January 6 Witnessing and Watching

In concluding my posting on  the Euvaldi/Buffalo tragedies I  said there was a difference between witnessing and watching.  ‘ Witnessing’ is a slightly damaged word.  In some religious contexts it means conforming through personal testimony to an external authority or belief system.  In the Sense of Good context I mean witnessing as an act of…

This post is inspired by an article in the New York Times written by Yuval Levin entitled: Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old? (June 3, 2022). As you will see it is a question I have asked myself in these past few years. Mr. Levin, a senior fellow at…

Having found myself  in quicksand as I work the nuances of good for this project, I find my range of considerations regarding good  has been expanded by that infinitely adaptive form of writing we call poetry .  My spouse has been an emergency room RN, hospice RN, pain specialist RN, and finally palliative care RN.  Some…

Awash in national grief and a strain of simple shame we search for words to describe what happened in Euvaldi, Texas and Buffalo a short week ago. The actual reality of wholly innocent children at that age along with their caretakers and people simply picking up groceries for self and family dying by gunfire is…

This is a second blog inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s article WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID It’s not just a phase published by Atlantic monthly April 11, 2022. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous…

Jonathan Haidt recently wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly called: WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID  It’s not just a phase.   I was so impressed by Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind  Why Good  People are Divided by Politics and Religion that today the book still sits on my desk all…

I frequently receive spam email telling me my following is not strong and of course they have just the products to correct that problem for my website. Occasionally I receive encouraging notes in my spam folder letting me know they found the content of this website very valuable and helpful to them. If anybody writes…

“Good” is a universally used word in our English language, but with such wild range of meanings that the word good in itself verges on being  a nonsense word.  One person starts a chess program for impoverished children and calls it ‘good’ while the next person sets a house of worship on fire and calls…

For many people, depending on their experience with ‘authority’, authenticity and authority are  in conflict with one another.  When these two terms are in conflict inside a person, life can become challenging and stressful.  A central purpose of The Good Decision(TGD) is to create a process that resolves this contradiction allowing both authority and authenticity…

In the challenge of developing this model I have had to resist the temptation to define ‘goodness’ in terms of specific behaviors or values.  But that said, the realities of the world around us require I deal with those actions that cannot be considered good in the context of a “Good Decision”.   Actions motivated by…