Scott was nervous on his first day of junior high school. Junior high started with the fifth grade in his town. He was going to be among the youngest kids in school, and everything was new to him....

For 24 years, Reverend Don Robinson worked as a teacher. He taught in the Washington, D.C. public schools, in a juvenile jail, and later as a community youth counselor who helped families in their neighborhoods....

Adapted from an Aboriginal creation story from Australia.When the earth was new-born, it was plain and without any features or life. There were no rivers or mountains, no trees, no grasses, only flat red earth as far as the eye could see—except that there were no eyes for seeing. Waking time and...

We do not need to think the same thoughts as someone else, in order to love them. So wrote Francis David, a long-ago faith ancestor of today's Unitarian Universalist movement. He wrote these words in Transylvania, where he lived and was persecuted for his unpopular beliefs....

Henry sat in front of his little cabin on one of his three chairs, listening to the evening. If you were there you might have thought there was nothing to listen to. Certainly no television or iPod. Those wouldn't be around for 100 years or more....

On a moss-covered log, in the middle of the Hoh Rain Forest, in Olympic National Park in Washington State, there's reddish, square-ish stone. This stone may be the smallest, least noticeable marker ever for a really big idea. This stone marks one square inch of silence....

Young Phebe Coffin stood on a box in the barn, playing preacher to the group of friends she had gathered. Of course, in the 1830s, when Phebe was a child, women ministers were unusual, if there were any at all. Women couldn't vote, didn't have the right to own property, and couldn't attend most...

In early 2008, Mark Covington was out of a job—a very common problem in his native city of Detroit, where unemployment rates are some of the highest in the country. Large sections of many neighborhoods have been abandoned as people have fled Detroit, looking for jobs and a better life somewhere...

Raύl Cardenas came to the United States from Mexico, looking for work that would support him and his parents. He found a job driving heavy machinery, and even better, he found the love of his life, Judy. What he didn't find was a way to become a legal American citizen, even after he and Judy were...

What's the biggest protest you've ever heard of? Maybe you've seen pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in front of a sea of faces on the National Mall in Washington, D.C....

This story comes from the Hopi people of northern Arizona. "Hopi" means "People of Peace." This story was recorded in the 1950s by Oswald White Bear Fredericks and his wife Naomi from the storytelling of older Hopi at the village of Oraibi. Part One The world at first was endless space in which...

Sometimes a big idea starts with noticing small things. One day 14-year-old Hannah Salwen was in the car with her father, stopped at a stoplight under a bridge. Hannah noticed that just off the road on her right was a homeless person carrying a cardboard sign asking for help, and to the left of...

Imagine that you are in a glider, soaring over the Grand Canyon. You see layers of rock, red and yellow, brown and black. You see a deep gorge, as if someone has cut a trench a mile deep out of the layers of rock....

It was a shock to the whole nation when a gunman opened fire on a group of people who had gathered at a supermarket to meet with their U.S. Representative, Gabrielle Giffords. In mere moments, six people, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, were killed, and many more, including...

Can you imagine not having running water in your home? How would you and your family drink, cook, bathe, or go to the bathroom? Sadly, more than a billion people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water....

Jo Carson is a Southern writer with deep roots—in her case to the town and even the house in East Tennessee where her grandparents lived before her. Her sense of place and roots led her to write a book of poems based on conversations she overheard around her. Jo Carson's friend George Ella Lyons...