To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Countless residents of planet Earth can’t imagine starting the day without a cup of coffee. What most people have never suspected is that coffee was once a serious spiritual issue within the Catholic Church. Around 600 years ago, a coffee craze swept the Middle East. Muslim mystics discovered that caffeine was an… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Along the timberline of Mt. Shasta in northern California, there lives an unusual tree called the Shasta Fir. In its early life it appears twisted and almost brush-like. Winter storms may deposit more than 20 feet of snow atop tiny fir seedlings. The young plants are so battered and pressed that… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Tom Toro draws cartoons for The New Yorker magazine, long considered the ultimate cartoonists’ showcase. His work springs from his humorous observations concerning the challenges of everyday life, as evidenced by the panel above. But it took a while before he hit the big time. The New Yorker accepted his… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In 1983, the Westfield chain of shopping malls in Australia decided to stage an ultramarathon between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne. The race would begin and end, to no one’s surprise, at the Westfield mall in each metropolis. That made the distance a staggering 543.7 miles. World-class ultramarathon runners –… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Let’s face it: Sean Astin is never going to live down Rudy. The 53-year-old actor is best known for playing the lead role in the 1993 film about Daniel Reuttiger, a real-life walk-on to the Notre Dame football team. He even lampooned himself in a commercial in which former NFL stars… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Before my two brothers and I got too old to attempt new outdoor adventures, we decided to hike about 45 miles of the Appalachian Trail in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Our time together began like all such quests – with glorious optimism. The AT is rugged and beautiful. It meanders… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here There’s no such thing as instant landscaping. But the Bradford pear sure seemed like an exception. This fast-growing tree with lush green leaves – native to Vietnam and China – was introduced to the United States in the 1960s. Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of then-President LBJ, was widely acclaimed as an environmental… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish. What you see poised on a single human finger in the image above is a pinecone. But it’s not just any pinecone. That’s the primary reproductive apparatus for the California redwood, the tallest living thing on the planet. Every one of the cone’s woody “scales” is… Read more »
To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. The pre-dawn earthquake that struck along the border of Turkey and Syria yesterday was one of the most powerful shakings those countries have ever experienced. There are fewer than 20 quakes a year anywhere on the planet that exceed a magnitude of 7.0. This one measured 7.8, meaning it was sufficiently fierce to… Read more »
To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Every day we have two choices. We can hope that things will get easier. Or we can handle life’s hard things better. That’s the perspective of Kara Lawson, one of this generation’s most accomplished female basketball players. Her resume includes 15 seasons as an All-Star shooting guard in the WNBA, including… Read more »
