The Gulf oil spill is symptomatic of larger issues than greedy oil companies or incompetent government regulatory agencies. The spill provides an opportunity for us to examine the connections between our affluent lifestyle and the future inevitability of such catastrophies.

When we consider the state of the Earth--its environment, its injustice, its economics, and governance--its difficult to retain hope. But there are many hundreds of thousands of nonprofits around the world actively working to change those conditions, to raise our consciousness and rouse our attention. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Earth's Immunity gives us reason to hope.

Hope for the Future is a review of James Gustave Speth's 2008 book The Bridge at the End of the World, which has been revolutionary for my thinking about the convergence of poverty & inequality, economic oppression, ecological devastation, and the loss of American democracy. Writing from an environmental perspective, Speth suggests that the old incremental, one-problem-at-a-time approach will not work and that we must work for a change in human consciousness that will recognize our place in the natural world, our responsibility one for the other, the failure of consumerism to make us happy, and the deep structural changes in corporations and government to bring us to sanity. Fortunately, those changes are well underway.

Health Care for Everyone: The Single-Payer Health Plan is an essay that I hope will encourage everyone to encourage President Obama to consider this form of health insurance for everyone.

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.