Human Trustees

Besides numerous children’s books, over a dozen biographies have been penned about Harriet Tubman, the intrepid slave fugitive who went back numerous times to Maryland’s eastern shore to free at least 70 fellow slaves. She is the American hero who will grace our US $20 bill with her image in 2030. My interest here is to probe Tubman’s spiritual life…

I would not have written this post had I not been part of a foursome virtual book club. One of these friends from my 1970s seminary days in the Boston area had been reading a book by award-winning author specialized in early American history (four awards, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize): Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Eye of…

On September 16, 2022, the Iranian morality police arrested a 22-year-old Kurdish woman visiting relatives in Teheran likely because her hijab had slipped a bit over her head, showing some hair. Three days later, Mahsa Amini died in police custody, presumably from the beatings she received. Within days, dozens of Iranian cities in all parts of the country exploded in…

  I rarely get so absorbed by a book I’m reading. But I could hardly put down Ronald F. Inglehart’s 2021 book (Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next?). An emeritus professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Inglehart is the “Founding President of the World Values Survey Association, which since 1981 has repeatedly surveyed…

In the first half of this post, the economist delegated by the US to last year’s G7 meeting in Cornwall, Felicia Wong, told us that she and her colleagues from the other 6 nations have noticed a shift in economic thinking. Call it the Washington Consensus of the 1980s giving way to the Cornwall Consensus. Neoliberalism with its mantra of…

This two-part post/essay is my way of introducing (and articulating for myself) one of the main themes of my present book project – human flourishing as defined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030). These 17 goals are breathtakingly comprehensive (see my 2018 post “Ending Hunger” on this). They range from those more traditional development goals like poverty…