I’m spending my summer in Minnesota, near the Canadian border, thinking and teaching about the difference between wildness and wilderness. The Wilderness Act of 1964 allows Congress to designate “wilderness areas.” In 1978, the boundary waters canoe area wilderness was created here. At a million acres, it’s the largest wilderness in the Midwest. There are now nearly 110 million acres of wilderness in the U.S. So what makes a wilderness? The Act defines it as an area “untrammeled by man, where

A couple of legislative sessions ago, a new law was passed requiring all public high school students in Illinois to take a semester of civics before graduating. On its face, this is a noble idea; we adults should help our kids to become better citizens. They should understand the importance of making informed decisions before voting, of how to balance their own interests with the interests of others. And perhaps most importantly, kids need to understand the difference between those who want to

I thought I used to understand Twitter. But now, after Donald Trump, everything is in disarray. When Trump tweets, is it policy or just an opinion? No one knows. On the one hand, the courts appear to be interpreting statements about a “travel ban” as a matter of policy. But does this mean that everything Trump tweets is to be construed as an official proclamation worthy of preservation in the national archives? And would this apply to everything, including covfefe? On the other hand,

I am involved in a national leader-training effort through my Lutheran denomination. Called “Natural Systems Academy,” it is based on Murray Bowen’s Family Systems research. It involves church leaders attending four years of workshops to learn how to help congregational pastors stay calm and thoughtful in the midst of anxious or conflicted situations. Sound easy? What’s easy for any leader in such tense situations is to react by getting defensive and losing emotional control. To not fall into

Recently, WNIJ reported the Rockford Police Department was offering a woman's self-defense class and that the class was already at capacity. In WNIJ’s story, Deputy Chief Mike Dalke noted awareness is half the battle in self-protection. With all due respect, I must disagree. It appears, from information in WNIJ’s story, the class will provide training on awareness and personal safety tactics. But, like virtually all women’s self-defense classes, the focus is on assaults by strangers. Yet sexual

Many of the small towns throughout the region from Mt. Morris to Genoa and Freeport to Waterman, the city councils made up of local business owners. This can create a list of problems. In one community, a councilman who's also a business owner worked to shut down live outdoor concerts at a nearby business. It was obvious the interest of this councilman was his specific business and not that of the community, many of which vocally let the council know they wanted live music. In another town led

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Recently my wife attended a Social Justice camp at NIU as a representative of DeKalb School District 428. She shared this quote from the camp on Social Media, and it has been resonating in my mind for the last month. While it’s an uncomfortable analogy, the vivid imagery it invokes is quite effective. What I’ve learned in the last 10 years of community involvement is that excluding people from the table is a well-known and commonly used tactic.

State guides to historic markers will tell you that “on this site a battle was won” and “on this site an invention was first tested.” These are all sites of public history. But there is also personal history, which William Wordsworth celebrated as “those nameless, unremembered acts of love that form the best part of a good man’s life.” Nearly all of us have benefited from these acts of love: a word of wise encouragement that stuck with us, or a little life lesson we’ve never forgotten. But there

Donald Trump won the presidency, at least in part, because he pledged to bring back coal jobs. He promised to end what he called his predecessor’s war on coal and signed an executive order in March ordering agencies to review or rescind many Obama-era environmental regulations. But a recent Columbia University study finds that these regulations aren’t the cause of most of the lost coal jobs. What is are clean renewable energy, cleaner sources like natural gas, automation, and a drop in

Superheroes are everywhere right now. Wonder Woman and Spider-Man Homecoming are drawing huge crowds to theaters around the country. Dozens of popular TV shows chronicle the exploits of various superheroes. Why are we so fascinated with superheroes? A superhero is defined as a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers or an exceptionally skillful or successful person. In these challenging times, having a superhero to resolve political, economic, and social problems does sound