Saint Francis de Assisi was born to Pietro di Bernardone, a rich cloth merchant. He had every advantage that one might expect of a young man born to a wealthy family in the Middle Ages. As a young man, Francis was a troubadour and wished to be a writer of French poetry. In 1201, he joined a military expedition against Perugia where he was taken as a prisoner and was not released for a year. A strange vision made him return to Assisi. He claimed to have had a mystical experience in the Church at San Damiano. Francis claimed to see the crucifix come to life and say, “Francis, Francis, go and...

One of the things I find truly astonishing about the human animal is the number of teachings and traditions that we have handed down time out of history for thousands of years from teacher to student, person to person. These are things that cannot be learned from books. You cannot learn to dance from a book. You cannot learn to play an instrument from a book. You cannot learn a martial art from a book. You cannot learn Zen from a book. If nothing else, you need a teacher in order to tell you if you’re getting it right or not, or, if you’re getting it wrong, what you must do to correct yourself....

I love art. I have to confess that I really know very little about it. That is, I only know what I have learned from my mother who took me to the art museum every Sunday when I was little, and from my various readings and interest. So I guess I know a little bit about art and art history, but not a lot. But, as the cliché goes, I know what I like. When I was first separated from my first wife, I used to like to go to an art gallery in a shopping mall near the bank where I worked. I liked to just walk through the gallery and look at the paintings for sale. They had paintings by Chagall and by Picasso,...

If the last ten years have taught me anything at all, it is the power of fear. After 9/11, our nation was turned upside down by fear. We went to war with a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack over fear. If that fool, Bush was re-elected legally (of which I have some doubts), it was because of fear. We have handed over our civil liberties because of fear. Indeed, many of the problems we are facing in our economy have been caused by fear. Nobody is buying a house now because of the fear that house will lose value in the next few years, so the people who need to sell their houses...