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Several years ago, I heard about a magical place in Wisconsin, the grotto in Dickeyville. A grotto is a man-made cave, meant to be a picturesque place for reflection. This grotto is located on the grounds of the Holy Ghost parish and was built by Mat…
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Dinnertime at my house has been a bit strange the last few nights. It all started last week when a friend and I pulled out a jigsaw puzzle to work on one evening. We opened up the box, dumped the contents out in front of us, and began sifting through…
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Monday night I was driving back to the Quad Cities from the north. You may remember it was a little stormy that night. After significant delays and the opportunity to make some new friends who huddled with me in the restroom at a BP gas station, I he…
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It was a pretty quiet afternoon in our house. My four-year-old daughter was coloring at the dining room table. I looked in from our kitchen and saw that my toddler son had crawled up on a chair to sit at the table next to his sister. I watched, unnot…
Herbert Spencer was one of Europe’s most famous intellectuals in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But this philosopher, sociologist, and evolutionary theorist lost plenty of favor in his later years. Critics assailed him for his absence…
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As a church this winter, we read the book “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson. He is one of the founders of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Alabama. This group of lawyers, interns, paralegals, and other justice workers advocate for equal treatment…
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The Bible is such an amazing book. This morning in Heart Soul Mind Bible study we enjoyed a terrific discussion of Psalm 119. We learned a lot of fun facts about this piece of scripture: it’s 176 verses long, divided into 22 sections, and, within eac…
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One of the joys of working with teenagers is that they so often have a way of articulating what adults are sometimes unable to vocalize. As an example, last summer I accompanied a group of middle school girls to a local nursing home to visit some of…
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Six months before his death, John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University: “So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can…
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One of my most treasured belongings is a quilt my grandmother made. I have others from her that are more technically impressive, but this mismatching simple nine-patch scrap quilt is my favorite. It’s made entirely by hand and the stitches that hold…
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When I was in high school, I worked at a homeschooling curriculum supply store. Our shop was wall-to-wall with books, games, programs, software; basically every supply a person would need to educate a child at home from preschool to 12th grade. This…
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The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing. Those words, penned by Edmund Sears in 1849, conclude the first stanza of the carol “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” On this twelfth and final day of Christmas, I hope you have managed to…