Howard Thurman was my traveling companion on the train to work this morning, and he greeted me with these words: It is small wonder that all religions that are ethically sensitive place a great emphasis upon the corrosive effects of pride upon the human spirit. . . . The most obvious basis for pride...
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A good twenty years ago, I was sitting in my car at a traffic signal on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, waiting for the light to change so I could cross the bridge over the rail yard and back to our home in Charlestown. I looked up to see a billboard that read, Come see...
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My day started with jolts from both my morning coffee and, then, these words from Howard Thurman: The will to understand other people is a most important part of the personal equipment of those who would share in the unfolding idea of human fellowship. It is not enough merely to be sincere, to be...
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I was a history major in college because of the professor who taught my Western Civilization course my first semester at Baylor. I’ve told this story before. I walked into Wallace Daniel’s classroom expecting to be told, once again, who won what war and what it meant for the rest of us and, instead,...
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I have been reading a lot about stories lately: how we tell them, how we hear them, how we live them. Telling a story is more than recounting events. In his book, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, Sven Birkets writes: There is in fact no faster way to smother the core...
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The past few days I have been captured by James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, in which Carroll articulates what faith in Christ looks like in the light of the Holocaust. He begins with a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend: “What keeps gnawing at me is this...
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I spent part of my day working from a window seat at The Marketplace, a wonderful coffee shop-café-grocery store that sits on the edge of the Guilford Town Green, which is renowned as the largest town green in New England (almost eight acres) and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed Central...
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As I rode the train into New York, hoping for sunrise this morning, I came across an article shared by a couple of friends stating that tonight would be “the darkest night in 500 years” because the solstice was paired with a lunar eclipse. Now there’s a metaphor, I thought, because that is how...
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During the course of the day, this video showed up in the feed of a Facebook friend who lives in California. If you don’t want to take time to watch the video, it is a promo for a new store Amazon is opening in Seattle in January called Amazon Go that allows you to...
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As Advent began last year, I did not see the gathering dark heading my way. I was preparing for my mother to come for Christmas so she could see our new home in Guilford. We were still unpacking boxes from our move from Durham and she was determined to see our new house. She...
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