Good morning, everybody!

That greeting is intentionally more peppy than I feel today.  Sometimes I have to try to con myself into a better place.  Although I’m not sure what to do with the fact that this approach actually works for me, today I don’t have the energy to quibble with the ends justifying the means.

The past few weeks at Augustana have been hard to watch. Getting ourselves to a deeper understanding of difference and how to communicate with each other despite those differences sometimes seems simultaneous deceptively obvious and painfully impossible.  I’d love to whip out some perfect data point and, with an magician’s “abracadabra,” cast a healing rainbow of glitter across the campus. But reality is never presto-change-o with a dollop of whip cream.

So instead, I’m going to share links to a couple of articles that gave me just a little bit of an uplift this morning.  I think there is something in both pieces that is worth pondering. Each of these articles were in the Chronicle of Higher Education – the first one just today and the second one earlier in the summer.

A Gorilla-Masked Student’s Attempt to Provoke is Met with Peace

Talking Over the Racial Divide

Sometimes you gotta “make it a good day,”

Mark