March 1, 2017 by richmalloy

Profiles in Courage: 2017 Edition

I first read John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage over fifty years ago when I was in my mid-teens. Published in 1955, five years before he was elected the 35th president of the United States, Profiles celebrated the moral fortitude of selected United States senators who, at times of national crisis, placed principle above ideology, the common good above private interests, and democratic values above demagogic passions. And that courage often cost them dearly in the form of vicious personal attacks and defeat at the voting booth in the next election cycle.

I read the book again last week and wondered, Is it time for a new edition? Is it time for a 2017 version of Profiles in Courage, one that would focus not on the past but on the present and would highlight not only senators but contemporary men and women from all walks of life–government, business, religion, the arts, education, and elsewhere? Are we ready for a new edition that would specifically recognize those men and women who, in the face of our own contemporary political crises, are courageously challenging threats from the highest levels of government to our most fundamental American principles, the hallmarks of our democracy such as a free press, freedom of religious expression, equality of treatment for all, the welcoming of immigrants, civil and respectful discourse, and the absolute centrality of truth in the face of a culture of “alternative facts”?

Who will write this new version of Profiles in Courage? And whose stories will grace its chapters? Who will our descendants read about, fifty years hence, and who will they take inspiration from to deal with whatever crises America will be facing then?

Who will future Americans come to know and honor as today’s profiles in courage?

February 1, 2017 by richmalloy

Mental Health 101: The Four Truths of Personal Wellness

[Mental Health—that which promotes the optimization of mind, body, soul, and interpersonal relationships]

What does it mean to be mentally healthy?

First, let’s think of mental health along a continuum on which one is either moving toward health or away from it. Each of us is either engaged in a style of life that is characterized by words such as wellness, wholeness, holistic, healthy, holy—words that all derive from the same word root, the Old English hal, meaning healthy—or is living a life that is less so.

Second, we are learning that what we call mental health is not restricted to that which is happening in the brain. Daniel Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and foremost spokesperson in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, has taught us that the mind is both embodied (flowing from the brain and throughout the body) and relational(affecting and being affected by our interactions with others) and that a healthy mind leads to a life of connectedness and meaning, the essence of spirituality.

Mental health is about our minds, our physical bodies, our spiritual dimensions, and our interpersonal relations.

With that introduction in mind, I propose four truths of mental health:

Each of us–every single one of the 7.4 billion of us—carries our own propensity for creating mischief for ourselves and others, and each one of us from time to time acts out of that propensity.
Each of us—every single one of the 7.4 billion of us—spends a fair amount of time in denial about the mischief we’re responsible for.
The first step on the road to personal wellness is the recognition, admission, and acceptance of those first two truths.
Each successive step on the road to personal wellness involves the ongoing commitment to notice that mischief when it starts to manifest itself, to say ‘no’ to it, and to choose an alternative action.

Each of us is on a journey of personal wellness—health in mind, body, soul, and interpersonal relations. To the extent to which we embrace these four truths that journey will be more life affirming than otherwise—not without the expected bumps and bruises, and the occasional traumas and tragedies, that naturally attend life on this earth but a journey at the fulfillment of which we can look back and say, with integrity, “I did good.”

December 4, 2016 by richmalloy

Election Postmortem . . . and a Pathway toward Redemption

“Barack Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.”
– conservative Republican author, TV commentator, and columnist David Brooks, several months before the election

Whatever our response to the 2016 presidential election, we can all agree that during the months leading up to it “integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance” were rarely present. To be blunt, it was a horror show. And we have received little indication that things will change in the few weeks since.

In some quarters, the simple virtues referenced above were discarded as part of a newly fashionable attack on “political correctness,” an expression used almost exclusively as a slur, a disparaging critique of any attempt to direct our attention to the fact that what one person might see as humorous another might find as hurtful. And so we declared open season on schoolyard taunting, disrespect toward women and religious and ethnic minorities, and even critiques of individuals’ physical characteristics, a particularly heinous and mean-spirited offense.

In a few weeks, Christians throughout the world will celebrate the birth of a certain Galilean who famously enjoined us to do onto others as we would want done onto us. These words, preached by a diversity of religious leaders both before Jesus and long after him, constitute the foundation of civilized life, the social glue that connects us to each other and allows us to get along reasonably well. We ignore them at our peril.

In the coming months and years, men and women of good will must unite against this culture of insult and expose it whenever and wherever it resurfaces. Let this be the mission that unites us, that allows us to come together as men and women of “integrity, humanity, good manners, and elegance.” Our future demands it.

Profiles in Courage: 2017 Edition

Mental Health 101: The Four Truths of Personal Wellness

[Mental Health—that which promotes the optimization of mind, body, soul, and interpersonal relationships]

With that introduction in mind, I propose four truths of mental health:

Election Postmortem . . . and a Pathway toward Redemption

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