Exploring the positive aspects of the human experience is well worth our time, and doing so will ultimately help us reduce cruelty and suffering.
Category Archives: Essays
Why I Started CTGL
My interest in community development started much earlier than my career in real estate development. In a broad sense, I think it started when I fulfilled my life’s dream of studying in Paris (and ended up being miserable).
Creating the Good Life’s Values
I recently published a supplementary “About” page for Creating the Good Life, describing the values that this publication operates within and what we work to support.
Bell Hooks Changed the Way I Think About Love
Love is not a noun, but a verb. It is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
This Book On War Will Make You Rethink Modern Society
Our great moral task is to consider what aspects of “progress” help us and which hold us back.
When I Was a Social Justice Warrior
We veer off course when we start to cling to one lens through which to view the world. When our acceptance of one group means the rejection, humiliation, and criticism of another, we are partaking in identity politics, not real politics.
When I Was Called a Terrorist
To me, being a liberal means that you believe things can be better. We might not know exactly what we mean by “better,” but we do know that “the way things are” isn’t good enough.
Education and Self-Becoming
We are what we speak and write. I am the persona of this post. In inventing this post, I invent myself. Writing—as much as reading—is a profoundly transformational experience.
Some Notes on Fear
The best experiences of our lives open us, they challenge us, they make us question ourselves and question each other, and this inevitable “opening” of ourselves is the way the good stuff gets in.
What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Ourselves
The goal of our global political economy should no longer be growth; it should be enough.
