We’ve considered this week the virtue of silence – of spending time in silence and of exercising the right we have to be silent. But perhaps the question arises in your mind, “what, then, am I supposed to do in...

It’s one thing to spend time in silence—it is quite another to be silent ourselves.   Do you ever find it interesting that when the police arrest somebody on suspicion of a crime, they don’t tell them they have the...

When was the last time you spent more than a few seconds…in genuine silence?  No music, no television, no iPhone alerts…or scrolling; no honking car horns or ambulance sirens; not even the conversation of a friend or the sound of...

The thing about an epitaph is that it is ultimately a kind of judgment—a short summation of the life of a person.  And whether we have a headstone or not, we’ll all have an epitaph written for us one way or...

Thinking about our epitaph can help us not to live life by accident.  But there’s also a danger in endeavoring to write it ourselves—i.e., the presumption that we decide how we will be remembered. Thomas Jefferson is a case in point.  He...

I don’t mean to be morbid, but have you ever thought about what you’d want written on your headstone when you’re buried? It’s actually a rather revealing exercise, to try and come up with the few words you’d want to...

We’ve talked quite a bit about our own opinions this week…but what about the opinions of others? Aesop’s fable of the Miller, his son and the Donkey offers a warning: “An old Miller and his Son were on their way...

We’ve been considering opinions this week – what it means to have one, how we should think about our own opinions, and so forth. “But,” you may ask, “why does any of this matter?  What difference does it make if...

Young CS Lewis made the mistake of forming an opinion without any actual thought or knowledge behind it.  Bu he’s not alone.   We all have a tendency to form opinions prematurely based on little more than our feelings or...