relationships and community on Traffic

ABC News ran a story about neighborhood roads that have literally become commercial thoroughfares because GPS systems are routing traffic there, rather than along larger highways. There are other prob...

My husband, Jeff, is an excellent driver. He has never had an accident, excepting two incidents in high school which hardly bear mentioning— Several years ago, I was driving across town to get to a sp...

Take the cul-de-sac, for example, which is my metaphor for the world of suburban monotony and triviality that so many Western Christians find themselves trapped in. The literal cul-de-sac (i.e., a dea...

Tom and Angela had lived in their neighborhood for about twelve years without really getting to know many people. They lived in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses and had limited communication and interact...

Tom and Angela had lived in their neighborhood for about twelve years without really getting to know many people. They lived in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses and had limited communication and interact...

In one of Aesop's familiar fables, an old man has several sons who are always fighting among themselves. He had often, but without success, exhorted them to live together in harmony. One day, he c...

The saints of the church flicker like candles along a dark corridor. They are not 1400-watt LED floodlights to blind you with their brilliance; those are the celebrities. A celebrity is a flashbulb st...

We argue with our alarm clock, which insists we wake up. We argue with our clothes that wear out or stop fitting. We argue with our bodies, we argue with our pets, we argue with bumps in the sidewalk ...

The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...

In his excellent book, Just Courage , founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen articulates some of the realities behind the systemic oppression of the poor around the world...

Never about, always to.

Have you ever felt like some people take longer to leave a parking spot when you are waiting for them? Well, apparently you are not just imagining it…Three separate studies have demonstrated that this...

If we want to connect with people, we can be like the census taker who had driven many miles down a remote country road to reach a mountain cabin. As he pulled up, a woman sitting on the porch yelled ...

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

At what age do you think it's appropriate to tell a highway it's adopted?

Entering a place that is new to us, or seeing a familiar place anew, we move from part to part, simultaneously perceiving individual persons and things and discovering their relationships, so that, wi...

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...

After several years of engagement in justice work Warren says in reflection on the story of the Good Samaritan, “I realized it’s not okay to have a road that perpetuates the beating, robbing, and pote...

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profoun...

My body continually takes me into place . It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and witness of being-in-place.

Communication usually fails, except by accident

Rumor travels faster, but it don't stay put as long as truth.

Communicating with people is often easier said than done. Take for instance this apocryphal story of the census taker who had to venture many miles down a country road to reach a cabin. As the man pul...

Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken languag...

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”

The truth, however, is that when we say yes to invitations that keep us compulsively busy, we may be exhibiting a lazy ambivalence that actually keeps us distracted from the invitations that matter mo...

Never in history has distance meant less. . . . Figuratively we “use up” places and dispose of them much in the same way we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the...

Do you hesitate, man, to go this way, when this is the way that God came to you?

From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.