Another quote from T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care:
“…it seems certain that the French will continue to emphasize equal access to medical care–the basic rule that anybody, regardless of race, income, or occupation, can go to any doctor and get the same treatment as [...]
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As part of my quest for information about health care issues for the poor, homeless, and underserved, I read T. R. Reid’s new book, The Healing of America. In it Mr. Reid profiles the health systems of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada with additional information about Switzerland and Taiwan. Mr. Reid describes [...]
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Read this…it sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
“What makes a saint?
Extravagance. Excessive love, flagrant mercy, radical affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love.”
–from Barbara Brown Taylor’s article “A Great Cloud of Witnesses” in Weavings III/5, September/October 1988, pages 32-33, 34-35.
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As I continue to read Jim Wallis’ Faith Works, I draw your attention to the second section which includes these three chapters:
Do the Work and You’ll Find the Spirit
Recognize the Three Faces of Poverty
Listen to Those Closest to the Problem
The third chapter of this section really affected me. It ended with this:
“It’s difficult to [...]
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On my reading agenda now is Faith Works: How to Live Your Beliefs and Ignite Positive Social Change by Jim Wallis.
The first three chapters, which he has organized as lessons, have me hooked:
Trust Your Questions
Get out of the House More Often
Use Your Gift
If we started with these three lessons, what might happen? [...]
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“Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health – and create profitable diseases and dependencies – by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, [...]
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There are many types of revolutions. History talks mostly of political revolutions, dramatic events that all too often represent little real change over the long term: The cast of players in power shifts and new political philosophies come into vogue, but when it comes to the daily realities of most people, little changes. But occasionally [...]
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“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s [...]
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For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent. When members of the Me’en tribe in Ethiopia were shown a coloring book that included an illustration of a local antelope, they didn’t recognize the animal. They would smell the paper, twist it in their hands, feel its texture, listen to its [...]
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Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
–Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976)
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