Blogs

Disabled Basketball Player Helped by Opponent to Score Shot

A most extraordinary incarnation of what the world looks like when we offer each other our gifts and share our delight in each other and the world.

I love this quote. It creates an irresistible tension between our present reality and the world of our imagination. We are compelled to resolve the tension through our own acts of courage and compassion.

"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more 'successful' people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it."

~David Orr

When Julio Diaz stepped off the New York City subway platform after work one night, he was simply planning to walk over to his favorite local diner for a meal. But when a teenage boy approached him with a knife blade gleaming in his fist, Diaz, a 31-year-old social worker, knew the evening was about to take a more dramatic turn.

The young man demanded Diaz's wallet, and Diaz passed it over without objection. But just as his mugger turned to walk away, Diaz called after him: "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something."

The mugger turned around, surprised.

I sailed my old wooden boat, Seven Bells, to Port Townsend, WA last weekend for the Wooden Boat Festival.

Only a few months ago, I started voice lessons with Mark Power, a Seattle-area voice coach, composer, and a singer/performer in many operas and musicals. I knew little about  Mark's personal background, but I gave him a copy of the book I published in 2011: The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family. My book tells the history of fundamentalism over the past two centuries, and connects that history with the history of my own family across the generations.

Video published by TedXRainier, an independently organized TED event in Seattle, WA.

At the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco in November, Chiara Press hosted a public conversation between Randall Balmer and me titled "Emerging from Fundamentalism," during which we discussed my recent book The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family.