In the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the year 1858, a young woman entered a streetcar and sat down. The conductor came to her and insisted she leave, but she stayed quietly in her seat. A passenger intervened, asking if the woman in question might be permitted to sit in a corner. She did not move. When she reached her destination, the woman got up and tried to pay the fare, but the conductor refused to take her money. She threw it down on the floor and left.

What was that all about? Read more →

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Perhaps you remember the story about Antoinette Tuff. She’s the woman in Atlanta, Georgia, who was working in the main office of an elementary school when a man burst in with an automatic rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition. Everyone got out, thanks to her. Read more →

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In theory, courage is a good thing. One of the best things.

As Screwtape, the Senior Devil in The Screwtape Letters puts it:

We [in hell] have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy [God] permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage
becomes so obviously lovely and
important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame….

As a matter of practice, the truth is more complex. Bill Maher pointed out that the 9/11 bombers were not cowards. In the days after 9/11, the President was calling the terrorists “cowards,” but, as Maher noted, one can say a lot of things about a man who purposefully crashes a plane that he himself is inside, but that he’s a coward shouldn’t be one of them.

But it’s not just that courage can be used for evil. I don’t think courage counts unless you’re actually using it for good. One time I was having lunch with a friend and her children and one of the children was stung by a wasp. The crying child crawled onto his mother’s lap. The wasp, still in shock itself, fluttered down onto a napkin on the table. We watched in silence.

“It would be nice if somebody got rid of that wasp,” my friend said. She picked up the napkin, wasp still inside, and held it out to me. The judgment was implied. If I didn’t get rid of it, I was inconsiderate of a mother who needed to be tending to her child. Annoyance creased her face.

Angry wasp—with the potential to put me in anaphylactic shock? Or friend who thinks less of me? Tough call.

I took the wasp. Holding the edges of the napkin as if it contained explosive material, I took the unhappy critter outside, set it down on the table and watched, quivering, until it flew away.

Carrying the wasp, though it involved facing one of my fears, was not an act of courage. I didn’t do it to help the child or the mother. I did it because as a grown woman, I was embarrassed not to. Something one does for someone else’s approval cannot count as a courageous act.

When I was a small child, maybe ten years old, my brother sat next to a wasp nest and got something like twenty stings. He ran into the living room, hysterical. Being a well-meaning, if not terribly bright child, I went running out and grabbed the blankie he’d left behind, calming him considerably, and getting six or eight stings for myself. I did that because it was the only thing I could think of that would make him feel better. It was worth facing down angry wasps to help him out.

That was courage. Of course, the stings I got and the resulting allergic reaction is how one develops a phobia that haunts one into adulthood. Nobody ever said virtue was easy.

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A few months back 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Read more →

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When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working… Read more →