On a recent trip to England, I was fortunate to make a side trip into London where I visited Toynbee Hall, the settlement house that inspired Jane Addams to found Hull House in Chicago in 1889. After graduating from Rockford Female Seminary, now Rockford University, Addams traveled to Europe, where she saw the extreme poverty of the East End of London, an area ridden with crime and a few years later the site of the Jack the Ripper murders. Because I work with the Community-Based Learning program

My sister has had her identity stolen numerous times, and I’d wager you know people who have also experienced it, if you haven’t yourself. “Identity theft” seems like a modern phrase, yet when you stop and think about it, identities have been systematically stolen throughout history. In Australia , it was the stolen generation -- indigenous children removed from their families to be raised by the immigrants and their descendants who invaded and settled there. Similar violations occurred in North

In late August of 1619, 400 years ago, the English ship the White Lion landed on the shore of Virginia selling a cargo of enslaved Africans. It is argued this was the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States. However, the practice of the transatlantic slave trade actually predated 1619 by 100 years. Additionally, the Africans in that cargo were not the first living in North America. Africans had been living here freely since the early 1500s. Despite being well-documented

Words matter. That point was driven home recently by my church's minister, as he reflected on how the hateful rhetoric against Hispanics influenced the murderous rampage in El Paso. Words matter. One Fox News commentator opined, "I'm not against immigrants; I'm for Americans," as if the two, somehow, were mutually exclusive groups of humanity. Words matter. A recent New York Times story reported, in great detail , how frequently the term "invasion" is applied by conservative news outlets. Here,

In my 15+ years as a parent, I’ve long maintained that sharing life lessons and advice and molding and shaping your kids is best done tapas-style, rather than buffet-style. Small bites, served often, are more effective than loading your kids up in one shot with an overloaded plate of guidelines they can’t digest. One thing I’ve drilled into our kids’ heads is a mantra that President Obama said often to his team during his 2008 campaign and also brought to the White House: Don’t do stupid s***.

Forty-five years ago this month, President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Nixon is a fascinating study in complexities and contradictions. He was highly intelligent, shy to the point where as a grown man he still had difficulty looking people in the eye, highly ambitious, paranoid and hungry for power. There is almost as much to admire about the man as there is to loathe. In a nutshell, at the heart of the Watergate Scandal was a man who wanted more power than he was entitled

One doesn’t paddle into the boundary waters seeking human stories. Instead we seek what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness,” or what Sigurd Olson described as “the antidote…of modern life.” On the other hand, there are so few human signs in this wilderness that we often do search them out. The ancient ochre pictographs, for example, remind us of the human need to mark our passing. One of my favorite boundary waters stories is set in the northern reaches of Basswood Lake. An abandoned Canadian

The recent anniversary of the music festival Woodstock reminds me that the tenets of the hippie generation represented by that event — peace over war, love over hate, and recognition that we’re all in this life and world together — have been mostly on the rise for the last 50 years. Both political parties found some value in those messages, if not always in the same way. But now, those who oppose those views are no longer willing to accept their minority status. A basic concept upon which our

Earlier this summer I told you about Monty and Rose, two piping plovers that decided to take up residence at Montrose Beach in Chicago. It was a remarkable occurrence for a fragile bird species that has been on the verge of vanishing from the Great Lakes region. But today, as summer winds down, the news from Montrose is good…remarkably good. Two of the chicks from the clutch of four eggs were successful, and the two fledglings are currently preparing to leave the beach and migrate south. This

“Anxiety is contagious. When you share an anxiety with someone, you feel better, but the listener may feel worse.” Reading this, I wondered, “Am I spreading the virus of anxiety when I talk about my dismay with what is happening to our democracy, our values, and our nation’s center of gravity?” “Anxiety is contagious” comes from research about emotional systems in families, churches, clubs, corporations, political parties. People in any organization bring a range of emotional reactivity to