I submitted the following letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer today:

 How quickly we forget. The sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq passed almost unnoticed. On March 19th the Plain Dealer’s front page had precisely no stories marking the advent of the war. Most other media outlets seemed to have ignored the event as well.

Even more upsetting is the extent to which the general public seems to have forgotten that people are still fighting and dying in Iraq. Every year for the past six years I have officiated some sort of religious service to mark the war’s anniversary. Each year these services have included a reading of the names of American and Iraqi war dead. Attendance at the services has fluctuated over the years. Last year’s service, the first I organized in Cleveland, drew about 80 people and coverage from two television stations. This year I expected a smaller attendance but I was shocked when not a single person showed up for the service the night of March 19th. 

Since March 19, 2003 more than 4,200 Americans and at least 100,000 Iraqis have died. In the future I pray that we do a better job of remembering them.

The latest issue of the Economist magazine has a review of the soon to-be-published book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. According to the Economist, the book’s central thesis is that social inequality is the main cause of many of society’s ills. This is a fairly classical socialist argument. What appears to make Wilkinson and Pickett’s book different is that they base their argument on a rich selection of data that documents that:

Within the rich world, where destitution is rare, countries where incomes are more evenly distributed have longer-lived citizens and lower rates of obesity, delinquency, depression and teenage pregnancy than richer countries where wealth is more concentrated. Studies of British civil servants find that senior ones enjoy better health than their immediate subordinates, who in turn do better than those further down the ladder.

There are lots of theories floating around about what makes human beings unique. Some argue that humanity is special because it is a meaning making species. Others argue that human uniqueness hinges upon our language ability or the fact that we use complicated tools. An article the Economist puts through a new theory. The article begins:

YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

I think it is an intriguing theory and suggests to me, perhaps, why the act of table fellowship and food purity laws are so important to some religious communities.