MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -25-   Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live… but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.   Parker Palmer   How do you spend your time? How do you choose how you spend your time? What undergirds your choices in how you spend your time? Parker Palmer presents two scenarios. The first is when we embrace values and standards that are not ours. It’s tempting, is it not, to be drawn along by the magnetic pull of cultural values? More responsibility is better than less. Higher remuneration is better than lower. Greater public prominence and recognition are better tha...

  To be released June 30. Watch for it! Book Description: They sold the farm, packed up seven children, and chased a promise called California. Based on Hazel’s journal, this true story follows a family that leaves Wisconsin hoping for relief from brutal winters—only to run out of money with hundreds of miles still to go. Stranded and desperate, they enter a world of labor camps, endless fieldwork, hunger, and exhaustion, where families are worked hard, paid little, and treated as disposable. Once respected and secure, they find themselves suddenly labeled vagrants. Pride becomes a liability. Dignity must be defended daily. And survival depends on grit, faith, and refusing to give up—especially for Hazel, who will not allow poverty to erase who she is or break her family apart. This is a raw, gripping true story of endurance, injustice, and a woman who stood her ground when everything was taken away. Endorsement: Hazel and Olaf is a magnificent story of resilience, persevera...

  They arrive with backpacks full of hope and words that sound different. In the hallways of American schools, immigrant children learn quickly that difference can draw laughter before it earns respect. Their names are shortened, their lunches questioned, their accents mimicked. But beneath those moments of cruelty, something extraordinary is happening. They are learning endurance. They are learning how to translate their parents’ sacrifices into possibility. They are learning that courage sometimes sounds like mispronounced syllables and sometimes looks like showing up again tomorrow. These children grow into adults who speak more than one language of belonging. They become the interpreters, the advocates, the innovators who remind us that America’s strength has always been its mosaic of voices. This Immigrant Heritage Month, let’s honor the children who carried their families’ dreams through the gauntlet of misunderstanding — and turned it into empathy. Their courage is the accen...