government and politics on Improvisation

Churchill’s extraordinary powers of oratory became legendary; his broadcasts to the nation and speeches in the House of Commons during World War II are still widely celebrated. Yet, not everyone was c...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.

Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one needs.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to ...

We are all imperfect. we can not expect perfect government.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and ob...

War is what happens when language fails.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

The million little things that drop into your hands - the small opportunities each day brings He leaves us free to use or abuse and goes unchanging along His silent way.

Wonderful Counselor, open our ears So we may hear your song God is with us, God is near Mighty God, open our eyes So we may see you at work For goodness, truth, and justice Everlasting Father, open ...

God is infinitely patient. He will not push himself into our lives. He knows the greatest thing he has given us is our freedom. If we want habitually, even exclusively, to operate from the level of ou...

[The] animating premise of Democratic liberalism, that the federal government has the ability to solve virtually any problem it chooses to take on, domestic or foreign.

There is no lack of pain and suffering in the world. Look around. Read the newspaper. Click on the Internet. Scroll Facebook or read a tweet. Suffering is always present like the paparazzi. It seems t...

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Freedom is found when undesirable habits are identified and the cue-routine-reward structure is defined, pulled apart, and reframed. In the context of our discussion, the cue is a desire for comfort, ...

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

Most of us in the United States know the famous “I have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the 1963 March on Washington. On a sweltering, humid day in the n...

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

From 1992 to 1995 the world witnessed one of the worst civil conflicts, the Bosnian War. Three factions, each tied to a religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), began attacking...

Stewardship means to consciously take up our cultural power, investing it intentionally among the seemingly powerless, putting our power at their disposal to enable them to cultivate and create.

Shakespeare’s play, Measure for Measure is an exploration of the nature of power and mercy. Isabella, the novice nun, trying to persuade the tyrant Angelo to have mercy on her brother Claudio, utters ...

Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that ...

We didn’t have a lot of rules [at the food pantry at St. Gregory, an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco]. You could be a drunk or junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t...