October 2, 2007

This fall Sharon Kugler began her first academic year as chaplain at Yale University—the first woman, the first layperson and the first Roman Catholic to hold that position. When Yale president Richard C. Levin announced Kugler’s appointment, he called her “one of the nation’s most creative university chaplains.”

Like Mitt Romney, I’m a Mormon, and as with him my Mormonism seems to be a defining, make-or-break characteristic for many people I meet. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made great strides in the past decade at improving its public image, partly as a result of an extensive and expensive PR effort. At the end of the day, though, polls show fairly consistently that we Mormons still rank near the bottom when Americans are giving “approval ratings” to religions. Many Americans report that they would never vote for a Mormon for national office.

On January 10, 2002, a healthy 57-year-old man underwent a liver donation procedure that successfully resected approximately 60 percent of the right lobe of his liver in preparation for transplanting that liver into his brother, a 54-year-old man who suffered from a degenerative liver disease. After what was described as a technically uneventful transplant, the donor patient seemed to do well on the first postoperative day. He began to manifest some tachycardia, abnormally rapid heartbeat, late on the second postoperative day.

I love looking at old photographs; it’s the closest thing to time travel that I know. I find myself staring at century-old black and white photos taken on the streets of large cities. I look at the people. I search their faces, wondering what was going on in their minds. Often they are turning toward the camera—an item that was much less common then—with a shocked expression. They seem as fascinated to be a part of the captured moment as I am to witness it.

“I’m not a fan of heist movies, where the mechanics of the heist are lovingly detailed. But criminality and people who live in a state of perpetual transgression—that is interesting to me.”
                                                —David Cronenberg