Category: courage
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Almost 500 petitions
On the first Tuesday of November 1872, more than 150 women around the country, including Susan Anthony, tried to vote. Susan Anthony was arrested, but she didn’t give up. “Failure is impossible,” she told her followers. Finally, in August 1920, Tennessee voted for ratification of the 19th Amendment and women were given the right to…
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Change?
“What the ego hates more than anything else in the world is to change—even when the present situation is not working or is horrible,” writes Richard Rohr in his book Breathing Under Water. “Instead, we do more and more of what does not work, and many others have rightly said about addicts, and I would…
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Try and not try
“We must both try and not try, we must both ‘care and not care,’ as poet T.S. Eliot puts it,” write Richard Rohr in his book Breathing Under Water. “By personal temperament, you will start on one side or the other, but finally you must build the bridge between the two.”
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Long term or short term?
“Prevention is physically rewarding in the long term, but not emotionally rewarding in the short term,” wrote Ed Yong in the May 20, 2020, issue of The Atlantic. “People who stay home won’t feel a pleasant dopamine kick from their continued health. Those who flock together will feel hugs and sunshine. The former will be…
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Holy anger at injustice
May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart. May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom and peace among all…
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One day at a time
“Health officials are warning that about a third of Americans are suffering from clinical anxiety and depression,” says William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week in the magazine’s June 5, 2020, issue. “To cope, we have to learn to tolerate great uncertainty, while having faith that scientists will find treatments and/or a vaccine, and this bizarre…
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A holy anger
May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart. May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom and peace among all…
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It’s time to protest
I have edited Martin Luther King so that his quote refers to “woman” instead of “man” and to “her” instead of “his.” “Every woman of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits her convictions, but we must all protest,” Martin Luther King once said. What can we do to protest? I don’t…
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The language of the unheard
“In the final analysis,” Martin Luther King once said, “a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear?”
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Gratitude at this dark time
William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week, wrote in the April 24 issue of the magazine about the people he encountered on a bike ride. One woman jogger smiled at me, a stranger, with such genuine warmth I was startled. “Hi,” she called out as I rolled by, in recognition of our shared predicament: escaped prisoners…