Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

He brought back a sack full of Afghan scarves, and offered me my pick of them. The one I chose, the yellow one, is what I’m wearing now. What the picture doesn’t show, but which was the first thing I noticed when I put it on, is the smell. One scarf smells strongly; the smell of Eric’s sack of them is tremendous. He didn’t notice it when he was in Kabul, because everything smells this way there. With my scarf on, I’m carrying that city with me today, into the new year. I’m breathing the city that my country has occupied for nearly a decade now.

I can try to describe it, but I’ll never succeed. It’s a bit like the smell of a wood fire, but there’s much more too. There’s also the trace of burning trash, which people use to supplement their insufficient wood and coal, for heat and cooking. There’s smog in it too, from a city where people can’t afford anything but the lowest-grade gasoline in cars, and where the snow-capped mountains all around trap it in. There’s also dust, because the cars are driving over mostly unpaved roads. And there’s the hint of unnamable filth, from the scattered sewers that run along the roads, open to the air. This would be just unsanitary in a city of thousands. But Kabul has swelled to four million, thanks to impoverished refugees pouring in from the war-ravaged countryside, their ancestral land lost and trading good, clean air for what I’m smelling now.

In late 2001, I met a woman who worked at the Pentagon. When she learned I had been protesting the invasion, she argued with me. She said, as we parted, that someday I’d understand that this was right. I’d get over it. Well, I still don’t. I haven’t.

The year to come will only really be new if we make it that way. Let our mere prayers for peace be made acceptable by our actions, by our willingness to shed the pride and importunity that keeps us trying to have our way with drone strikes and night raids. They will fail. There is no victory from making widows and orphans. In a new year made truly new, we will no longer accept the waste and horror of war as the policy of normalcy. We will stop trying to take what isn’t ours. We will starve the bottomless hunger for revenge, and sit down with our enemies, and eat together.

Let God be the first to know, and Congress second: it’s a new year. War, the demon-mother of poverty, is no good in our sight, and we are the ones who can stop it. This year, may the four million human beings in Kabul breathe clean air again. Amen; let this be done.

What its leading lights envision is something at once quaint, radical, and practical: end the practice of factory farming that makes misery for animals and pollution for the planet on an enormous scale. They want to encourage a gentler, more sustainable kind of animal agriculture, one carried out by family farmers who live on their land and take pride in their animals. And they’ve got help.

In the article I explore the sensation of being around do-gooding celebrities, what they can do for animals, what Farm Forward means for the animal welfare movement.

I’ve been actually quite inspired by Aaron’s work—both his advocacy at Farm Forward and his scholarship in the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara, where we met. Conversations with him and with Bryan Farrell, who joined me at the event, have actually been leaning me toward a very modest inclination to veganism. Well, to be honest, the people really pushing me there are my mother and uncle. Stay tuned (perhaps for a long time) for their fantastic upcoming cookbook. If there’s any desire, maybe I’ll start posting recipes from it on the blog! Let me know.

He has cystic fibrosis, and he needs about $70,000/year in medicine to survive. He has also devoted his life to the unlucrative work of independent journalism and political activism. He lives on almost nothing and has a place to sleep only thanks to a generous arrangement with a generous church. While he contributes more to society than the average millionare, our system seems on the brink of deciding that he doesn’t deserve to live. Just another of the millions of stories about how utterly broken the American health care system has become.

Today in The New York Times, Paul Krugman makes clear how dangerous John McCain’s health care plan is. But in its fundamentals, I’m concerned that Barack Obama’s plan, as well as his general approach to labor, is dangerous too. Neither reflects the needs of a twenty-first century citizenry and workforce.

I’m 24 years old, and my grandfather in his mid-eighties doesn’t quite understand what’s taking me so long. By my age, he was married, and he had a job at RCA that could’ve lasted him a lifetime. All told, after college he couldn’t have had more than five serious jobs, and most of his life he had only one. I have had five jobs in the past year.

Today, fewer and fewer of us devote our lives to a single company. We change careers, get laid off, work as consultants, go back to school, and repeat. And for good reason. The world isn’t like it used to be. American industries compete in a global marketplace, and they have to be agile in order to keep up. No matter what the Democrats promise the big old unions, jobs are going to keep going overseas. If they don’t, consumer prices will go through the roof. Though Obama recognizes the demands of the market, he has not been willing enough—as willing as McCain has been, even—to tell American workers that they will need to be willing to retrain and retool if they want to stay competitive. This could be the mother of many false promises to come, meant to assuage the Democrats’ labor union base.

Currently, employers receive significant tax incentives for providing health benefits to their employees. And insurance providers can give much lower rates to people through corporate plans. Consequently, the health insurance regime is structured around employers and employees. However, in the new world order, this approach is dangerous and out of date. It leaves out a growing class of workers—freelancers, independent contractors, and of course those employed by companies that don’t offer benefits. Forget it if you actually pursue the American dream and start a small business. My father, who co-owns one of the last remaining small real estate firms in the Washington, D.C. area, has to buy health insurance as an individual.

Anyone who’s tried that knows how expensive it is. I would have had to go that route, if I hadn’t been lucky enough to find the Freelancers Union. In New York City, the same Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan went from around $800/month to around $200/month when I joined up with them. No background checks on health history. Some annoying paperwork to be sure, but I’m in.

For my friend losing his Medicaid, there’s no affordable alternative in sight.

I hope that the Freelancers Union represents a new kind of worker’s organization that spreads very, very quickly. You’re not just a member by virtue of having a certain job. And isn’t the organization’s primary objective to keep you from being laid off, whether your job is competitive or not. Instead, they support you wherever you’re working, providing insurance as well as a training seminars, political advocacy, and a community to network with. Almost like a church or a Masonic lodge. A new, yet old way of organizing workers.

In the current political climate, where a European-style single-payer system isn’t in the cards, such organizations are a plausible alternative. They still leave room for the competition that the free-market folks think will prevent the inefficiencies of a single-payer model. Because employees are not so dependent on companies for basic needs, both are freer to maximize utility in the marketplace.

Fortunately, Obama’s health plan features a government-run program that allows people to buy affordable insurance as individuals. This is a vital step in the right direction. But if he is serious about both a humane health insurance market and a competitive labor market, he has to go farther to detach benefits from jobs and create tax incentives for organizations that stay with people in both good times and bad. Vital services like health care need to go to people qua people, not just insofar as they also happen to employees.

Ironically, we should listen to the stumbling McCain did after being caught saying that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” a week before the financial system collapsed. The fundamentals of the economy, he claimed, are not corporations or markets, but people:

“The economic crisis is not the fault of the American people. Our workers are the most innovative, the hardest working, the best skilled, most productive, most competitive in the world, that’s the American worker.”

It may be jingoistic stump-talk, but it’s talk worth trying to live up to.

But despite the horrid memories that these words evoke, something else lurks at the bottom of most of the pages. There are little boxes with tiny text. Some mention the features and benefits of Cable pianos. Others simply offer moral, upbuilding quotations from notable people. It is as if righteousness were so appealing to the people of 1922 that there was no better way to attract their attention.

Take the box under “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” a song written by a white man about slaves wailing over the death of the person who claimed to own them:

Courtesy is the eye which overlooks your friend’s broken gateway, but sees the rose which blossoms in his garden.

Today I had lunch with a friend sorely concerned about the direction of the social order and the family and so on. Afterward, looking around the city, it was hard to blame him. Especially as far as little things go, which hint toward things more troubling. Hearing guards at the magnificent 42nd Street library saying bad words nonchalantly to each other while checking the bags of tourists; similarly bad words scrawled along the pedestrian path on the Williamsburg Bridge, which always has families walking on it; a condom lying in the stairwell of my apartment building. When one turns off the blinders that one develops living in New York, these things really can add up. What kind of world are we creating? Certainly not one that says, as The Cable Company does:

Music washes away from the soul the dust of every-day life.

The beautiful is nothing else than the visible from of the good.—Plato.

Be not simply good—be good for something.—Thoreau.

Soldiers remember—”He that ruleth his spirit” is greater “than he that taketh a city.”—<em>Prov. 16: 32</em>.

These are fabulous. I could go on forever. There are many more. And of course, stuff like this is mixed in:

Economy in buying a piano consists in getting the best instrument that can be made for the price you pay. You expect to receive the full equivalent of your money. That principle is the basis of our selling policy.

Today, rather than upbuilding quotations, advertisers attract our attention with boobies and innuendos. (The demise of this form of advertising, which treats the buyer as a rational, essentially decent person and replaces “him” with a base, id-driven subconscious, is the subject of part one of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self.) I am tempted to agree with my friend—the world has gone to, dare I say on what has always been a blog you can bring the whole family to, shit.

But every time I go back to my favorite Stephen Foster songs in there, I’ll remember, “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground.” Those were days when, in this same country as mine, people couldn’t stand to share a drinking fountain. It is an odd kind of decency, a broken gateway that’s hard to ignore on the way to the blossoming rose.

Human societies seem to work this way. Where there’s righteousness, there’s a cruelty it ignores. And where there’s filth, at least we have music to wash our souls of it.

The net is an odd metaphysical fact of modern societies, an imperceptible contractual reality that holds the scepter of life or death.

In his Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Gorgio Agamben explores the relationship between sovereign power and the capacity to define “bare life” from something else. Bare is the life that can be killed without committing a crime, yet cannot be sacrificed—a middle space between human and animal. He argues that the logic of European political power, since Rome at least, has revolved around the capacity to draw the line between bare life and human citizenry.

Being a citizen means having a net, or rather, being had by the net, being held in it. Killing a citizen is a crime, so citizens can consider themselves protected. The state serves as their divine, invisible bodyguard. A presence that can be felt but not seen, except in its works, on the lethal injection table.

Several years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with a friend in the Coast Guard about maritime law. He explained how utterly bare a ship without a flag is. In international waters, destroying it is not a crime. All that protects ships are the flags they carry and the web of treaty arrangements between countries that agree to recognize the sovereignty of one another. However beautiful your boat, without a flag, you are no longer a thing of intrinsic value (though your boat may be).

The net, Agamben makes clear, is the definition of citizenship—or more, of species. We stand as equals alongside those who share in the net that protects our lives from being mere flesh, that insists on its value and its worthiness of being saved.

In the United States, the healthcare net has been fashioned as an economic problem, even though the rest of the post-industrial world has shown it possible to make health a human right. This owes, in fact, to an historical mistake. The healthcare system developed in a postwar industrial culture that could depend on more or less stable employment. Benefits were distributed through employers, negotiated by unions, and regulated by government. Now, however, Americans can expect to work an increasing number of jobs over the course of their lives. Currently, I work three at once, none of which offers benefits. Though we have become a post-industrial economy, resting on the shifty ground of the service sector, the safety net has failed to keep up.

Politics has cast this historical mistake as a crisis of individual responsibility—the 48 million are apparently not responsible enough to put up for their healthcare costs. But of course the hurdles are innumerable and particular to every case. In my case, it took six months for me to assemble the paperwork I needed in order to join the Freelancers Union program, which, quite absurdly, was about a third the cost of buying the same policy directly from the insurance company as an individual. Some laziness was certainly involved, but it is amazing how little laziness it takes to be so utterly unprotected.

Politics then says the problem is economic. To keep the quality of care high, we need to ensure there is adequate market incentive for innovation and efficiency in the medical industry. By virtue of mathematical equilibria, there can be no better system than an open market. But an open market means that some people can lose.

No. The problem is metaphysical, which is to say a matter of human rights. If we are to be fellow citizens, protecting us from bare life must be the priority above all. The human problem must not be subjugated to the economic one. Just as free speech and the right to a trial must not be sold to the highest bidder, nor should the safety net that declares our fleshy, fragile lives worth protecting.