On the morning of April 19, 1775, a company of Massachusetts militia formed ranks on Lexington Common. They had received word in the night that regulars would be coming through that morning on their way to confiscate weapons in the town of Concord, a few miles away. As the redcoats appeared at the edge of […]
Worse things have happened to better men. There’s a little chestnut I’ve told myself all my adult life. Goals Status: Marathon: On Track. My son and I ran a little over four miles this morning. Turns out taking last week off didn’t kill me. Two Square Yards of Earth: Behind Schedule. I met with my […]
I thoroughly disliked Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven. But this line has stuck with me. Goals Status: Marathon: On Track. As soon as I finish this, I’m off to do a three-mile run. Two Square Yards of Earth: Behind Schedule. I’ve started Chapter 3. My writers group meets this week, and it looks like I’ll get […]
What if … … There were no such thing as destiny? … Our place had more to do with our attitude and skills than our circumstances? … The only way to find a soulmate were to choose someone with whom we have a profound connection and dedicate our lives to making that person happy, trusting […]
I once had a priest apologize to me and a roomful of others, on behalf of the entire Catholic church, if any of us had been abused by a priest. It was a touching gesture, delivered almost twenty years ago, at a time when all the victims of decades of priestly misconduct seemed to be […]
Courage, conventional thinking goes, is a quality of our character. We either have it or we don’t. There’s something to this thinking, after all. There are those whose natural courage far exceeds that of the rest of us. How else do we explain the deeds of Medal of Honor recipients, or the heroes of September […]
Veronica Roth is the author of Divergent, the first book of a teen trilogy about a dystopian future society. In the story, society is divided into factions, each based on values its founders felt could counteract the evils of the world. Those with aptitudes encompassing more than one faction–the Divergent of the title–are seen as […]
Check out Our Lighter Side. I can’t decide whether this is courage or not. If you click the link, you’ll find an exchange unlike any you’ll find today, at least between a business and a customer: a fan–a season ticket holder, no less–wrote a letter to the Cleveland Browns organization in 1974 complaining, of all […]
Pope Embraces Man with Rare Genetic Disease | Neurofibromatosis | LiveScience. Compassion requires courage, particularly at this level. The man the pope embraced and kissed on Wednesday suffers from Neurofibromatosis, a condition I’d never heard of before reading this article. In a word, he’s hideous, the sort of man most of us would be much […]
I love reading. Since I was about eight years old, one of my favorite ways to be entertained is to kick back with a good book. I don’t read nearly as much now as I did then, of course, but I think it’s fair to say I still read more than most folks. One of […]