Spirituality & Faith / 06 Jul 2020
Pillow Prayers For COVID Season
Do my prayers actually make a difference?
Grief & Coping / 30 Jun 2020
What Kids Can Teach Us About Being Adaptable During Covid
Some tips to help you and your kids become more adaptable.
Art & Culture / 29 Jun 2020
Queens Of Color: Role Models For A Troubled Time
My daughters and I flop into our seats and get ready to watch Our Weekly Show. It’s one of the most enjoyable TV series of which I’ve ever been a devoted fan. Each episode brings glamour and energetic performances, rivalries and alliances, humor and pathos. It even has a follow-up show with behind-the-scenes material. It’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, either a regular season or an All-Stars season, and it’s a heady combination of fashion, performing arts, jokes both silly and shady, biting competition and oversized personalities. We love this show, hosted by the internationally known drag personality RuPaul Charles, and during the week we check out the Instagram accounts of the show and of individual cast members, and occasionally watch online spinoff shows featuring a few of the most famous queens. My girls have even attended the New York City DragCon a few times. We thrill to the lip-sync competitions, the weekly runways, the Mini and Maxi challenges. We critique the outfits, makeup and accessories of the queens. We cheer for “death drops” and splits, cartwheels, and other extreme gymnastic routines. We clap for dance moves done in high heels, and laugh (or cringe) at comedy sketches and parodies. We get misty-eyed along with the queens who discuss challenges and struggles they have faced because they are gay and effeminate, and how they dealt with bullying, families who disagree with their lifestyles, and other problems. We are hooked on watching a show about LGBTQ+ people who are expressing themselves, carving niches for themselves in the entertainment world, and dealing with the joys and sorrows of being “different” from much of mainstream society. Going even further, many of the drag queens during these twelve regular seasons and five All-Star seasons have been QOC, Queens of Color. There have been many Black and…
Building New Identities / 25 Jun 2020
Lemonade From Lemons: Diversity And Inclusion In The Terrible ’20s
One of the most powerful changes to come from this era is the abrupt dismantling of the wall between our work and home lives.
Inspiring People, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 11, 2013
What Makes a Teacher Great – Remembering Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
When nearly one million people attend a teacher’s funeral, as happened this week in Jerusalem, one can’t help but pay attention. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, was a cultural, spiritual, intellectual and even political phenomenon. ?A former chief rabbi of Israel, the?spiritual leader of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and a teacher revered across many ethnic and religious borders, he?was?buried this week?in the largest funeral in Israel’s history. ?His enormous popularity can teach us so much about what it means to be a great teacher and how we can find the great teachers we......
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When was the last time you had really good dinner conversation with family or friends? Conversation that was not interrupted by the many ways our devices have a hold on us: the compelling ping calling us to a text or an email, the insatiable desire to check our Facebook page, tweet a thought, take a photo, or Google anything.? A conversation that was more than just a breezy catch up, one that was spirited and smart and made you think in some new way and become more connected to someone because of......
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Daily Life, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 09, 2013
Does The Road to Wisdom Start With the Journey or the Destination
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” Making the journey as interesting as the destination sounds great, and there are some great tips in this article here. Ultimately though, when I think about this article in the context of Emerson’s quote, I wonder if it’s more about who we are in the inside than what we do or see on the outside, that determines whether we succeed at making......
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News & Politics, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 08, 2013
New Movie Wadjda Sparks Reflection on Gender Equality
In this week’s Week in Wisdom, our weekly round up of what we’re reading and watching, I shared the trailer for the film Wadjda, a compelling film – one of those films you wake up thinking about the next morning.? It evokes so many questions and feelings. How will we in the West deal with the Arab Muslim version of feminism, which will be very different from ours? (Do a search for Arab – Muslim feminism and you will get close to 3 million results.) Can Muslim feminists reclaim their religion and......
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Inspiring People, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 07, 2013
10 Pieces of Wisdom from Desmond Tutu on his Birthday
Today – October 7 – is Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 82nd birthday.? I have the honor of serving on the Board of The Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation (DTPF)? whose mission is to help provide tools to create peace within, among and between people. Peace-making or what I call Peace-ing is an ongoing daily practice of attending to our own self and our ever widening webs of relationships that are our families, our communities and the diverse people of the world. Meeting Archbishop Tutu, hearing him speak and teach is an......
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Daily Life, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 04, 2013
Respecting Opposing Views: How to Look at the Other Side
Seems like every morning we wake to the overwhelming headlines of fighting, anger and polarization – there aren’t many conversations today that aren’t anchored by disagreement.? From Congress, the media, cocktail parties and even our own dinner tables we’re seemingly unable to see that “the other side’s” opinion may be based in some truth. Instead opposing views should immediately be dissed or destroyed. Remember the Aesop fable, “The Fox and the Grapes”? where a fox sees some high-hanging luscious grapes and wishes to eat them. The fox jumps and jumps but fails......
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News & Politics, Videos, Wisdom Warehouse |
October 04, 2013
Video: Brad Hirschfield on Washington’s Bad Example
From Odyssey Network’s Faith on the Record series: “This week the political fight in Washington came to a crisis point over the Affordable Care Act and the debt ceiling, leading to a shutdown of the federal government.? There is a lot we can learn from the bad example being set in our nation’s capital, says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President of CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.? “When doctrine and dogma get in the way of addressing the real pain that people are feeling, something is terribly wrong.”” Odyssey Networks......
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Sometimes we need to let the past be in the past. It’s not always easy – and it’s certainly not always appropriate choice. But sometimes it’s true that forgetting a part of your past is the best way to create a better future. Forgetting can be a remarkable gift – allowing ourselves to forget painful things we regret, resolving to forget the hurtful acts of others. Most of us have moments in our past that we wish were different, and many of us carry those hurts and resentments with us, each new......
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What would you do if forty days before your daughter’s wedding it gets called off?? In your disappointment, would you stew in sadness, would you cancel everything, try to get your money back? You don’t if you’re William and Carol Fowler. When their daughter Tamara’s wedding was canceled, the Fowlers called Hosea Feed the Hungry, a nonprofit organization that provides homeless individuals with services and resources, and invited 200 homeless people to what they called “The Fowler Celebration of Love.” William said he “prayed on it during the night and God had......
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This face could change our world and shape history.? Whether that happens or not, depends not only on him, but on you, and what you see when you see his face.? In part, what you see depends on whether or not you know to whom the face belongs, or if you simply see some religious guy – probably Muslim, or is that a Sikh turban?? But it’s actually bigger than that. What do any of us see when we see anyone or anything unfamiliar to us, “whatever religion ‘that guy’ follows”?? That’s......
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Latest Video
Listen To The Names Of The Victims First
A video where Brad Hirschfield lists the victims names in the recent Orlando shooting. Because first we need to internalize a tragedy before we jump to speak.
