Christian nationalists have invaded our current public conversation and weaponized the Christian faith. Their form of patriotism believes that America was founded as, and should therefore remain, a country built on their version of Christian values. They believe these values, and not the democratic vision enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, should shape our government. They would prefer a world more like the authoritarian governments of our fiercest adversaries than a messy, pluralistic democracy.

It took me until I was in my forties to stop worrying so much about the lesson in what I was reading and whether people thought I was smart. I opened my imagination to whatever new world the author laid out before me and set myself loose to wander with fresh eyes and ears, brand new senses of touch and smell. I started to experiment with questions like, What choice would I make if I were in this situation? What would I feel in these circumstances? What if I were this character and not who I am, a woman in her circumstances and not a man in my own?

I’m so TIRED. But it's not just my age and my body that are exhausted - my spirit is also worn out. I’m soul-saddened by the death of a lifelong friend and the startling news of the serious illness of another dear one. At my age, the illnesses and deaths of my peers are no longer a rarity. But the depth of my current sadness caught me by surprise.

In our family’s lore is the story of my mother propping me up as a toddler against the front of our living room console with the radio playing and me, clad only in a diaper, rocking left to right in rhythm to the big band music of Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, or to the vocals from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Still today, wandering through a mall, I find myself softly singing the lyrics to overhead speakers playing instrumental versions of these personal treasures so deeply stored in my little-boy memories. She taught me to love the music she loved, music that has lingered through my lifetime.

A friend recently forwarded to me a story from TikTok, so I linked up to the site for the first time. It seems someone posed this question to a large number of women: Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man? A large plurality of the women said, the bear, most without hesitation. My first response was to laugh because this sounded so silly. But because I’ve been reimagining my own relationships with women for the past several weeks, I pressed on, read more, watched accompanying videos, and learned a lot.

In public circumstances, empathy doesn’t require intimate love and trust, or the sense that we’re personally safe with one another. Public empathy means we can be in the same room together, pointed in the same direction, working to understand one another even if our disagreements persist. So what's changed? Why does public empathy seem so out of reach now?

In ways I don’t recall from previous years, an underlying hopelessness creeps in more and more to conversations with my friends and therapy clients, expressed in recurring phrases, like: The world is such a mess. What happened? How did we arrive at this sense that our world is falling apart and there’s nothing we can do about it?

Why do I care who Shohei Ohtani is or why the curse of the Bambino hung over Boston Red Sox fans for eighty years? The origin of my devotion is that sports, and especially baseball, was one of the few things that connected me as a child to my dad.

I spent my 1950s childhood living within blocks of perhaps ten movie theaters between Bronson and La Brea Avenues on Hollywood Boulevard. Of the hundreds of films I’ve seen, a few stand out as important because they help to define different seasons of my life.

It is surprising how often a person’s very disparate dreams well up from a common source: unfinished emotional business collected in a mist-covered lake of fear and sadness and shame going back to childhood but out of the reach of consciousness. It’s as if each dream is a plea to dispel the mist and wade deeper into this still-mysterious dream-lake as we continue constructing our sense of where we come from and who we’re becoming.

I've been married for sixty years and, despite eras of confusion and disappointment, have found my way to a pretty good level of intimacy. During the same six decades, as a pastor and a therapist I’ve worked with hundreds of couples to help them get closer to one another, with an even mix of success and failure. Here's what often goes wrong (and what you can do about it).

We are naturally aware of race. We must be taught to be racist, and that's a lesson we learn not just explicitly, but implicitly from the culture that surrounds us all the time. It's a lesson we absorb before we know we're absorbing it.

Over the forty years that I’ve been a therapist I’ve come to believe that the issue of feeling safe is at the core of almost every person’s emotional struggles. What’s become clear to me over time is that whatever our emotional wounds, every person craves the experience of basic security, suffers in its absence, and thrives when it is the air they breathe. But what happens when we confuse imagined threats to our safety with real ones?

I’m a more strategic reader year after year. I no longer have any reservations when giving up on even a highly popular and well-reviewed book: I only have so much reading time left, so I want to spend it well. Certain books from this past year have stuck with me, so I want to share them with you as this new year begins.

As I approach another Christmas, I must admit that all this traditional music holds more boredom for me than inspiration. Endless repetition and familiarity have robbed it of its sacred purpose. So I find myself searching Pandora for songs that may seem less sacred but still capture my imagination. These three are the gift I offer up to you in what continues to be a holy season for me.

Thanksgiving week through early January is, on my calendar and in most American’s imaginations, one extended holiday season. I still get caught up in this turmoil of over-eating and over-spending, but my mood through these weeks is best summarized in the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III: the winter of our discontent. Even after twenty-three years, this somber mood arrives like the season’s first chill as sadness once more lowers the temperature of my soul.

When I have the thought or hear the advice that I should be grateful for something, what rises in me is not gratitude, but obligation. And obligation elicits in me not gratitude, but resentment.

Though I deal with delicate issues every week as a therapist, I've increasingly noticed how I'm also walking on eggshells with certain friends and acquaintances about hot-button issues. I’ve lived most of my life with friends and family members who disagree about religion or gender, about war and peace, or who come from differing sides of political issues. In the past, we could be comfortably safe with one another despite such disagreements. But things have changed.

It is difficult to talk about all of this reasonably. Whatever our convictions, our hair is on fire from the carnage and horror that we’re witnessing, each of us from our own perspective. So whatever we say, there are those who will find us absolutely wrong or only partially correct when complete prejudice is required. When your hair is on fire, nuanced reasoning and any form of empathy go up in smoke.

For years, I could find God’s responses in the scriptures I read every day, in worship on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays. But such unmediated contact with God is no longer my experience. The breeze has stilled. I feel no hand on my heart. My prayers, long unanswered, now go unspoken. What happened between God and me?