Generosity

Most Thursday evenings I spend in the garden at Ward and Chandler.* Usually I am by myself, puttering. Last night was different. If you had come by the garden yesterday you would have seen neighbors “shopping” among the rows. In...

“We are not just what we eat but how we eat,” says John Schwenkler, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, in a recent article on nourishing America from The Philanthropic Enterprise’s Trends in Innovation series. Americans...

Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer...

The challenge of modern life seems to be to learn how to cope with paradox and the sense of crazy-making it can produce. News reports are filled with horrendous tales that portray the most unpredictable elements of nature and...

When Edd Conboy took over orchestrating the Breaking Bread meals at Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia, he focused on developing as many ways as possible to counteract the constant messages about scarcity that their guests encounter each and every...

For five years, my family lived in Wilmore, Kentucky, home of Asbury University and Asbury Seminary. Living two blocks from the center of town, I could walk everywhere — to work, the post office, the gym, the hair cutter,...

In October 2010 Hannah Brencher had recently moved to New York City. She was feeilng lonely and depressed when her heart one day was touched by a sad-looking woman she saw on the subway. She started writing a letter to...

The character of a neighborhood—strongly expressed by how much people help and trust each other—may influence its collective health and economic survival even more than such obvious indicators as income levels and foreclosure rates, a long-term study suggests. Harvard sociologist...

Gerard’s story says more than all the speaking, action steps and theory some of us spend our time on. On the professional question, we all speak for the citizen, but every place needs someone like Gerard, paid to create...