The Barbershop

Road Signs and Watersheds and Gratitude

Tributary streams remind us that every attitude flows to the sea. Our reactions to the streams of today’s circumstances feed the rivers of our everyday attitudes.

Stories That Bind Us

Despite differences that are exacerbated at the national level, we often share significantly more in common with our “enemy” when we interact with them at human scales.

Grandmother’s Wisdom

When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.

Human Interaction: The Most Essential Business

Scotsdale, AZ. With a vaccine on the horizon, it is time to think hard about how our country should look when the pandemic ends....

Ravining

I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the ravines to find the spirit of my place.

The End of Childhood Play

Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.

Institutions Rescue George Bailey

George offers his joyful holiday greetings to these institutions as if they were persons, bodies that saw his town through good and bad, through war and peace.

Some Possibly Helpful Thoughts on Localism, Populism, and Proximity During a...

The departure of Donald Trump from the White House will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of...

Ministry in a Place of Poverty

There is nothing morally wrong with being poor, and the stigmatization that affects the poor probably only adds more to their burden.

Home, Revisited

The pandemic has provided an opportunity to recenter our lives around home and family