Note: The following essay first appeared on Tikkun Daily at www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily. I appreciate their work and am thankful for their generous support of mine. Years ago, my brother-in-law, a retired geophysicist, invited us to join him on a trek across the lava on the island of Hawai’i so we could see red-hot flows making their …
Note: I beg your indulgence for this particularly long post. I have pulled it from a book I am trying to birth. It speaks to the confusion I face as I try to discern how humanity might find its way home. The more I learn, the more the explanations I grew up with are …
Note: This article will appear in the September-October issue of Neighbors of Batavia magazine. How are you doing? Before you answer, think carefully…there might be more at stake than you think. I might be wrong, but there is a good chance your immediate response would have been to a question other than the …
Note: in 2008, Batavia rebuilt the Wilson Street Bridge which spans the Fox River. The Fox River severs our community into its east and west, and the bridge plays an important role in keeping us connected. As head of the Chamber of Commerce, I was asked to write a letter to my counterpart. It …
Note: This piece was recently submitted for publication in the May-June issue of Neighbors of Batavia magazine. Many years ago, I taught in a private high school on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey. As faculty advisor in the dorm, I began each day at breakfast with the students. One freshman would frequently catch me …
Note: The following is being published this week in the March issue of Batavia Business, the monthly publication of the Batavia Chamber of Commerce. When I began these words, I would have thought that being human and being inhuman were opposites and mutually exclusive. But now I wonder. The spectrum of words that define “inhuman” range …
Note: I wrote the following for the December issue of the Batavia Chamber newsletter. And while it speaks directly to issues related to entrepreneurs, I think the message of how we prioritize the moments of our lives has broader meaning. In the context of our lives, even five minutes is perhaps too much. Two …
The following will be published in the next issue of Neighbors of Batavia Magazine. Like a modern day Parthenon, it wore the ravages of time—but this monument to human endurance had no one to defend it against old age, or protect it for future generations. It stood pockmarked and failing, left as nothing more than …
A recent Chamber presentation by Mike McKinley entitled “Laughing Your Way to Success & Happiness,” invited more thought about our third unalienable right: the pursuit of happiness. Since we have been in pursuit for 235 years; certainly we’ve made progress. In many industries, the U.S. leads the world in production efficiency and effectiveness. So why not in the …
When Andrew asked the question, it didn’t appear to meet the philosophical dictates of our Socrates Café—a place where we explore the questions of our life by “remaining in the question.” The way Andrew posed it—what is life?—seemed to beg for an answer. I have read a fair amount about how science defines life, and …