[Acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:] This award is for mothers, who sit at railway stations to try to eke out an existence, selling potatoes, selling mealies, selling produce. This award is for you, fathers, sitting in a single-sex hostel,...
I was with the national tour of "Les Miserables" and we were performing in Salt Lake City. At the time, we were doing the poster sales for Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights AIDS. If someone donated $50, they would receive a poster signed by the entire cast. After one...
There is a dignified nobility in humankindWe know it when we see itNurse tenderly caring for your loved one in the hospice house as she travels toward the great beyondPolitician choosing integrity, knowing full well he won't be elected againPastor remaining true to...
The signs are all around us. We can see them springing up like wildflowers after the prairie rain. People who had fallen asleep are waking up. People who had been content to watch are wanting to join. People who never said a word are speaking out. The tipping point of...
It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels... It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they'd tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they'd seen as hungry, tired, footsore as the rest of them. But it was also the...
Our situation of "knowing God" is thus similar to that of a baby being held by its mother. In her hands, the baby does not "understand" the mother but rather experiences being known by the mother. In the same way, the revelation of God we have received from God is not...
Luther said, "Remember your baptism." How can people do that? In Luther's church, most of the baptisms were of infants. They were brought by their mothers and fathers and they were baptized. So how could they remember their baptisms? Luther knew that when they became...
Notice what happens in Luke 11 when the woman in the crowd starts praising Jesus as the object of adoration and his mother as blessed: Being made the focus of attention and adoration makes him nervous, perhaps even belligerent. He is the signpost, not the Sign, and so...
“How was your day?”…A mother I know has a different way of asking the same question. As she tucks her children into bed each night, she asks them a question: “Where did you meet God today?” And they tell her, one by one: a teacher helped me; there was a homeless...