The Creative Work of Love Cherie Harder Wednesday, May 12, 2021 “Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys…. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Recently, I was part
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Lets Get Creative Cherie Harder Friday, January 8, 2021 It is hard to get the grotesque images from Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol out of one’s mind. The Confederate flag paraded in its halls, Members of Congress huddled under desks as police struggled to contain a stampede, the noose set up on the West Lawn,
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And There Was A Great Calm... Richard Miles Wednesday, November 11, 2020 Our extraordinary year has been described as a mashup of the 20th century’s most tumultuous years. Among those, 1918, the year of the pandemic that eventually killed 675,000 Americans, is held up as a mirror and a warning. The devastating influenza appeared as
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A New Beginning Cherie Harder Wednesday, November 4, 2020 As I write this, polls have only just started to close, and election results are hours (if not days, or even weeks) away. But regardless of the final outcome of this election, in many ways we begin a new season. As Atlantic columnist Joe Pinsker helpfully pointed out
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Not an Impossible Task Cherie Harder Wednesday, September 23, 2020 In times of deepening division and increasingly heated conflict, it can be awkward to remember that Christ’s commandments centered on love — loving God, and the gritty, hard, often seemingly thankless work of loving one’s neighbors (even the obnoxious ones). It is a task well
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Hope and Healing Amidst Deep Division Cherie Harder Wednesday, August 12, 2020 This year has brought dramatic and unforeseen changes and challenges to virtually every American. Assumptions, plans, and schedules have changed; industries have been upended, schools shuttered, churches closed, much of everyday interactions moved online. But amidst all the churn and change, one trend
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Character and Culture Cherie Harder Wednesday, July 29, 2020 A month after graduating, I moved to DC to start work on Capitol Hill as a junior legislative aide. Over the next several years, I would work for a House Member and three Senators in a variety of capacities. Relatively quickly, I was struck by how the
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Take Up and Read Cherie Harder Wednesday, July 15, 2020 One of the silver linings of this cloudy year is that the forced isolation and confinement of our once-flitting selves, unwelcome as it has been, has provoked new interest in and efforts at reading. While reading overall has been in steep decline in the country
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Customs and Constitutions Cherie Harder Wednesday, July 1, 2020 In 1831, a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville visited America intending to study its penal system and provide a recommendation to his home country as to whether the US offered a worthwhile model to follow. But he was also personally curious about why the US
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