We're in Italy for two weeks on vacation with a couple of friends. We've been staying for the past few days in Bologna, an extraordinarily beautiful city in the north of Italy. Bologna is the home of the oldest University in Europe, and students have attended classes in some of the lecture rooms for almost a thousand years. Bologna is also a city of porticos, covered walkways along the streets that shelter walkers and talkers from the elements. There are over 35 km of these porticos in the central, oldest part of the city. And Bologna is a city of churches.

Mr. Parks was an old man who lived with his sister in a big yellow house next door to us on College Avenue in Wheaton, Illinois. On frequent summer nights beginning when I was eight years old, Mr.

This essay is the introduction to the Voices in Wartime Anthology.

From my childhood I lived in the middle of the idea of war, trapped between the World War II memories of my parents and my own terror of the imminence of World War III. I was born at the height of the Korean War and came to young adulthood as the Vietnam War spiraled toward its senseless and incomprehensibly bloody conclusion.

Thanks to my friend Tim Harris for telling me about this magnificent cartoon from 1939 on his blog, Apesma's Lament.

I attended the Art of Hosting retreat on Bowen Island in the fall of 2006 at a moment full of history and possibility. I have always been someone in a hurry, and I think we live in particularly urgent times. Five years after 911, in the wake of our misadventures in Iraq, we have the chaos and wreckage of a disastrous war all around us and the consequences of that war looming before us. Now, I think Americans are entering a “teachable moment”, when we may be open to new wisdom, new lessons about how to live in a troubled world and our need to heal the wounds of war.