One of the Seven Wonders of the Christian world is in Xian, China, the starting point and terminus of the original Silk Road. It is the Nestorian Stele, a 10 foot stone tablet carved in 781 A.D. to commemorate the 150 year history up to that point of the work of the Church of the… Read More The Nestorian Stele of 781 A.D. T’ang China: Our Story in Their Story
This is my first post in 2018, so of course it has resolutions in it. A few weeks ago I wrote on a quote I saw in the Writers Lounge at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. (See Write because you have to) The Oriental was a frequent stopping point for authors and other public figures in… Read More Resolutions for a New Year
One of the greatest pains in life is the isolation caused by personal or family struggles that we feel can’t be shared. It is just too shameful, too jarring perhaps from the personal narrative we have carefully constructed and maintained. Then something happens, and the whole edifice begins to collapse, sometimes slowly but often rapidly… Read More Mental Illness and the Courage to be Real
As some of you know, I recently published my first book. In the past 13 years, I had published nine articles, three chapters in books and finished a PhD thesis. But not a full book, until October. I have wanted to be an author since I was 10 years old, when I wrote detective stories… Read More Write because you have to
Sometimes a phrase or quote just jumps out at me. Last week hunting around our local library, it happened. I saw a book (photo included) by Paul Loeb, titled The Impossible Will Take a Little While. It comes from a song lyric by Billie Holiday, that reads The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little… Read More “The Impossible Will Take a Little While.”
Yesterday here in the US was Thanksgiving holiday, a day to gather with family and friends. Along with my family, I’m grateful this year for those that stand with the “heroes” in their lives. Those that are faithful daily to the tasks that enable them to serve others, often not in the public eye. The… Read More Thankful for the people around the “Heroes”
Four simple words. Perhaps they should be also combined with a hashtag and read #Ibelievethewomen, to be read alongside #metoo. In the last few weeks in the US, allegations of sexual misconduct have ripped through Hollywood, Congress, and other areas of society. Some have been acknowledged as true by the perpetrators, others continue to deny. Sadly, this… Read More “I believe the women.”
A few months ago in Singapore, one of my favorite places in the world for a bunch of reasons, I came across a wall in a hotel with these two quotes on writing. They are really also about living. The first is by Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding generation in the United States and… Read More ‘Write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.’
The news from Northern California in the United States keeps getting worse. As I write this from Switzerland, wildfires that have already devastated areas of cities like Santa Rosa continue to spread. Over 5,000 houses and other structures have been destroyed, over 40 lives lost with many more still missing. The winds have picked up… Read More A Historian is a Missionary to the Past
There can be an intense pleasure in learning. But there can also be wounds from schools and education that sometimes never heal. We may think we can leave these wounds behind, but they remain with toxic ability to affect our present and future educational opportunities. Recently I read a wonderful book titled Wounded by School: Recapturing… Read More The Pleasure of Learning and yet the Wounds
An Invitation to Pause, Encounter & Grow Together.
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