Ray Nasher has the stamina of a revolutionary, the staying power of a long-distance runner and the standards of Leonardo da Vinci. He insists on the best, and that is what the city will get when the Nasher Sculpture Center opens next month. It will be not only an extraordinary gift to Dallas but also the crown of a life quintessentially devoted to quality of the highest order.

Balance seems to be the watchword of the hour. From presidents to preachers, the exhortation is the same: life must be balanced or it isn't life at all. It's merely an extended stint on the elliptical trainer, rounded, as the poet said, by a sleep.

Last week I heard a bright young intellectual proclaim the "death of secularism." That came as a shock to me, but it also set me to thinking about American politics, American religion and the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is on the rampage at the moment, investigating All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, because George Regas, a senior priest, gave a sermon before election day last year in which he urged members of the congregation to vote according to their deepest beliefs, especially on issues of war and peace. Unfortunately the Los Angeles Times covered the sermon and called it a searing attack on George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

Some, mainly Democrats, say we should leave Iraq as soon as possible. Others, some of them in the military, say we may need to stay for another five years. William Polk, who had a long career in the State Department, argues that if we endure another five years we will lose 5,000 lives instead of the 2,000 or more dead so far, and we will spend another $1 trillion. And even then, we will leave Iraq in a mess. He concedes, however, that if we pull out now, as he advocates since he believes the occupation is causing the insurgency, we also will leave Iraq in a mess and the Iraqis will simply have to manage it for themselves.

Charles de Tallyrand, French foreign minister under Napoleon, used to send forth his diplomats with this admonition: Above all, not too much zeal. It could be added: Not too much clarity. An excess of clarity, like an excess of zeal, can rupture the webbing whereby communities are held together, their differences suspended in solution.

It's an amazing American story -- the uneasy alliance between Lyndon B. Johnson, a wily wheeler-dealer president, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a scholarly, spellbinding Baptist preacher, to pass the most historic civil rights legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. In his new book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America, Nick Kotz explores the complicated relationship between these two extraordinary leaders, both from the South, both excellent organizers, both brilliant at bridging deep divides among their followers.

No one has been more a woman of her time than Jane Fonda. She has been perfectly in sync with every decade. In her memoir My Life So Far, members of a certain generation of women, liberated by the 60s, will find themselves. They may not have been sex symbols of Paris film as Jane was, but they led sex lives quite unlike their mothers'. They too evolved from bulimic adolescent to radical militant. They didn't go to Hanoi, but they filled the streets of America with unseemly...

Hillary Rodham Clinton returned to Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, South Carolina this New Year's for the first time since running for the Senate. The annual gathering of 1200 people, declared to be Bill Clinton's national base, greeted her ecstatically at an interview program she did one night at 10:00.