Good Books - What The Red Herring - Page 5 Category
How to be a Good Neighbor

How to be a Good Neighbor

Most people have heard the line from the Bible about loving your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t know the rest of the story, in the biblical context, everyone is your neighbor.

Here are three good books unified around a theme of neighbors and how we treat ours. These books contain big T truth – the Truth that comes through in any medium where there is space for it to dwell.

Light Reading

Light Reading

I’ve been posting about a lot of heavy books lately, because they are good and important. This post is a quick little pop-up advertisement for two books that are just for fun.

White Exceptionalism

White Exceptionalism

This month’s antiracism title was Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, by Layla F. Saad.

The chapter was “You and White Exceptionalism,” and I might be its poster child.

Teaching Kids Emotional Regulation

Teaching Kids Emotional Regulation

With everyone home together even more often than usual this past year, we have all struggled to manage our feelings. Fittingly, I’ve tuned this year’s homeschool health curriculum to focus on emotional regulation.

Dealing With Difficult People

Dealing With Difficult People

My favorite part of the paper has always been the advice columns. Ann Landers, Dear Amy, Dear Abby, Miss Manners, and more recently, Dear Carolyn and for crowd-sourced advice, Quora.

I enjoy the letters describing the dilemma, which unwittingly tell the reader so much about the author. The advice makes me think critically – what would I have done? Do I agree with the advice? Did it seem like the advice giver “got” it?

The situations and their responses give me a sense of what is socially appropriate, emotionally healthy, and legal.

The advice world, reflecting society at large, has a growing trend toward removing “toxic” and difficult people from your life. I put toxic in quotes not because toxic people don’t exist, but because our definition of them has grown to include not just your pathological, gaslighting uncle, but also your awkward friend who is working on her problems but still sometimes says careless or terrible things.