Category: English

Prefer to listen. Strikebreakers do not help. They do not rescue. They step into the space where solidarity was meant to stand. In return, they receive a wage. A temporary payment for a permanent wound to collective power. When I try to understand their place in the moral architecture of society, I find myself circling Read more

Prefer to listen. Nightingale. Florence Nightingale. That is…it. A singular figure whose name has become shorthand for an entire moral horizon. We call her the founder of modern nursing, but that phrase barely captures the magnitude of what she did. She reimagined care as a discipline, a science, a social force. She fused compassion with Read more

Prefer to listen. Human language, by which I mean not the idiom, but the very act of exchanging meaning, has grown more intricate with time. Our vocabularies have expanded, our metaphors multiplied, our channels of expression diversified. And yet, our ability to truly convey what we mean has diminished. Deteriorated. We speak with greater sophistication, Read more

Prefer to listen. Let me begin with a story. I visited my younger brother in his hospital room at 11:00 a.m. on a Friday. He had been admitted the night before after falling in his home. When I arrived, he had just returned from a CT scan of his head. “What happened?” I asked, both Read more

Prefer to listen. During the halftime of Super Bowl LX, a simple line drifted across my TV screen, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Good vs evil. Light vs darkness. For a few decades, I have held a faint conviction, that love and hate, as well as good and evil for that Read more

Prefer to listen. God is everything imagination imagines God to be. Some traditions speak of God as a being, a presence with intention, personality, and will. Others speak of God as Being itself, the ground of existence, the “is-ness” from which all things arise. Some imagine God as energy, the pulse that animates galaxies and Read more

Prefer to listen. When you look at the world in all its unruly diversity, what reveals itself to you? Do you witness despair braided with hope, happiness shadowed by sadness, smiles rising beside tears, joy intertwined with suffering, each emotion leaning on the next like threads in a single tapestry? And when you lift your Read more

Prefer to listen. Death is certain. Death is inevitable. And yet, among all the events that shape a human life, it is the one for which we least prepare. People readily prepare for what they expect: a wedding, a vacation trip, a job interview, the birth of a child. They even prepare for what they Read more

Prefer to listen. A patient sits across from a clinician. The clinician glances at a screen and says, “Your results are in. High.” A pause. “I’ve written a prescription. Pick it up at the pharmacy.” In many cases, that is the whole encounter. No inquiry into the patient’s life. No curiosity about what high might Read more

Prefer to listen. It follows you. It needs you. It will not leave. Who, or what, recommended that product, that podcast, that article, that video, or that song to you? Was it a friend who senses the drift of your interests? A family member who has watched your curiosities unfurl over years? Or was it Read more