Today has been grey and damp here along the Shoreline, as they call this  part of Connecticut. As I lave been reading and writing, I have also been listening to songs that have been a part of my soundtrack this winter–some old, some new; each one providing a necessary note in the melody of my…

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 is…

While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be shared. There isn’t any other tale to tell; its the only light we’ve got in this darkness. (James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” quoted in The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long…

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 the…

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 conscientious….

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, was…

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 meaning…

Because I have now lived through the death of both of my parents, I understand more of how the disciples might have felt after Jesus’s death and burial. One of the hardest things has been to mark time without them. The first morning. The first month. The first year, and then the second. I think…

I started a new train book on the way to work this morning: Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi. The book, as the title suggests, uses cartography as an extended metaphor for writing. As the train worked its way to New Haven this morning, Turchi was talking about the importance…