writing: book + selected pieces
The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life, Your Work and Your World (PenguinCompass) came out in 2002. You can find used copies floating around.
When Is Enough Medium March 2024. One of my favorite parts of Passover is the reminder of dayenu, enough. Meaning, that any one gift would have been enough. It’s such a beautiful and enlarging ritual, to keep naming and feeling the many elements that make freedom possible. Read more…
Fund Us Like You Want Us to Win: How White People Can Move Money Now to Resoure the Uprising Medium, June 2020. It’s June 2020 and we are living history. Continued police violence is resulting in more death of Black people, the uprising in our streets continues perhaps beyond our collective imagining and there is an opening for real systems change in our city budgets, institutional practices, social systems and more. We should make no mistake how we got here: decades of organizing and the wisdom of struggles for liberation led by Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Read more…
Life at An Appropriate Scale, or why I live 23 miles out to sea Medium, Oct 2015. When I first came to Ocracoke, North Carolina in the early 90s, I was working on a book and needed a place to make the final push. I’ve been coming back as a visitor and then to work part of the season here. Like so many, I am drawn back again and again by the endless stretch of ocean, the richness of island culture, and the pace. But there’s more. Read more…
The true miracle of Oscar Romero Open Democracy, June 2015. Our delegation gathered at 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning for a prayer circle in San Salvador. We had traveled from Latin, Central and North America, drawn by the life, death and message of Archbishop Óscar Romero. This group of 30 people had come with hundreds of thousands of others for Romero's beatification at the end of May 2015, the third step on the path to sainthood in the Catholic Church. Read more…
Rothko Chapel and the Practice of Non-Doing Huffington Post, March 2015. Eleven. That’s the number of minutes people spend on any given work task before being interrupted. This statistic comes to us via the new discipline of “interruption science;” we need such a thing because our lives have become an ever-accelerating moving walkway, carrying us from one thing toanother to the next. Read more…
Why we need radical love to create change Open Democracy, February 2014. The past few months, I’ve been living on an island with a population of 800. Many days I might only have one conversation, if you don’t count the ones with my dog. So it was quite a departure to find myself surrounded by 4,000 other LGBTQ people at Creating Change, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's annual conference, in Houston last weekend. Since coming out as queer at 45, I've been coming to understand what that means. “Queer” is a reclaimed word that aims to reject oppressive cultural formations of sex and gender identity. But to me it also means a new perspective on radical love. Read more…
Civil Society and Spirituality, excerpted from The Oxford Handbook on Civil Society, Michael Edwards, ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. While there are numerous impulses that inspire citizens to take collective action on the issues that concern them, spirituality may – paradoxically – be one of the most prevalent but least understood. Read more…
Spiritual Activism: From Confusion to Liberation The Reconstructionist, Vol 68, Fall 2003. I was an activist for a long time before I ever opened myself to the gifts of the spiritual realm. Raised
as a Reform Jew, I went to synagogue and Hebrew school largely out of obligation to my parents and because I figured that since I was always going to be Jewish, I might as well learn some- thing about it. Read more…