Commuting from Philadelphia to St. Paul this fall – and with multiple side trips ranging from North Dakota to Virginia and the Carolinas — I’ve been more sensitive than usual to the common rhythm of seasonal change and to the diverse ways that change occurs in different parts of the...

Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” seems a fitting poem for this Memorial Day weekend precisely because he reminds us how quickly we forget the sacrifices of the fallen. Each battle, let alone each war, robs us of the strength, the potential, and the future of so many people. We pause on...

I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, hoping to finish it before going to see to Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, Lincoln. (We’ll see if I can wait that long.) One of the central themes of the book is that Lincoln had a...