As my spiritual directee described what she called “a meltdown” in talking with her husband, she sighed, “I just don’t care anymore.” Things were not going well at the parish where she is on staff. She was fatigued; her husband was not recovering well from an injury; sh

When he resorts to civil disobedience, his long body hugging the earth of a Palestinian olive orchard or a home slated for demolition, Rabbi Arik Ascherman sets loose upon the Holy Land the ghost of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like King, Ascherman lets the prophets’ hard-bitten calls f

Witnessing the slow death of a people

Each year I spend at least a few weeks in the deserts of the Southwest. My favorite places include the high desert canyons of northwest New Mexico, the Great Sonora Desert of Arizona, Death Valley, and the Big Bend area in Texas. Many of my friends in New York City cannot quite understand the attrac

The importance of solitude

A small but important collection of ingeniously designed yet simple-to-use devices from around the globe is currently on display at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution) in New York City, where it will be on view until Sept. 23. Organized outdoors in the lush