What we need in the world is manners…I think that if, instead of preaching brotherly love, we preached good manners, we might get a little further. It sounds less righteous and more practical. —Eleanor Roosevelt
I think we can all...
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of...
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where...
I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (words spoken by Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby)
It’s not without a twinge of sadness that I think of Daisy Buchanan, one of...
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you...
Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it.
- Maya Angelou
A few years ago I had a conversation with a professor who had just spent several months abroad during a sabbatical year, and we got...
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
To make routine a stimulus / Remember it can cease / Capacity to terminate– / Is a specific grace. Emily Dickinson
I love new beginnings. January first, the summer solstice, the start of the academic year (no matter that my student years are long passed, that Tuesday after Labor Day will always put a spring in my...
As the wheels of our plane touched down in Cap-Haïtien, the bright Haitian sunlight flooded through the plane’s dirty windows. I had just arrived for a weeklong immersion experience with classmates and professors to learn about the lives of...
This past summer, I had the opportunity to serve as a chaplain at a hospital in my hometown. While I learned a number of invaluable lessons, the most powerful of them all revolved around the concept of gift. I...