Guy Carawan died earlier this month at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. He had been the director there for many years. While an accomplished musician, folklorist and collector of traditional hymns and songs, his most lasting contribution is probably one he launched almost accidentally. “O Sanctissima” is a Roman Catholic hymn composed in 1792. Beethoven arranged the hymn as “No. 4” in his “Verschiedene Volkslieder” and the tune made its way to the United States. Eventually it was rewritten and published by a black preacher in Philadelphia, which led to its use by workers in a 1945 strike against the American Tobacco Company cigar factory. Zilphia Horton, a musician and…

These six assumptions kept returning to our conversations about how tech people think—and what they will hopefully bring to the practice of philanthropy.

A few minutes before noon on April 25 two tectonic plates nine miles beneath the surface of the earth shifted after 81 years of grinding and pushing against each other. The force of 20 thermonuclear bombs was released in a moment, and the entire city of Katmandhu was lifted permanently by more than two feet. The destruction is the worst in the 21st century and while 5,000 people have been accounted for as having died, we still do not know and will not know for years the full scope of the damage. All of this happened because the tension of two opposing masses of rock had been suddenly released. A…

After the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan, and the typhoon in the Philippines, millions of Americans (and a fair number of Gathering participants) responded to the immediate needs through Twitter, Facebook and text donation appeals from scores of well-known relief organizations. Of course, there are more than a few scams that proliferate after every disaster. The earthquake in Nepal will be the same. Years from now even many of the better-known organizations (like the American Red Cross) will be either holding millions of dollars in unspent money—or worse will have used the money on projects completely unrelated to the original appeal. Years after Superstorm Sandy a third of…

This week I received a note from my close friend of many years, Terry Parker. He wrote: “As I think you know, about five years ago one of my grandchildren, Katie, who was nine years old, was given a death sentence because of a brain tumor. She came to live with us as we are a mile and a half from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. In seven months from diagnosis she had died. While she was with us, I read to her every day for hours. But I could tell that she was sad because she couldn’t do what the children in the books I was reading were doing. I…

Dr. Gardner Taylor died this week. For 42 years he served as the senior pastor of the 10,000-member Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He was the author of many books and 2,000 sermons, as well as the recipient of 15 honorary doctorates. Gardner was named by TIME magazine as the dean of black preachers and considered one of the most influential preachers in the English-speaking world. As a close friend of Martin Luther King, he shaped the earliest years of the civil rights movement when in 1961 he and Dr. King founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention. This gave Dr. King a national base of hundreds of…

In 1967 film maker and devout Christian Irwin “Shorty” Yeaworth (whose first popular movie was “The Blob”) produced “The Gospel Blimp” as a send-up of the craze over mass evangelism using the latest technology to reach a whole community in the most effective way possible – an inflatable blimp manned by a “Commander” and his crew. They towed Bible-verse banners, “firebombing” the unchurched citizens with thousands of gospel tracts and broadcasting Christian music and programs over loudspeakers. Things unravel and the new technology ends up being just one more way of wasting money with little positive effect. But for a brief moment it is new and exciting and full of…

If you caught Sixty Minutes this week you had a glimpse into the crushing plight of Christians in Iraq specifically and the Middle East in general. The Christian population in Iraq has been reduced from 1.5 million to less than 300,000—through slaughter, forced migration, conversion under duress and fear. More than 125,000 Christians have fled to Kurdistan and are huddled there in refugee camps. The entire Christian population of Mosul has disappeared and, according to a priest interviewed by CBS reporter Lara Logan, the intent of ISIS is to completely eradicate the Christians: “To wipe them out. To be nothing. No place left that bears the name of Christian or…

Lieber uses conversations around money to help inculcate seven basic values in our kids that will lead them to become mature adults.

Spock always said what he thought and was bewildered at how humans complicated and confused issues with emotions - anger, fear, love and attachment.