Dear Friends, Thanksgiving isn’t just a day in the calendar year. Thanksgiving day is meant to be a reminder of something that’s an essential part of us, something we need to nurture.

Dear Friends, This is a challenging time. It’s okay. I don’t mind being challenged. It just makes a big difference to have a sense of supportnot necessarily agreement. That’s what gets us through.

Dear Friends, When I wrote this column one year ago today we were in shock. Hours after the attack on America I changed the letter which I had composed the day before. “Everything has changed,” we said. And, in some ways, it has.

Dear Friends, Lucille Clifton, one of the poets who spoke and recited at Chautauqua last month, and the only person of color to speak that week, told us about an experience the day JFK was assassinated.

Dear Friends, A couple of days before we were scheduled to leave for Chautauqua the Ninth District Court in California ruled that the insertion of the words under God in our pledge of allegiance was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of religion and state.

Dear Friends, I want to cover three things in this easing-into-summer missive: the ministers’ on-call schedule; a Habitat For Humanity proposal; and an invitation to participate in my next recorded book project, In Times of Trouble.

Dear Friends, I have been bathed in bundles of sympathy in response to my dear nephew’s tragic death. I hope that this expression of sincere appreciation is adequate response.

Dear Friends, Early on Saturday morning I got a call from my brother John. We talk on the phone from time to time, usually for special occasions. He and I share the same birthday- he was my big present on my eighth birthday. Each of us tries to be the first to call on that […]

Dear Friends, On the first night of Passover I shared a Seder with Lory’s extended family, all of whom are Jewish. I was, in a sense, the outsider. They didn’t treat me like an outsider, but I was the only person sitting around the Seder table who is not Jewish.

Dear Friends, Westport children are deprived. Most of them have just about everything money can buy, of course-an over-abundance. But there are things money can’t buy.