Patrick J. Kennedy, the former congressman and youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, recently appeared in an interview on the award-winning news broadcast, “CBS 60 Minutes.” The interview that Kennedy gave so intrigued me that I decided to read his new best-selling book, A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Illness and Addiction (New York: … Read More
David & Goliath: Have We Misunderstood a Classic Biblical Story?
Popular author Malcolm Gladwell is one of the best-selling non-fiction writers of our time. His insights into how we think, make decisions and process complex data are intriguing to most who’ve read his books. He can be exasperating, however, when he glosses over big and important issues to make a central point, something that he does quite often. In his … Read More
Romance, Human Bliss and the Changing Place of Marriage in Our Culture
In the introduction to his classic book, Orthodoxy, the famous G. K. Chesterton says that he wished “to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance.” This quote baffled me at first sight. How can a “mixture of the familiar … Read More
The Righteous Mind
Author Jonathan Haidt has written one of the most intriguing, and potentially helpful, books that I have come across this year. The title intrigues me instantly: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Random House, 2012). I published a comment about this book, along with a clip from NPR, on my Facebook page … Read More
Breaking the Conventional Lies That Surround Us: The Prisons in Our Minds
A Guest Post by Menno Fieguth Menno Fieguth is a long-time friend and supporter of ACT 3 in Canada. He is also a gifted writer who still stays pretty busy long after formal retirement. When I saw this article that he wrote many years ago (Nelson Mandela was still Prime Minister of South Africa as you will see in the … Read More
Why Do We Wait When Danger is So Near?
Yesterday I wrote about the recent storms in the southeastern portion of the United States. The violent storm that hit Joplin, Missouri, killed an estimated 142 people. What we know about this storm and this city is that twenty-minute sirens went off warning people to flee to cover. Many did flee but some waited. Why did these people wait? William … Read More
The Human Art of Prospection
I admit to a growing love for various kinds of psychology and psychological research. The human brain is simply amazing. And much of what distinguishes humans from lower primates, at least in terms of our brain, is in the frontal lobe of the human brain. After viewing a PBS series on emotional life I was drawn to read the book … Read More