Category: Justice and Peace

Peacemaking and mending breaches is part of life, and poetry, story, and song can help us learn how to do the things that matter.

Peacemaking and Mending Breaches

Remembering Things that Matter I rarely post anything about current events, but once in awhile, it happens. I’ve been thinking about peacemaking, mending breaches, and restoring what has been broken. For issues that have existed for years or decades or...

Should the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award have been renamed?

Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Art of Historical Fiction

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award was recently renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, a remarkably generic name for such a prestigious award. A lot has been said about the change, and most that I have seen has been negative, with reactions...

Virtue, education, and the electorate on election day 2016

Virtue, Education, and the Electorate

An orderly line of voters snaked halfway around the parking lot at the polling place this morning. The crowd courteously made way for seniors with canes, wheelchairs, or walkers, with quiet thanks to those who sported evidence of military service. My...

Sermon on the Mount by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1598

How Then Shall We Live?

Some of the ideas in the last post’s video seem reminiscent of classical Christian ideas of how believers should live in the world. These Christian ideas are drawn from the whole of scripture and tradition, but the best known source...

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright

Moving Away from an Industrial Economy

Have you ever been inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater? This architectural gem offers contrasting spaces that feel spacious yet intimate. Its beauty and fame lies not in the fact that it’s an enormous, costly monstrosity  that dominates its site, but...

How About a Plenitude Resolution for the New Year?

Although entrepreneurship and micro-business have traditionally been seen as paths to wealth, the Doing What Matters business model is intended to lead toward a simpler, richer life. In the graphically illustrated five-minute video below, Plenitude author Juliet Schor discusses how to create a human-scale “plenitude economy” with...

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

Can Changing Your Thoughts Change Your Life?

Remember the schoolyard taunt, “What you say is what you are!”? It usually followed a mature exchange of insults, often beginning with “cooties,” and progressing through booger-possession to “You’re just dumb!” Thankfully, the recess bell usually intervened in time to...

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi as a Labor Day Meditation

Today is Labor Day in this part of the world, and I wanted to share this song from a prayer by St. Francis of Assisi as a meditation on the attitudes that can make labor beautiful. Whether you work in...