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Small town/big city

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I loved living in our small New Hampshire town where the guy in the post office knew who you were as soon as you entered, and your plumber had a kid in your daughter’s class. Those small moments of connection cut through the feeling of anonymity from which we had fled in Brooklyn. But during our years in Chicago, we’ve learned that, given the right circumstances and the right location, you can...

Archive Diving

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Recently, Christina, a historian based in Jackson, Mississippi contacted me about a book project. She is writing about a program called Friends of the Children of Mississippi (FCM) which is an offshoot of the Child Development Group of Mississippi. CDGM, about which I’ve written in earlier postings, was one of the first of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs in the 60’s, one of the largest...

More on Spirituality

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My blog has a small readership, but they are as smart, thoughtful and empathetic as any group I know. They proved themselves once again in their responses to my recent posting on Spirituality. To jog your memory, it’s the one in which I bemoaned the fact that I felt like I wore cement boots that were keeping me from elevating, as it were, into another plane. I also mixed my metaphors by adding...

Just After The Big Bang

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Note: Sections of this entry were written in 1969, a time when “Negro” was considered a respectful means of address for Black people. I’ve chosen to leave the word as is. Doing otherwise would be anachronistic. The center is way out in the country, many miles down a red dirt road over which the trees arch in a way that must make it invisible from the air. There is a clearing with a white wooden...

Cement Boots: Musings on Spirituality

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It’s sad that we don’t plan as many Shabbat dinners with friends as we used to. We’re not alone in this. Our friend Bob Putnam in his ground-breaking book Bowling Alone has the numbers to show that the frequency of dinner parties has decreased steadily since the 60’s, part of a larger trend of declining social capital in our society. But we bucked the trend on a recent weekend and invited some...

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