Jennifer Browdy

“If we spent more time listening to each other, instead of screaming at each other, we’d be a much stronger, happier country.” -- David Isay, founder of StoryCorps

Maybe all the rainbows we’ve been seeing lately have a message for us about the pots of gold, both real and metaphorical, that await us on the other side of the storm of climate change.

I believe that if more women had the confidence to step into their potential as creative leaders, our world would be a more interesting, vibrant, and kinder place.

The power of the human imagination to empathize deeply with others is our most valuable trait. It holds the seed of the vision of world peace and ecological harmony.

In a time when too many teenagers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time exercising only their fingers — playing video games — it’s good to see a funded jobs program for teens that demands physical fitness, and leaves the participants with a healthy tiredness at the end of the day.

The Vancouver final game was watched by 25.4 million viewers on Fox — a record for any soccer game, men’s or women’s, shown on English-language television in this country.

What a month it’s been! In just the past couple of weeks, the Pope made a passionate argument underscoring the need for humans to...

Today, I am grieving the beautiful souls gunned down in their place of worship, where they were working together to build a better world.

The American working world is rarely family-friendly. The Pew study found that “16 percent of working mothers and 15 percent of working fathers say it is very difficult” to balance the responsibilities of work and family life.

The film, ‘The Mask You Live In,’ establishes clear connections between what one expert called “the pandemic of violence in America” and the repressed anger and hurt of boys and young men, as well as a narrow definition of masculinity that equates “being a man” with physical force, sexual conquest, and economic success.

College-aged women are four times more likely than any other age group to face sexual assault and in 90 percent of reported cases, the victim is acquainted with his or her attacker.

Now, as never before, we have an opportunity to come together as a global society to wage peace in the name of survival…and beyond survival, prosperity. It will take ordinary people like you and me acting each in our own locales.

This Mother’s Day, by all means shower your mother with flowers, chocolates, and love. But let’s also think more deeply about the tremendous contribution mothers make every single day, and how we might work together to ease their burdens and give them the recognition and rewards they so heartily deserve.

Disasters make us wake up and realize all over again how precious life is, and how important health and security are to human happiness. Even here in the placid Berkshires, we need to think about disaster prevention and preparedness. No, we don’t live in an earthquake zone, and no, I don’t see any riots on the horizon in quiet little Great Barrington. But there are some big issues brewing that we do need to be paying attention to now, before they become runaway disasters.

Joanna Macy calls our time “The Great Turning,” a critical transition time in human history on the planet, during which we will either learn to live harmoniously and sustainably as stewards of the Earth, or we will be swept away into the maelstrom of the Sixth Great Extinction, caused by our own carelessness and ineptitude.

Can anyone doubt that climate change is real and upon us, already melting the glaciers, acidifying the oceans, and setting off droughts, floods and storms of Biblical proportions? The question is, now that we are aware, what are we to do?