How the mighty ripples of school transformation have spread! I just spent two weeks working with Unity Grammar, a K-12 co-ed Islamic faith-based school in Sydney, Australia. Yes, the clothing is different, and prayer time more frequent, but the hospitality, generosity, and fervor with which these edu-leaders want to change the traditional model of education [...]
Is the nuclear family, an icon of the 20th century American dream, a failed human experiment? Hidden within the seven weeks I spent on Leg 1 of Wisdom Road this fall was a feature of rural America that is becoming as extinct as the buffalo that once roamed the plains: large, extended families. As I [...]
The guiding values of McGillis School, in Hebrew and English A visit to the McGillis School in Salt Lake City has made a fine end to Leg 1 of Wisdom Road. McGillis is a K-8 school with several very interesting and almost unique elements that I think make it a sure bet to [...]
Joe White Mountain and his granddaughter, Tabitha Keller, who introduced us. Teaser: Joe reports first hand from an elder who was at Custer's Last Stand: the history books are wrong about how Custer died! If two families have a dispute of any kind, the older people would put on a feed and they [...]
Somewhere on this Sunday morning, church bells ring to call the faithful to kneel before a stained glass reprieve. There ain't nothin' short of dyin'Half as lonesome as the soundOn the sleepin' city sidewalksSunday mornin' comin' down Kris Kristofferson My God, the hues and textures of autumn grassy plains tipped by low morning sunlight, [...]
The real core of our lives is simplicity. There is almost zero chance that anyone who reads this blog got to experience what I did. I don't know many other things in life I can say that about. If a batch of still-warm chocolate chip cookies became sentient and knew how they were welcomed by [...]
I had multiple people say to me, ‘I have never voted for a Democrat in my life. You will be the first one I vote for'. The young redhead in a funky multi-colored jacket that looked like it might have been sewn for a theater wardrobe greeted me at the door of the equally funky [...]
East-central South Dakota is a poster of American farmland; corn, soybeans, cattle, and silos, out to every horizon, punctuated by tiny hamlets with populations that rarely exceed two digits, and a few larger towns with a gas station, a truck repair shop, a few stoplights, churches, and a school. Over the decades, the quintessential small [...]
The things that break us are not the not the core stuff. It's the ancillary stuff. An order of Benedictine nuns came to Yankton, South Dakota in the 1880's and has been a mainstay of the town along the Missouri River ever since. Today they share a campus with Mt. Marty University and the largest [...]
Were Muddy Mo’s a campus cafe there would be bad folk singers on a microphone late in the evening; and were it a bar it would be the kind with local brews on tap where everybody knows your name. Instead it is a simple coffee shop in an old brick building on one of the [...]
