The chances of two traditional, Hebrew-speaking Jewish men, one from Rhode Island and the other from Arizona, winding up in West Virginia for the National Endowment for the Humanities' "Voices from the Misty Mountains and The Power of Storytelling" July institute for teachers is surely quite ...
The spiders spin their webs above fruit-laden vines. Watch out for wasps and bees. Gnats could invade your space. And so could mosquitoes. The foliage could hide ticks, chiggers or mites. Worst of all, you could stumble onto a snake or invade the privacy of poison ivy vines.All that nastiness ...
Whether it be insect pests, fungal diseases or simple decline, many tree problems can be traced to the tree's root zone, to what's happening beneath the soil surface.We tend to overlook this fact, first because the root zone is hidden and it's only natural to focus on what we can see and, ...
A few years ago I was at a tree conference and Doug Tallamy of the University of Delaware was presenting on oaks and native gardening. He made an off-the-cuff remark about berries from the nandina shrub (Nandina domestica, a.k.a. sacred bamboo or heavenly bamboo) being toxic to songbirds and ...
If a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?That sort of question has caused many a college Freshman's eyes to glaze over. Who cares? Yet, all of us are operating off of some philosophy - some way that we view the world. And the holiday we celebrate ...
Last Friday I received an email that made me think about something. This was a mass mailing from my campus' student police department, required under federal law to be sent, stating there had been a sexual assault on campus. The email did not use the words sexual assault, it used the words ...
A Christian pastor and a Muslim Imam walk into a conference room.No, its not the beginning of a really bad joke. Its something that will actually happen next Thursday evening! Why? Because its time we stopped talking about and at each other and started talking with each other!I don't know if ...
Have you been to a Pride Day celebration? Or maybe a women's march? How about a Black Lives Matter Rally?All of these are important groups facing amazingly important issues, but are all of these issues as separate and compact as we want to think they are? When talking about the issues that ...
We've all worked with someone like Chris."Chris" (name changed to protect the guilty) and I worked together at a chemical company before I entered vocational ministry, and Chris knew exactly how things ought to be. He knew how HR could be improved, lectured the rest of us regarding shift ...
Do you look at people of Walmart and think, "Hey I've seen that lady downtown?" Do you see a poorly dressed person on the street and think that redneck is going nowhere? Then you just like me, my friend are guilty of classism and judging others based on their economic class.The concept of ...
