MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -43-   Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.   Ella Fitzgerald   Ella Fitzgerald, the “Queen of Song,” had a legendary career that spanned over half a century. Beginning in the early 1930s, she performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra and helped to form new styles in American popular music. She was noted both for her vocal and artistic range and for her remarkable improvisational ability. Reacting to the formulaic style of big band swing music, Fitzgerald was at the cutting edge of bebop, the jazz movement that turned away from prominent bass lines and featured extended improvisational solos from instruments like saxophone and clarinet or from the voice in the role of instruments. You can...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -27-   Love is another word that is a bit (or a lot) ruined- something we routinely speak of as something we fall into and fall out of. But as a piece of intelligence about what makes us human, and what we are capable of, it is a virtue and way of being we have scarcely begun to mine. People who have turned the world on its axis across history have called humanity to love. It’s time to dare this more bravely in our midst, and dare learning together how love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good.   Krista Tippett   Love can change the world. There is the rippling, accumulative effect of treating each person you meet with dignity and grace, but there is more. Creatively applied, love fuels activism that reconfigures the world in the public sphere, as it does among individuals. Jonathan Cedar is a professional...

  Unconditional love is often spoken of in soft tones and poetic phrases—as if it’s something simple, automatic, even easy. But if you’ve ever tried to love fully and freely, without expectation or self-protection, you know: it takes work. Real work. Inner work. The essence of unconditional love isn’t found in a single act of kindness. It’s revealed in our willingness to look within—to understand why we react the way we do, where our emotional triggers lie, and what parts of our past still shape the way we love in the present. That’s where  Learning to Feel  begins. This book is not about suppressing emotions or floating above them. It’s about entering the heart of them—discovering what is ours, what is borrowed, and what no longer serves us. As we do that, we gain something extraordinary: the power to choose how we feel and how we respond. And when we gain that choice, love changes. It becomes less about control, more about connection. Less about fear, more about freedom...