What does courage look like? One doesn’t need to look beyond the face of Malala Yousafzai, who this last week returned home to the beautiful area of Swat in NW Pakistan. You may remember that in 2012, when she was only 14 and on her way to school, Taleban gunmen stopped her bus and asked… Read More Malala Yousafzai Returns Home
Confinement. A place of limitations, being held back, a lack of freedom. Yet the places of confinement in our lives often yield the greatest creativity. That’s why some of the classics in literature and history have been written in prison. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail, or Nelson Mandela writing a diary and letters… Read More The Confinement that Leads to Writing
There are only a few places I have visited in the world that had a palpable sense of evil. One was an island off the coast of Gambia, where captured slaves from the interior were held before being transported across the Atlantic or up to Liverpool. Another was last week at the Cellular Jail in… Read More Kala Pani and the Evils of Colonialism
If you have read this blog even a bit, you know my feelings about Mother Teresa. I had the great honor and privilege to meet her twice in Kolkata, in 1985 and 1994. I have written posts about her before, and continue to be deeply inspired by her life and the sisters who carry on… Read More Changing history by creating ripples
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
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”
The past two weeks I’ve been in Sri Lanka, India, and China. (and still in Asia). It has caused me to reflect again on the life energy, the dynamism of this continent. Asia is of course the largest continent, with the two most populous countries on earth in China and India. Together they represent over… Read More The Dynamism of Asia
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
With these impassioned words, Indian journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh would lash the editors in Delhi over the telephone. Based in Bangalore in the Southern Indian state of Karnataka, Lankesh was overseeing a weekly edition of a Kannada-language magazine. She had a firmly established reputation for challenging the ruling government, as well as injustice whenever… Read More “Speak up, you must do more, why are all of you so timid!”
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