On the eve of our national day of Thanksgiving, and after recent posts on the power of gratitude and it’s contagious nature, it occurs to me that it may be helpful to step back and ask what gratitude is in the first place. I suppose at its most basic level it’s simply an awareness of blessing and a willingness or even eagerness to offer thanks for that blessing. But what precipitates that awareness? And if it’s primarily an awareness or perception of blessing and good fortune, it strikes me that gratitude is likely available to us anytime and in all manner of circumstances. Which brings to mind a statement by the Apostle Paul, writing...

Do you have seven minutes to change your life? Really. This is one of the more powerful and important videos I’ve seen in a long time. It’s about happiness. In particular, it’s about the connection between gratitude and happiness. As it turns out, expressing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to increase happiness. Which is what makes this video powerful – not the idea itself, which we’ve explored in other places on this blog – but because the good folks at Soul Pancake actually took research about the connection between expressing gratitude and levels of happiness and replicated the experiment and filmed it for us to...

‘Tis the season of high school and collegiate football matches. (Indeed, my loyalties will be tested sorely this weekend as the Nittany Lions of Penn State venture to chilly Minneapolis to take on the Golden Gophers of the University of Minnesota.) And along with the contest on the gridiron is another festivity not to be missed: the half-time show countless marching bands put on each Saturday afternoon. The Unionville-Chadds Ford School where my children now attend has an awesome marching band, and it’s been fun throughout the late summer and fall to hear them practice from outside our home just a mile away and to see them whenever...

Six and a half minutes. That’s all it will take for you to watch this remarkably inspiring TED Talk of one person’s sensitivity and vision that became a gift first to her neighborhood and then to neighborhoods throughout the world. Candy Chang is what I would describe as a community artist. She is, indeed, an artist…and a designer…and an urban planner. But what strikes me most about her is that she takes all these varied skills and uses them to offer gifts to her community, to invite her community to understand, refine, and claim their identity more fully. In this sense, then, she is an artist for her community, a public artist...