The world wants you to believe in stark black and white. We’re told we must choose between freedom and safety, right and left, equality and merit, individualism and community. We’re told there’s always a correct answer, that compromise is weakness, and that any nuance means moral failure. But the real world doesn’t live in absolutes—it lives in shades and gradients, in the slow work of discernment.
Fascism doesn’t usually arrive with torches and parades. It creeps in through culture, through habits of thought and language that make authoritarian politics feel normal. We explore Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism alongside today’s U.S. landscape, asking what we’re willing—and unwilling—to get used to.
A good friend of mine once said a good leader should be a springboard, not a lid. He’s right. And it’s been the foundation of my leadership career ever since. I don’t always get it right, but I always try.
Have you ever stopped to consider the trajectory your life has taken? All of the minute decisions that have brought you to the precipice of now? For some, it’s a fairly regular experience. For others, it might never have occurred to you to take stock of at all.
Talking new and exciting things coming down the road for Despised Samaritan.
Friends! It’s been awhile since I last shared anything with you. Well, don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of new news to share soon. But today, I wanted to simply leave you with this. In a word full of brokenness, heavy hearts, endless struggle, war, politics, and injustice… remember to pray for people and not against […]
I am not offering this list as any definitive “you should absolutely add this to your reading/listening/watching”. But I thought I would share with you all the resources I’ve been working through to gain a better understanding of the past, present, and future of us as a people, as Americans, and specifically of systematic, unwarranted, invisible white privilege.
We want to be the good guy. We have this instinctive moral imperative almost built into us that we have to be the good guy. But in order to do this, we’ve taught ourselves that there must be “bad guys” for our “goodness” to overcome.
Society doesn’t improve when the naysayers stand by and proclaim “I told you so.” It improves when, as a community, we decide that we’re better than the sum of our parts.
Sometimes we say the right things. We say “I forgive you” or will even convince ourselves we’ve forgiven someone who didn’t bother asking forgiveness. But in reality, we’ve filed it away somewhere, only to pull it out and use it against them the moment they wrong us one too many times.
