“There is a call to us, a call of service,” Dorothy Day once said, “that we join with others to try to make things better in this world.” This phrase gave rise to the title of Robert Coles’s 1993 book, The Call of Service, a meditation on the meaning of voluntary service — the kind [...]

There’s been a lot of talk of revolution in 2011, especially in connection with the Arab Spring and the continuing Occupy Wall Street protests. The word revolution conjures up images of political violence and social turmoil, of insurgent militias and defiant chants, of street barricades made from overturned vehicles and ragged crowds armed with makeshift [...]

The late British economist Robert Theobald once asked me, “of all the people you have interviewed over the years, who left the deepest impression?” I came up with a half-dozen names. To my surprise, all of them were women.

Here are a handful of recent Twitter entries on random subjects like kindness, grievances, consensus, and the limits of humility.

Some years ago, I had the good fortune to spend time with Huston Smith, the distinguished philosopher of religion. Over a period of two months, we met for a series of interviews covering fascinating subjects like the troubled relationship between science and spirituality, the rise of fundamentalism, the common threads at the heart of the [...]

The world is getting freer, quantum physics is getting weirder, Americans are full of doubt, and the Norwegians have it best. Here’s a sampling of interesting articles and other stuff on the web culled from my Twitter feed.

Schopenhauer once observed that when you look back on your life, it appears to have had a consistent plan, as if composed by a novelist. Of course, it never feels that way when you’re in the throes of it.

It’s remarkable how quickly organizations seize on words like “innovative” and “entrepreneurial” to describe efforts that are anything but.

“Nonprofit.” It’s a curious word. It doesn’t tell us what it is, but it tells us what it’s not. Given that the term has come to define a vast sector of American society — one that encompasses more than 1.5 million organizations and accounts for some 10 percent of the nation’s GDP — it would [...]

Some thirty years ago, historian and presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns introduced the concept of “transformative leadership.” It was a powerful idea, one that continues to shape how I think about great leaders — in politics, certainly, but also in organizations, in communities, and even in small and informal groups. Burns observed that most leaders approach followers [...]

Today I read a remarkable passage from Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. It touches on the fate of great ideas and how the world tends to marginalize “true believers” and drive them down the path of disillusionment and defeat. The quote is from Okri’s book In Arcadia: If you believe in something your very belief renders [...]

“Be anything you like,” Thomas Merton once said, “be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.” I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing. The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves too often [...]