The Olympic Games just ended in Rio De Janeiro. I always love the Olympics, the two-week spectacle of the best physical specimens of humanity doing things with their bodies I can only imagine. It’s inspiring to watch their determination, their grit, their courage, to envision the years of training that go into a single effort […]
Amazing changes are underway in Pakistan. For all the attention this young country gets for being a haven for radical Islam, a base of operations for the Taliban, and a sanctuary for Al Qaeda, it has managed to do something the U.S. has not–elect a woman head of state, not once but twice. And it […]
These two women aren’t celebrities. Most of us didn’t know about them before last year. They aren’t heroes for seeking our attention, or seeking thrills, or seeking danger–they’re heroes because when their lives called for them to do something extraordinary, they didn’t shrink from it. Ordinary people who did something extraordinary, then went back to […]
I can’t let Dr. King’s day go by without posting something in his honor. His very name inspires visions of courage: not the swaggering bravado of the nineteenth century, nor even the forward-at-all-costs determination of the industrial-age soldiers we came to admire in the twentieth. Martin Luther King’s courage was something different. It’s one thing, […]
Former South Africa leader Nelson Mandela. How many of us could forgive our enemies, time and time again? How many of us could spend thirty years in prison and emerge ready to make peace? How many of us could allow a small group of people to oppress our own, larger, group, sometimes brutally, then when […]