Fred’s Blog

Earlier this summer I was hurrying to a meeting with our chief of police and was pulled over and given a ticket for going too fast through a reduced speed zone. Yes, I did think about mentioning [...]

Part of the appeal of Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, is his invitation to a time before the modern world conspired to eliminate the continuity of more tight-knit communities with shared [...]

I hear a growing amount of conversations about where people are in the various stages of their lives. It’s good to have a general framework – especially when wrestling with something that [...]

One of the more useful powers granted to foundations is that of convening. It’s not forcing people to show up or collaborate but inviting people to a useful exchange of ideas and stories, such as [...]

I recently listened to David Brooks speaking at Q on the topic of humility. I made a note when he said, “If you sample some of the commencement addressees being broadcast on C-Span these days, [...]

Someone once wrote that freedom has an expiration date, and this may prove true. A little more than 200 years passed between the time Moses delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt to the time the [...]

After my father died we were sorting through his papers and found a stock certificate for 100 worthless shares. They were all that was left of what had once been his retirement plan. He had [...]

Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, is the story of Sir Thomas More, who served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor, Archbishop and trusted adviser until More could no longer support the King in [...]

If you read biographies, you notice a pattern that is frequent in the lives of many great leaders. Early success and then years of obscurity and hardship – even rejection and exile. Two good [...]

For his Easter column, “President Carter, Am I a Christian?”, The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. In the column Nick asked, “With Easter [...]