As a child I used to believe in just wars, trusting my elders and being able to isolate evil people in the world. All part of my miseducation, I suppose. I’ve come a long way and now look back at this time as an odd dream. I think back in anger at all that was fed to me through school and elsewhere. This is not to say that I am... more...

This spring, I attended an interreligious peace conference in Pakistan. When I landed, I thought that Spring would bring fighting season soon, just a few hundred kilometers north.  The late March heat in Lahore and Islamabad thrust me back into the sights and sounds of Central Asia, the smell of korma, the wail of the Azan at prayer... more...

When I visited the Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle many summers ago, I was hit with a curtain of ice that cut down much of my hiking. I was short on food at this point: oatmeal, cliff bars, and a block of emergency rations meant for shipwrecked souls. Perhaps I was shipwrecked, philosophically speaking, but I managed to take in... more...

There is much talk about the veteran civilian divide. Indeed, there is plenty separating those from Sparta and those from Babylon—to butcher a pair of historical metaphors—but as a writer, I know there’s plenty they have in common, and one thing in particular: their reaction to writers, negative, as it were. And more... more...