“Smile!” the photographer implored, looking straight at me as I stood in a line of people to be captured on digital. “This is a wedding.” His emphasis on the “is” made it sound as if... Read More

It was nearly dinnertime on one of the last days of summer break. I’d promised my daughter—just ten days shy of turning seven—that we could have Chipotle for dinner. I had to come through on... Read More

The Doppler radar showed a perfect pinwheel of storm clouds spinning off Cape Hatteras on the coast of North Carolina, drawing energy off the warm waters of the Gulf Stream: a nor’easter. Down on the... Read More

On Monday, March 24, 2014, I received a phone call from a woman seeking a humanist wedding officiant. It was a pleasant surprise and a good way to start the week. She told me about... Read More

This is part one of a two-part series. Click here for the conclusion. On February 26, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have made it legal for businesses to discriminate against LGBT... Read More

An abscess in the tooth or colon curls one inward as salt poured upon a snail. And so does grief; grief is an oozing, boiling abscess of absence. I was eight thousand miles away in... Read More

Chris Stedman, who is the assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University, intrigued me when we would meet at Harvard Humanist events. Stedman’s position as “Interfaith and Community Service Fellow” struck me as particularly curious for... Read More