My Mennonite Missionary Father in front of his Home in Paraguay It’s the ‘in’ thing: Simplify. Unclutter. Less (smaller) is better. As I’ve written about elsewhere, my good Mennonite missionary father was anti-materialist and anti-consumerist to an extreme. He firmly believed that God only…
I am pleased to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Harriet Brown. She is a writer, magazine editor and professor of magazine journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Harriet writes,…
I have suggested in prior articles that we all have circles of belonging that delineate who’s included in our in-groups and who represents the ‘other’ in our out-groups. Most of us divide the world into “us” and “them” based on a…
Apricot Irving, award-winning author of The Gospel of Trees I am sitting on the steps of an 8’x11’ shed (though I prefer to call it a tiny house) in a green meadow, just down the hill from the house that I share with two…
Belonging means feeling part of a group. It’s “we-ness.” Social identity theory proposes that the groups we belong to (e.g., social class, family, etc.) are typically important sources of pride and self-esteem. They also give us a fundamental sense of who “we” are, a sense…
There’s a lot of discussion about the risks of COVID-19 for the elderly. But I worry more about the impact of this pandemic on our just-turned-teenager grandson. He’s at the stage in life when he’s very invested in social connections and…