. Today, as we journeyed through the city of Hebron, a large city in the southern West Bank, I not only felt as though I was continuing on my journey of profound emotional transformation. I also felt as though I had entered a deeply significant area – an axis mundi of world conflict, a dim-lit stage for human failure, a clogged Heart of the World.
I'll just be upfront about it: I'm not a science person. Like an awful lot of people, I was content to leave science to whoever was masochistic enough to subject themselves to memorizing formulas, the atomic numbers of the elements, and when each geological epoch happened. There was always a chasmic divide between the political and social issues that I found compelling and the impersonal questions about mass and velocity scientists seemed bent on asking and answering.
I'll just be upfront about it: I'm not a science person. Like an awful lot of people, I was content to leave science to whoever was masochistic enough to subject themselves to memorizing formulas, the atomic numbers of the elements, and when each geological epoch happened. There was always a chasmic divide between the political and social issues that I found compelling and the impersonal questions about mass and velocity scientists seemed bent on asking and answering.
is a member of the 
Official Music Sponsor: 
