On this day, one hundred and sixty years ago (1854, for those who struggle to do math on the weekend 🙂 ), Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden was published. In it he chronicled the two years he spent living in a one-room cabin he’d built for himself by Walden Pond on the property of his...

I am currently preparing for a conference on stewardship and so perhaps it’s not surprising that I read Norman MacCaig’s poem “Small Boy” through that lens. His musing on the need to practice letting things go…and the difficulty most of us have in doing just that, I find not just...

I’d known – and loved – the closing line of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day for years. A family in our neighborhood in St. Paul had made a large mosaic featuring it and hung it beside their front door. Whether walking the dog or running with a friend, I’d pass by their home and...

If you happened to catch the Germany-Brazil World Cup semi-final match this past Tuesday – or have heard news reports of it since — you’ll know what an incredible result it was. Not incredible because Germany won – they’ve been playing well throughout the tournament and were...

One hundred years ago today, Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated while visiting Sarajevo by a nineteen year-old Gavrilo Princip, a member of the nationalist group Young Bosnia. I found two relatively unknown aspects of that day intriguing. First, while the assassination had...