I came across this fascinating interview sometime last year and am finally getting around to sharing it here. Philanthropy Roundtable interviewed Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, in late 2020. Strossen had recently published her book, Hate: Why We should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship. What caught my attention in the interview were …
I speak often on the multi-generational view of family.
For many it’s a new concept, but I have yet to have anyone disagree with me. I’ve yet to meet a parent that subscribes to a “one and done” philosophy—meaning that they hope to have kids who will immediately walk away from the family unit, form a contrary set of values, and never return.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever been given?
Not necessarily the most extravagant, or the most costly, but the best gift? For me, it was a book, a simple hardbound book with pictures throughout, with corners now frayed and pages yellowed with age.
My father died a week before Christmas. I was just 12 years old. My mom was left with six kids to raise and little income to make ends meet. We buried him three days before Christmas—December 22.
Do you remember reading about feasts in the Bible?
Perhaps you have, and perhaps you’ve skipped right over them or at best scanned them briefly. There are seven of them in fact. They all have different names and purposes.
But have you ever wondered what the real purpose of those feasts was?
It was a prayer he did not pray, and the answer he did not ask for. Yet through it, God revealed special depths of his goodness and grace.
I was sitting with a friend of mine, and he told me about a startling experience of his. He’d been asked to join a board for years. He finally relented, but he was in for a surprise at his first board meeting.
I remember when I first started in the donor advised fund world. One of our earliest funds was opened by a sharp, shrewd man. He asked me a simple question: “Do you have your donor advised fund set up?”
When we think about the Bible, some might think of stories like David & Goliath. Others might think of great teaching like the Sermon on the Mount. Still others might think of prophesy like the book of Revelation. Or some might think about the rise of a nation, the story of Abraham and the birth of Israel. But the Bible …
There’s healing power in telling your family story. Emily Esfahani Smith in “The Two Kinds of Stories We Tell About Ourselves,” writes simply: We are all storytellers—all engaged…in an act of creation of the composition of our lives. . . . By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified …
