Writing is the most effective way of dialoguing with the human family across boundaries of space and time. These essays are efforts to enter the dialogue. This is my third collection of essays. Reform and Renewal and Hope is a Dialogue preceded this publication. I have taken the liberty, in this book, to reprint in the "Milestones" section, the five essays which many consider the most successful of my writing career. As in those previous books, the essays enter the field of controversy much more readily than the other two dozen books I have written. The longer volumes tend to be contemplative rather than conversational. In any case, writing is a record of how some of us lived and thought. It becomes often a search for a truth we sometimes miss and occasionally encounter. I offer these essays conscious that they are, at best, a partial picture of a larger truth we do not see readily in its comprehensiveness. Writing is not so much a celebration of what it is like to arrive but a report from somewhere on the journey that we are at least on the road. It is an act of hope that the path is right and the direction correct. It is an act of confidence that one's energy will hold out and that in the moments of exhaustion others will bring the message home and correct its ill-formed syllables.