Inspiration: Essays & Musings

From filmmaker Michael More: "This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. In those cases, we were...

At Half Price Books the other day I picked up a copy of five short pieces by Denis Diderot, the 18th Century French philosopher of the Enlightenment: This is Not a Story and other stories, a new translation by P.N. Furbank. (Oxford University Press, 1991) The last...

In Karen Armstrong's book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she quotes Confucius, who said that the family is the first school of compassion. I've been thinking lately about how that applied to my family. Three things that  I learned when I was three — and my...

Periodically, Slate has been running a piece about American events written using the tone and language US reporters typically employ when writing about events elsewhere. It's disconcerting, enlightening and in a very direct way, about compassion. The latest is about...

We publish a series of classic fiction books that focus on particular peace & justice topics. Most are short stories, but End of the Line is an anthology of five short novels about the death penalty. As I re-read my introduction to the book -- about the impact...

At the beginning of our weekly staff gathering yesterday, Ann Helmke, the peaceCENTER's director, told us that all the traffic lights went out downtown. We leaned forward in our chairs, primed for a gory story of traffic snarls, blaring horns, some Texas-sized road...