Today I turn 75! It’s hard to believe I have reached this milestone, although frequent visits to the physiotherapist reminds me that my body needs more care.  “Slow down, you are not Superman!” is a frequent instruction. I share this birthday with my twin sister, Ann, who lives in the UK. We celebrated together last year when she and her husband […]

“Finding hope in the practice of walking through the worst.”  This was the theme of a sermon by our rector, the Rev. Eileen O’Brien, as we celebrated Founders Day at St James’ Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas last December. “There’s no pretense that injustice and torture and murder are anything other than injustice, torture, and murder.” However, “within the same […]

A special guest column featuring a talk by Prof. Gerald Pillay, President of Initiatives of Change International (IofC), at a global forum in July on Healing the Wounds of the Past at the IofC conference center in in Caux, Switzerland. Pillay was born in South Africa where he taught ecclesiastical history at the University of South Africa. He also taught […]

This month, I joined colleagues for an Initiatives of Change fellowship call when we reflected on the life of Mary McLeod Bethune, the pioneering educator and civil rights activist. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, she became one of the most important Black educators and civil and women’s rights leaders of the twentieth century. In 1904 she started the Daytona […]

In 2001, the University of Michigan published Intergroup Dialogue: Deliberative Democracy in School, College, Community and Workplace.  With case studies edited by David Schoem and Sylvia Hurtado it offered one of the most comprehensive reviews of the role of dialogue as an essential tool for healthy democracies. A chapter by Karen Elliott Greisdorf describes the early formation of the Initiatives […]

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Richmond’s first “walk through history.” On a sweltering June 18 afternoon, people from 50 cities and 25 countries joined Richmonders of all backgrounds to mark places that had been too painful or shameful to acknowledge. The walk was the highlight of the Healing the Heart of America conference, “an honest conversation on race, reconciliation, […]

A recent op-ed in the Daily Beast by Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, declared, “The left needs a spiritual renaissance. So does America.” The writers point to the failures of neoliberalism – rampant consumerism, economic inequality, loss of community – as the […]

In 1849, Henry Brown escaped from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, by arranging to have himself mailed in a crate to Philadelphia. Henry “Box” Brown as he became known, was among some fifty-five men owned by William Barret who had sold Brown’s pregnant wife and child to another slave master. Most of the men worked in Barret’s tobacco factory. Brown’s story […]

Incidents of people of color, particularly Black men, meeting their death at the hands of police occur with heartbreaking frequency. This week, I took part in a deeply moving Zoom call with some of the Initiatives of Change USA network in a dozen cities, including alumni of the Community Trustbuilding Fellowship and Caux Scholar programs. The expected agenda for the […]