Share Born on March 25, 1934, Gloria Steinem has spent a lifetime unlearning dangerous lies stemming from prejudice against women and helping others to do so. Her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a well-known women's rights activist and a leader in the movement for vocational education; she left a lasting impression on Gloria as a self-assured, intelligent woman intent on civic activism. Gloria's mother Ruth gave up a career in journalism to raise a family and — partly as a result of that sacrifice — suffered from incapacitating dep...

Share Novelist and short story writer Flannery O'Connor was born on this day in 1925. She died after a long struggle with a debilitating, incurable disease in 1964. She had a keen sense of vocation, knowing who she was and what she was put on earth to do. Through her imagination, this citizen of Milledgevile, Georgia, spun out her own world in two novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1964), along with 31 tales which were gathered together in a 1971 volume titled The Complete Stories. Through the lives of country judges, landow...

Share A 2020 message from the Earth Hour organizers: "This year, we are facing Earth Hour in exceptional circumstances with countries around the world experiencing a health crisis with the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). We recognize the exceptional challenge that the world is facing, and we thank you for your support as we try to realign our Earth Hour work appropriately. In light of the latest developments, the Earth Hour global organizing team is recommending all individuals to take part in Earth Hour digitally this year." Here...

Share Catherine of Siena (1347 - 1380) was a Catholic mystic, theologian, teacher, and religious activist. Born the youngest child in a very large family, she became a nurturer, devoting much of her time caring for the seriously ill. Catherine of Siena ranks high among Catholic mystics and spiritual writers. In 1970 Pope Paul VI named her and Teresa of Avila as Doctors of the Church. Her spiritual testament is found in The Dialogue. This Italian saint was also honored as the Patroness of Italy for her tireless efforts to return the Pope to Ital...

Share On March 24, 1989, an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled and — worsened by a delayed response and strong wind and waves — polluted 1,300 miles of shoreline, as well as the sound and adjacent waters. Investigators later learned that an unlicensed third mate had been steering the massive ship while the captain was drinking. Exxon payed billions in clean-up costs and restoration, but that could not undo the terrible and tragic damage to a sensitive...

Share “Yes, Jesus thought destruction was coming for sinners. He repeatedly discusses it. Strikingly, though, he never says anything about divinely sent misery, torture, or protracted deaths. The end will come suddenly, when no one expects it, and it will be decisive. Destruction would come to all who placed themselves above others, who refused to help others, who insisted on promoting their own pleasures and position even if it meant hurting others. People like that would be annihilated, but they would not be tortured. Moreover, Jesus never ta...

Share Alistair Cooke (1908 – 2004) was a radio and television journalist who, although born in England worked for most of his career in the United States. In the 1950s he hosted Omnibus, a imaginative television program on the arts. He followed that up with his role as host of public television's Masterpiece Theatre, where he wowed fans of these mostly British dramas with his sophisticated and urbane banter. But Cooke's longest project and his best work was done with Letter from America, which he described in a memo to the BBC: "It will be a we...

Share Ehrman is a New York Times best-selling author of several books. This one will not disappoint, if you have read any of the others. He writes with real pacing and verve, setting out to deconstruct inaccurate and harmful beliefs and teachings often found in evangelical Christianity. All the violence of those teachings on the “end times,” as well as the “ideology of dominance,” and “longing for vengeance,” are scrutinized by Ehrman, who long ago attended evangelical schools, but then went on to reject the divisiveness and anger that separate...

Share The Green Piano, written by five-time Grammy winner Roberta Flack together with Tonya Bolden, allows us to see how the extraordinary seed of her musical talent sprouted. From the start, she was planted in good soil: Her father played piano and harmonica, and her mother played both organ and piano at church. Flack writes about their pride as she used her elbows on the church piano at age three or four because her fingers were too short. Her dreams were even bigger. Hayden Goodman — a painter and editorial illustrator making her children's ...

Share Men may act strong, but it’s often a pretense. Connor Beaton, an entrepreneur and founder of ManTalks, an organization designed to bring men together to talk about themselves, wants to help fix this. He offers details about his own journey: growing up in Alberta, Canada; his parents divorcing when he was still a toddler; and eventually learning “how to father yourself.” Beaton’s book is practical, organized in short, digestible sections often followed by practical questions to answer. These questions are aimed at helping the reader uncove...

Share “How can you forgive yourself for betraying others and your own integrity? “I remember sitting down one morning and journaling about this after my conversations with Bernard. 'What do I owe myself?' I wrote, followed by, 'How the hell should I know?! Maybe some self-respect? I owe myself a lot of things.' And so, I started writing them all out – everything I owed myself. It was a long list. I realized that forgiving myself meant doing the things I had always avoided: giving myself compassion, developing discipline, giving myself room to f...

Share It was during the month of Ramadan that the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. One of the five pillars or key practices of this faith tradition is to fast during this month from the time just before sunrise until just after sunset. During the fast, total abstinence is required from food, drink (including water), smoking or consumption of tobacco, sexual intercourse, and any form of negativity — backbiting, fighting, cursing, arguing and similar behaviors. Muslims rise before da...

Share Each year more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to resort to using potentially harmful sources of water. This causes a silent humanitarian crisis that kills some 3,900 children every day. Nearly two in ten people in the world have no source of safe drinking water. To address this crisis, the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, has established March 22 as World Water Day; the Water for Life Decade started on this day in 2005. Since its foundation in ...

One of the persistent misrepresentations of mindfulness is that it is predominantly a solitary struggle. One thinks of the sage on the mountain, the hermit sequestered in a cave, you sitting home alone in your room, privately gazing at your navel (which is a pretty strange image if you think about it). It’s true that mindfulness meditation does involve spending time alone with your own thinking mind. In fact, a great benefit of cultivating more mindfulness, many people report, is that it helps them get along better with themselves. Meditation h...

Share Johann Sebastian Bach, born this day in 1685 into a family of gifted musicians, was a German composer, organist, and musical scholar of the late-Baroque period. His works, edifying in their grandeur, have earned him respect as one of the greatest composers in history. His exceptional skill as an organist was recognized in his time, but he was not fully acknowledged for his composing until the first half of the 19th century. His vast repertoire includes the six Brandenburg Concerti written for Prince Ludwig of Brandenburg, The Goldberg Var...

Into every life a little rain must fall. So goes the cliché. I don’t know if the person who coined this phrase intended it as a massive understatement, but it definitely is. Over the span of a lifetime, for most of us, more than a little rain falls, metaphorically speaking. In my own case, I’ve been on the receiving end of several hurricanes and blizzards—storms that knocked out everything and stopped the flow of life in its tracks.  In the Great Blizzard of 1978, in Boston, I marveled at how a sudden cataclysmic event—two and half feet of snow...

Share Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers (1928 - 2003) began playing piano at an early age and graduated from Rollins College in Florida in 1951 with a degree in musical composition. Interested in child development and how television was being directed at children, he was hired to work in programming by WQED in Pittsburgh, a community TV station. He worked as a puppeteer on a local show called The Children's Corner. Still not completely sure of the direction of his work in the rapidly growing medium of television, Rogers decided to stud...

Share "Just as there are seasons in the world around us, so there are in our interior life," Teresa of Avila wisely observed. "We cannot expect it to be otherwise." Spring is a season of renewal and rebirth. It's a time when buds become leaves and flowers, when healing rain washes city streets and falls like grace on parched country fields, when the hard ground beneath us softens to allow shoots of new life to emerge. As outside, so inside. Spring is a time for cleaning out and making way for fresh possibilities and new commitments. It's a time...

Share "St. Cuthbert (634 - 687) was an Anglo-Saxon who was educated at the Celtic monastery of Melrose, one of the many Anglo-Saxon saints who had a Celtic education and who sought to reconcile both peoples in the peace of Christ. He was consecrated bishop of Lindisfarne rather against his natural inclination to live a hermetic existence on the Inner Farne Island. His dying words on March 20 are a testament of peace: 'Always preserve divine charity among yourselves, and when you come together to discuss your common affairs, let your principal g...

Share Today is the birthday of Sir Richard Burton (1821 - 1890) who was one of England's greatest explorers, a renowned anthropologist, a brilliant linguist, an accomplished translator (including the Kama Sutra and 16 volumes of Arabian Nights), an inexhaustible writer of 50 books, and an obsessive traveler whose journeys to Africa, Asia, and the Americas made him a man in perpetual motion. His lifelong quest for gnosis led him to participate in a number of esoteric religious communities. The key to appreciating this extraordinary man is found ...