When I decided to spend the summer posting "deleted scenes" from the book, I wasn't really sure what I would find on the cutting room floor. Now, with two and a half weeks until publication of the paperback and this blogging experiment reaching it's end, it seems more got cut from the book than included [...]
Some of you have heard me say that it was pregnancy that inspired me to write The Wisdom to Know the Difference. That's mostly true, but the other thing that got me thinking about the Serenity Prayer was a 60 Minutes episode about Richard Leakey. This deleted bit of the book is one of the first [...]
My Quaker meeting recently had a session where we shared some of our experiences with money. Dealing with poverty–our own or other people's–was one of the themes that emerged. Afterward someone asked me what I thought of a famous Gospel quote about the poor. As it turns out, I have a few paragraphs about that [...]
Photo of MOMIX performanceNothing gets me feeling inspired to be creative like graduation at University of the Arts, where I’ve taught part-time for the past ten years. Six-hundred students in fields ranging from painting to musical theatre and multimedia can exude a lot of energy, especially when they are fired up about graduating. Then there [...]
Over on her blog What Canst Thou Say?, Robin M explains what she wants her children to learn in First Day School (which is Quakerspeak for Sunday school). While the post raises many important issues, the line that jumped out to me was this: “I want them to learn how to be a Quaker.” Given some [...]
Last Saturday I spoke to a group of Philadelphia Quakers about spiritual discernment, a topic I’ve been writing about for nearly 16 years, though the longer I write about it, the less I think I know. In general, my message over the years has been this: There is a Divine Spirit that offers us guidance, [...]
A big theme in my writing is living with trust because I don’t think it is good for our souls to go through the world with our guard up all the time. I’m not against smoke detectors and seat belts, simple ways we can make ourselves and our loved ones safer. I’m not against security [...]
It’s been two years since my meeting granted me a minute of religious service, and since my anchor committee is meeting tomorrow night, it seems like a good time to reflect on what having a minute has meant. First, for the non-Quakers—or for those Friends whose meetings don’t engage in this practice—let me explain a [...]
Yesterday, after running into a woman whose husband is in remission from brain cancer, I realized how many reminders I’ve been getting lately of life’s fragility. A member of our meeting has entered hospice after many months of treatment for brain cancer. Another member’s ALS has progressed to the point where, for the first time [...]
Speaking of fear… I’ve been given my own opportunity to work through some. As some of you know, I teach a class on South African history at University of the Arts, which I really enjoy. The course uses the art, music, and literature of South Africa to study the apartheid era. This is the fifth [...]