I love these first weeks of the year when many of the emails I receive begin with a “Happy New Year” greeting. I enjoy reading and returning these wishes, and this year, because of an essay I’ve been ...

A friend asked me this as we sat at a laminated table eating big salads in a little take-out restaurant facing a riverway. It was a recent gorgeous September afternoon, that rare kind of day that is ...

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed …” — Wallace Stegner The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set ...

Many years ago we had staying with us a clergyman to whom I listened with close attention. One day he spoke of someone as “having the rare grace of humility.” I think he must have meant that this ...

Whom would you trust more: an expert who seems to have all of the answers or one who admits what they don’t know? We have spent the past five years studying that question and the many ways people may ...

The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, a friend of Adam Smith, called humility one of the “monkish” virtues, and he didn’t mean that as a compliment. Humble people, he seemed to say, weren ...

DAVENPORT -- Charisma and spirit made Lynn Mousel willing to join the Congregation of the Humility of Mary. Ms. Mousel, of Des Moines, recently began the process to become a vowed member of the ...

U.S. Coast Guard Academy Cadets raise the first wall on a Habitat for Humanity home Sept. 8, 2012. The on-going project is sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association class of ...