From gas to food to childcare, prices are soaring. And my neighbors feel the pain. The numbers just don’t add up for my neighbors. As inflation soars at the highest rate in more than 40 years, many families on the near east side of Indianapolis are struggling a bit more each month to pay the rent, feed their children, buy gas to get to work and back, and even to purchase necessities like soap and laundry detergent. One mother recently told me she now washes her family’s clothes less often at...

The Great Unsettling: Fast pace of social change leaves us uncertain and uneasy. Here’s how we can cope. Journalist Shams Charania accurately summed up modern life in 18 words: “The world we live in now is totally different than it was five, six, seven, eight years ago.” Charania was speaking about his specialty – he reports on the NBA for The Athletic. Yet, he could have been describing how our world has changed in the past two years as the COVID-19 pandemic radically altered how we live,...

Legos at Easter: We’re made to work together to build something beautiful with our neighbors. My grandchildren love to build all sorts of things – spaceships, castles, skyscrapers – with Legos.  For them, snapping together brightly colored Lego bricks to create something new is a fun outlet for their imagination. I’m not so enamored with Legos myself – I’ve had too many late night, barefoot encounters with hard-edged bits of plastic that a grandchild left behind on the floor. The other...

From gas to food to childcare, prices are soaring. And my neighbors feel the pain. The numbers just don’t add up for my neighbors. As inflation soars at the highest rate in more than 40 years, many families on the near east side of Indianapolis are struggling a bit more each month to pay the rent, feed their children, buy gas to get to work and back, and even to purchase necessities like soap and laundry detergent. One mother recently told me she now washes her family’s clothes less often at...

The Great Unsettling: Fast pace of social change leaves us uncertain and uneasy. Here’s how we can cope. Journalist Shams Charania accurately summed up modern life in 18 words: “The world we live in now is totally different than it was five, six, seven, eight years ago.” Charania was speaking about his specialty – he reports on the NBA for The Athletic. Yet, he could have been describing how our world has changed in the past two years as the COVID-19 pandemic radically altered how we live,...

Legos at Easter: We’re made to work together to build something beautiful with our neighbors. My grandchildren love to build all sorts of things – spaceships, castles, skyscrapers – with Legos.  For them, snapping together brightly colored Lego bricks to create something new is a fun outlet for their imagination. I’m not so enamored with Legos myself – I’ve had too many late night, barefoot encounters with hard-edged bits of plastic that a grandchild left behind on the floor. The other...