After reading my post on Day Two, a friend asked a perfectly reasonable question: “What is the takeway for you each year you attend this Forum?” My answer: exhausted as I am, back home after the third and final full day of the Forum: I feel, as I’ve heard said in another context, “touched, moved […]
Tonight on return from a long day at Forum events, I opened an e-mail from my retired friend and colleague John Borgen. In the e-mail was a link to this song sung by a young person with a spectacular voice, Jackie Evancho. Somehow, it fits like a glove the earlier part of the day, and […]
UPDATE March 8, 2012: A personal photo album from the entire Nobel Peace Prize Forum is accessible here. A wonderful Jazz combo from Augsburg College opened the 2012 Forum, first with a fine rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine, and Sting’s We Work the Black Seam Together. It was a neat beginning to a superb day, […]
About this time of year in 2002, Paul Miller and I met each other at a meeting, and we learned we lived in the same community. Paul was already active in the cause of Justice for Haiti, and over the coming months he began to urge me to visit the island Republic with him. It […]
About 60 of us dropped by Woodbury’s indoor City Park Saturday morning to meet Congresswoman Betty McCollum, whose 4th Congressional District moves to the east in January, 2013. Of course, during this time of transition, my town remains in Cong. Bachmann’s district until January, but all candidates for all elective offices need to become acquainted […]
Today is one of those Birth Days in my family circle. It is unusual in that there are three today: Oldest son, Tom; spouse, Cathy; daughter-in-law Robin all begin a new year in their respective histories. Tom was born less than three weeks after the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan ‘shew’, February 9, 1964. […]
Wednesday noon we attended Ash Wednesday service at the local Catholic Church, and that afternoon I walked around with ashes on my forehead (“dirt” as the Priest described it), not making a particular statement with it. It’s the one time of the year when you can sort of figure out who might be Catholic. Back […]
There will be endless political verbiage about the new Minnesota political map, released yesterday. The implications depend on where you live, what your political leanings are, or who you like, politically. (In some places there will be an incumbent Republican (or Democrat) against another incumbent from the same political party.) It will be a very […]
Sometimes, something is just too good to wait. This morning I had the opportunity to re-union in St. Paul with Marion Brady. Marion and I were long time members of a quality education e-list maintained by the National Education Association (NEA). We “met” on-line in the mid-1990s, and had only seen each other in person […]