Robert Coles

Um, and Timothy, I, I have interviewed I c- I think at least a couple times.

Um, honored Robert Coles, uh, someone who I was not familiar, uh, with before, uh, as a transformative teacher and mentor whose literature course connected intellectual inquiry with compassion and service.

We recall Coles' storytelling, support engagement, and personal influence.

Um, he was urging, um, readers, listeners to carry forward his legacy through moral reflection and meaningful responsibility toward other people.

Well, and, and the nice thing about-

... uh, it's one of those things where you-

The, the nice thing about Bob Cole was that, uh, he, he would inspire people to make their own judgments by reading.

You know, he- heaven forbid.

referring to is entirely...

The content of his ethical teaching, Robert Coles, the psychology professor at Harvard, pointed out, all the writings on ethics over the past 2,000 years... are simply footnotes to the Sermon on the Mount.

Not strictly relevant, but Coles was a Pulitzer-winning psychiatrist, not a psychology professor.

A psychiatrist is a medical doctor specializing in mental health, while a psychology professor is an academic trained in the distinct discipline of psychology.

It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned, that somewhere a distant honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue and that somehow your bravery counts, end quote.

She added that author, child psychiatrist, and Harvard professor Robert Coles found that children in crisis facing a deathly ill parent or poverty are often viewed God as a, quote, kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help, end quote.

God as an object of pity.

And here we reach one of the most intriguing aspects of this case, how these children talk about God and Satan.

But what if you are a child enduring a continually grueling, dangerous journey? Instead, these children, quote, snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible story leaflets from street corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths.

adding, in shelters children could meet, exchange stories, and tell one another things that helped them survive the harshest nights.

Robert Coles of Harvard, as we wrote, wrote in The Spiritual Life of Children that Sense of mission may explain why some children in crisis, and perhaps the adults they become, are brave, decent, and imaginative, while other more privileged kids can be callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre.

Coles also claimed, "...the ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good, a sense of mission, is nurtured in these eerily beautiful shelter folktales." Edwards elaborated that homeless children live where violence and death are commonplace, where it's advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are nowhere to be found.

She meant her longing for God.

And one of the beautiful moments in her life comes at the end where she's asked by Robert Coles...

She wrote this memoir, Long Loneliness, when she was young, and at the end of her life, she was asked, "Did you ever think of writing another one to the rest of your life?" And Dorothy Day, for those who don't know, was a woman who not only served the poor, but lived amongst the poor.

A life of selfless love, really.

That was when the organization in the early 70s had its first black official, Robert Nash, an architect from Washington, D.C., I believe was a vice president.

Eventually, Robert Coles was also in a similar role.

That's not nothing, but it wasn't a wholesale transformation of the organization, which, of course, didn't have a black president until the 2000s.

Marshall Purnell, I believe.