Heretic is one of my top ten favorite words. When I was in seminary, several of my professors called me a heretic to my face. In the 1990’s! I was asking questions outside the quite tiny box of their dogma and it enraged them, but that’s another story.

Heretic is a variation on a Greek word which means able to choose. Able to choose. A heretic is someone who knows that choosing is the principle activity required of a human being. A heretic doesn’t take the conventional wisdom as truth. A heretic knows she has a choice. A heretic looks at theory, dogma, concept, idea, everything and asks about it. A heretic is more often than not thought of as an eccentric.   Read more...

From what I have heard, Syb Roell, Vice President of Business Development for Ode, is hoping to create an ODE for kids. That’s a terrific idea, and I’m sure Syb would welcome suggestions. So here’s one: It’s a book entitled Teen Voices from the Holy Land, a collection of 34 interviews with Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, that gives readers a chance to hear about what it’s like as teenagers living in the troubled Holy Land. Readers will hear from 17-year old Ahmad who doesn’t like school, loves his family, and is ready to share the Holy land with people he doesn’t like. Ella Shik, a 12-year old girl lives in Tel Aviv, has a 17-year old brother, plays guitar, wants to live on a kibbutz and help make the world a safe place to live in. Reem, a Muslim teenager from Yama, feels that friendship “is like living in a steady stream of sincerity, honesty, love and cooperation flowing from one person to another.”   Read more...

When I was a child, every summer in my hometown there was a county fair. Since it was a farming community, there were exhibits by the 4-H, pens with prize-winning calves, mountains of Blue Ribbon produce, and a parade through town with fire engines and tractors. It was an event that brought out the entire populace and was talked about for months afterwards.

With those memories as part of my roots, I appreciate local festivals very much. Happily where I live now in Japan, there are many such summer events because this area is surrounded by paddies on one side and the ocean on the other. Last year I went to a festival featuring farmers, so this year I elected to head towards the sea.   Read more...

I have a question for every one who reads this blog. Does living in a community have a huge future?

When most people think of living in a community they usually think of people with a specific belief (fanatics), living more or less detached from the world, sharing everything, no privacy, living a life of low economic standard, sharing everything but their underwear. More or less traditional communities still exist and will keep existing more or less in the same way. The benefits that I see for living in such a community are:

Another inspiring woman that I met through my community tourism work in Uganda, was a successful zero grazing farmer named Perusi Karamuzi. Perusi is helping to pave the road for positive change in her community.

Perusi Karamuzi – Model Homestead Farming   Read more...

Fellow Reader Blogger, Laura Portalupi, writes that she was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry in her U.S. Peace Corps training prior to going to South Africa to work primarily in education. It’s good to know that the Peace Crops is open to using Appreciative Inquiry to do what Laura says: “to learn to value” what the culture they are working with values. Another such practice, one that is complementary to Appreciative Inquiry and in some ways more intriguing because it is counter intuitive, is that of Positive Deviance (PD). Briefly, here’s PD’s story:

In the late 1980s, Marian Zeitlin at Tufts University was researching hospitals in developing countries, trying to understand why in the groups of malnourished children being rehabilitated there were always a few children who seemed to recover faster and better than the majority. She labeled them “positive deviants.”   Read more...

Creating peace on this planet requires risk. Did you already know that? It surprises me that so many of us think we know what peace is. I’m not sure we do. I’ve been working with peace as a spiritual priority in my life for more than fifteen years, and I’m not sure I know what peace is.

On the other hand, I definitely know what a chocolate chip cookie is, and I also know how to create one. Peace isn’t the same thing as that. There is no recipe, and its form morphs as soon as we think we have it pinned down. Peace is the biggest umbrella idea I know other than God. God, bless Her, as a word, puts off enough people that I’m sticking with Peace in this entry.   Read more...

One of the first events that I attended back in Berlin was the foundation of a German e.V. (association). When I arrived at the Café “Sala del Popolo” that day, I did not even know that the intention of the evening was to establish the “Foreign Entrepreneur Support Network”. I had been invited by Allison, founder and owner of Sala del Popolo and also initiator of this network.

The movement that I currently work for (www.wearewhatwedo.org) is about to take the next entrepreneurial step in Germany and I have been trying a bit to find my own way in the German bureaucratic jungle and did not get very far, so far. Thus, I have huge respect for Allison, as a Canadian in Berlin to start this network. Here are three questions to get to know her a bit more:   Read more...

Last week I shared with you my story of Jane Kahima, a rural woman in Mbarara district in western Uganda, who found that she could use her midwifery skills to build her own home based domiciliary. Now I’d like to share the story of another woman who is setting an example of positive change in her community

Monica Muhozi, a home-base flower gardener, is also an example of how a rural housewife turned into a successful business owner.   Read more...

Bruce Lansky has written a marvelous version of Cinderella. (Lansky, Bruce, ed. 1995. Girls to the Rescue, Book I. New York; Meadowbrook Press) Instead of the insipid version that Disney has cursed us with, he introduces the concept that Cinderella should be an active participant in shaping the events of her life.

This take starts off with the fairy godmother suffering from overwork. She is about to take a long vacation. Before leaving, she passes on her responsibilities to her assistant. So, in other words, the work is shared.   Read more...