A friend asked me once, “What do you think your best contribution will be? And for what would you like to be remembered?” I did not need time to mull the answer over: “I have been a Sunday School teacher for the largest part of my life now, and other than being a husband and father, I think that is the answer to your question. I am a Sunday School teacher.” Granted, it doesn’t always feel that way when the alarm goes off at 5:00 every Sunday morning. That’s when I put together the notes I’ve worked on all day Saturday. Some mornings it feels like a calling, and other…

In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We studied his brilliance in the…

In the Baptist church where I grew up, we heard rumors of “intellectuals” lurking in the world beyond our safe fellowship who relished the opportunity to attack our faith. While we had never met one, we knew that one day we would, and it would be the fight of our young lives. We had to be prepared. We had to have a plan and a set of responses. Fortunately, just as David served as our model for slaying giants and Samson for bringing down pagans, we had Paul’s confrontation with the philosophers of Athens as the way to best the intellectuals later in life. We studied his brilliance in the…

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…

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…