In March of 2008, presidential hopeful Barack Obama ran into a firestorm of criticism when video clips of sermons preached by Obama's pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, hit the Internet. From my point of view, the criticisms of Obama were fueled by the persistent racism and white misunderstandings of American racial history that have permeated our national history.

Letter to Lefties is a short piece that appeared in my favorite blog TomDispatch in February of 2006. Tom Engelhardt, who writes and edits the blog, is a good friend and asked me to write a piece about Christians in the movement. It seems that some of our secular leftist friends are sometimes surprised to find Christians on their side. So I wanted to introduce ourselves.

American Mythology is a brief commentary published in Sojourners in September 2004. It's a look at some of the reasons we Americans might have been willing to believe so many of the false rationales given for our invasion of Iraq, specifically, the willingness of most human beings to scapegoat others.

Recovering Memory was, as far as I can remember, never published. It is a reflection on all the shifting reationalizations that were given for our invasion of Iraq. Since my brief visit to Iraq just before the war, I paid lots of attention to those rationalizations, and I was astonished at how quickly they changed. the article was written in March of 2005.

Facing Our Mistakes, a 1984 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the writing for which I am most notorious in the medical profession. It's about the inevitability of making serious mistakes as a physician, the agony it brings to the physician, and our usual inability to deal with it. Although the article received wide coverage in the medical literature, it would be over ten years before other doctors began writing about their mistakes publicly. The article became one of the chapters in my first book, Healing the Wounds.