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Guest post by Deb Steransky Muncy, Pennsylvania Someone To Tell It To Compassionate Listener and Trainer My family and I have been camping during the hottest — and usually stormiest — part of the summer in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the last 15 or so years. We go the week leading up to the anniversary of…
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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me… Andrea Jenkins, Vice Chair of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, City Council, began her remarks singing those words today in a press conference as she addressed the racial tensions and violence that were fomented by the death of George Floyd, an African American man, on…
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Tuesday, Jan. 25, 1944 A transport of a thousand people left for Auschwitz in a howling storm and pouring rain. In animal wagons, yet again. The majority was from the S barracks: 590 people. The rest, young men of the Aliyah, old men from the hospital and 31 young, nameless children from the orphanage whose…
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Lately, we’ve been re-reading a favorite book of ours: The Book of Joy. A perfect book for this imperfect time, it accounts the week — which took place five years ago this month — during which His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent time together talking about the concept of joy. We’ve…
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She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Suddenly, a man was down on the pavement, being beaten by others waiting in the same line for their turn to go into the store. She’s still haunted by his cries for mercy, for them to stop their savage pummeling of him: “I’m not Chinese. I’m Vietnamese. I’M…
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Their cars and trucks and jeeps line the perimeter of the small parking lot next to the church on the corner. They gather at the same times each week lately, in this season of physical distancing. Before, they always met in the church basement to talk about their alcohol addictions, a common life fact they…
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When the sirens in Tel Aviv, Israel, wailed shortly before 7 o’clock one evening in February 1991, maestro Zubin Mehta was conducting the Israeli Philharmonic with renowned violinist Isaac Stern at the Jerusalem Theater. Another scud missile attack from Iraq, one of many during the first Gulf war, was underway. The audience was asked to…
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The following is a story we shared in our second book, Someone To Tell It To: Moved With Compassion called “The Cure for Loneliness.” “She had more courage in the face of death than I had in the face of life.” —A man who lost his wife to multiple myeloma “The greatest disease in the…
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In the matter of a few weeks, much has changed. Words and phrases such as “shutdown,” “lock-down,” “social distancing,” “pandemic,” and “outbreak,” among others, have become part of the common vernacular. Most of these words and phrases are inherently negative in nature, evoking feelings straight out of a Dean Koontz suspense novel, one in which…
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On March 15th, political and cultural commentator David Brooks — who also writes for The New York Times — appeared on Meet the Press, NBC’s weekly Sunday morning public affairs program. As with every program right now, the show’s main topic of dialogue was the current coronavirus crisis. During the course of the program, what…
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