A few months ago I met a young Egyptian judge who was in Washington, DC, taking part in a fellowship program. “The problem with Americans is that they never have any time,” he told me. “Often I start a conversation with a person and he will say “Oh, that’s so interesting, I’d love to hear more about that.” But when […]

Driving to Delaware for the family Thanksgiving we stopped for lunch. “My name is Christy and I will be taking care of you,” announces the bright young woman who hands us a menu. And she really seems to mean it. Later we stop at Kmart for supplies. We remark to one of the staff that the store has advertised that […]

I am flying home after an intensive two weeks in Europe! I have enjoyed my brief stay in the Netherlands. I like its human-sized scale, the streets full of cyclists (the Dutch must be a healthy people!) and the trams. On my arrival I am even allowed to travel without paying the train fare to The Hague. The machine had […]

My week-long program of talks, workshops and consultations in the UK continued in Bradford. Here are more notes from the road: Bradford’s magnificent town hall features a 220-foot clock tower modeled on the Campanile of the Palazzo Vacchio in Florence. In its heyday as the center of the wool trade, Bradford shared with Florence the distinction of being the only […]

In my book I write about Richard Hawthorne, a Nottingham printer, who has built a web of friendships in his native UK city: “In the course of a day, a visitor moving through the city with Hawthorne might expect to meet a leading imam, the editor of the newspaper, the president of the chamber of commerce, and a director of […]

A few months ago I took a call from Harold Vines. I had not heard from Harold since the late nineties when he came to take part in a Hope in the Cities training retreat for community leaders in Richmond. Harold told me he had seen the advance notice of The Trust Factor in Washington, DC. He had recently retired […]

A “racial caste system” is alive in America, says Michelle Alexander, whose book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, provides some shocking statistics. I heard her speak in Richmond last week. More African Americans are under some form of correctional control than were enslaved in 1850. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised (i.e. […]

On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks our youngest son, Andrew, who was 15 at the time asked us, “Will this change our lives?”  While we wanted to say, “No,” we understood that we had entered a new era of uncertainty. Last Sunday, on the tenth anniversary of that fateful day, my wife and I participated in the […]

I write this from Cape Cod with the winds of Irene rattling the house. On the way from Richmond last week, Susan and I visited the “Breakers,” the seventy-room summer “cottage” built in 1892 by the Vanderbilts in Newport, Rhode Island. The end of the Gilded Age, symbolized by such remarkable monuments to wealth and power and to a grand […]

I was pleasantly surprised by Joe Nocera’s column in the New York Times on August 22.   He apologized. In an earlier column he had compared Tea Party Republicans to terrorists. Like many of us, Nocera was outraged that those who precipitated the financial crisis are not being prosecuted more vigorously; by the attempts to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial sector […]