Category Archives: Beloved Community
Crafting life together
It can all fall apart, this democracy thing. It’s not like gravity that makes rocks fall, even if you don’t believe in it. Democracy only lives in the mind and spirit and evaporates when we forget it. The belief that … Continue reading
Championship Spirit
You can no longer watch championship basketball in North Carolina because of a political train wreck involving sex, bathrooms and religion. In spite of some of those same politics, this is a great place to watch something more important, a championship … Continue reading
Runaway heart
My daughter Lauren is about to give birth to my second grandson, which, with her sense of dramatic timing will probably happen on Mothers’ Day. This also kicks off Nurses’ Week in hospitals. My wife and my (now former) first … Continue reading
Mainsail
Perhaps you’ve met a human. You have noticed that we can be hard to help. Perhaps you’ve been to a planet like Earth and noticed the same thing, except 7 billion different ways. How do you help something with 7 … Continue reading
Improbable Lessons
Between Pope Francis and the nine Charleston “Saints” whose deadly witness held us just as rivited a few months ago it is obvious to all that faith is not synonymous with stupid, mean and irrelevant. They are helping us see through … Continue reading
New blade
I peered through a hole in our basement wall into a cloud of sawdust where my father fed a piece of wood into the spinning blade. The sound was painfully high loud and powerful, such that I can still hear … Continue reading
Pompless patriotism
Jefferson, the pompless patriot, would have approved. Thanks to the Daily Beast and my brother Ron who forwarded their article, I learned that exactly 1,003 steps from my home near the Square in Salem, the Moravians had created the very first … Continue reading
Warren, Kenny and Barney
Fred Smith is a Harvard-SMU-Emory PhD and United Methodist preacher. He grew up tough in Oakland playing football. When he and I were walking around Jack London Square Thursday night after a nerve-fraying couple of days, we went looking for … Continue reading
Sin and Liberation
Didn’t expect that title did you? There is something about Good Friday coming in the same week as a day-long medical center budget meeting that turns my mind toward sin; and then, just when you least expect it, toward liberation. Tom Peterson … Continue reading
Redefining Redefining
Life is messy, more like the picture on the left. From time to time healthcare helps, but life is not about health….care. It is important to remember this amid the policy maelstrom and the basic fact that the healthcare industry … Continue reading