Po Boy Tango, Reviewed
Food is so much more than just food. It is how babies bond with their mothers, how we woo our sweethearts, and how we comfort the bereaved. We serve special foods to show respect or to ask for...
View ArticleIda B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
We don’t know our own history. I aced the mandatory eighth grade Illinois Civics class in 1960, by repeating what I had been taught about Abraham Lincoln. But I was not taught about Ida B. Wells, the...
View ArticleHandel’s Messiah: Music for Many Good Causes
Music can be a marvelous way to make money. Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid concerts have raised more than $33 million to save family farms. The First Lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, donated the...
View ArticleSpring Cleaning – Make Room for the New
Comedian George Carlin said, “That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.” And Dorothy...
View ArticleDorothy Day: Protester, Journalist, Someday a Saint?
The last time Dorothy Day went to jail was at age 75 while protesting with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers supporting grape workers in California. The first time she went to jail was at age 20...
View ArticleFundraising When Money is Tight
Mal Warwick is what diplomats would call the Old China Hand. He has simply done more than anyone else. He has raised money and taught others how to raise money on every continent except Antarctica....
View ArticleHow Do YOU Want to Die?
Who benefits if Americans are afraid to talk about death and dying? Or even making choices about the quality of their own end of life care? Clearly not the taxpayers, who according to a study by Duke...
View ArticleBook Review: The Accidental American
“It is always about race,” says Rinku Sen, the Executive Director of the Applied Research Center. “The people who advocate for restricting the number of new immigrants talk about jobs, disease, and...
View ArticleNorwegian Christmas Cookies
My great-great-grandfather grew up near Fortun, in Norway. Three families owned the entire valley, so he would have been a tenant farmer, a day-laborer, or a servant. Since he could not marry into one...
View ArticleYou Wouldn’t Get a Carpool
My book club was recently discussing the ways people avoid talking about problems. One woman said that her daughter, who is Jewish, was being shown homes in several suburbs of Chicago. Her realtor...
View ArticleJust a Chip Off the Old Block
Last week Fox News commentator Glenn Beck went on a rant against Barack Obama simply because his mother and father chose to name their baby after his father. He has been named Barack for 49 years, and...
View ArticleThe Names Will be Changed
When my very Norwegian mother was selling ads for the Chicago Daily News in the 1930’s, the company assigned her the name “Miss Kelly.” This was so that irate or flirtatious customers could not track...
View ArticlePolitics Mixes with Everything!
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered the keynote for the International Conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals on April 13, 2010. As he addressed 3,000 professional...
View ArticleKnowing Your Neighbors Can Affect Social Change
Last week I came home to discover little fliers stuck into the doors of three apartments on my floor, indicating a visit from the U. S. Census Taker. Now I know which people in my building are too lazy...
View ArticleImmigrants and Fundraising
Una Okonkwo Osili has been an immigrant twice. She is the daughter of an American mother and a Nigerian father who met as students at Cornell University. When she was six months old, the family moved...
View ArticleFourth of July Then and Now
When I was growing up in a small town in Illinois during the Eisenhower administration, Fourth of July was pure and simple: the children decorated our bikes and tricycles with red, white, and blue...
View Article“I am an American”
When Amanda Standerfer was the Library Director at the Helen Matthes Public Library in Effingham in downstate Illinois she was disturbed by the snarky comments of some library patrons who were offended...
View ArticleMockingbirds, Truth and Justice
My favorite novel is Harper Lee’s brilliant To Kill A Mockingbird, set in small town Alabama in the 1930’s. The narrator recalls the events that happened when she, Jean Louise Finch (nicknamed Scout)...
View ArticleRevisiting Freedom of Religion
The very first clause of the very first amendment to the United States Constitution is about the Freedom of Religion. It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or...
View ArticleIsolated in Detention
If you squint at the center of the horizon in the photo on the right, you will see the Tri-County Detention Center in Ullin, Illinois. It is 354 miles from Chicago and 156 miles from St. Louis. It is...
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