Martha Manikas-Foster of Family Life radio approached me a few weeks ago about an old blog post of mine about Thanksgiving. Back in 2014, I wrote about how Thanksgiving is oddly apolitical (in contrast to, say, Columbus/indigenous people’s day) and oddly areligious (though it claims Protestant roots, Thanksgiving is celebrated outside of the Christian tradition just as easily as it is within it). But I also wrote about the relationship between giving thanks and understanding ourselves as dependent creatures. 

So Martha and I had a chance to talk about gratitude—what it is, why we need a sense of dependence in order to give thanks, how gratitude can distort our understanding of the world, and how we can actually practice giving thanks regularly and not just once a year. Our conversation can be found here. It runs for about 15 minutes, and I hope you’ll start this season of Thanksgiving by listening in.

That short dialogue got me thinking about gratitude as both a simple practice and a complex idea, so in this month of Thanksgiving I’m also going to offer a series of posts about gratitude: gratitude and grumpiness, gratitude and grief, gratitude and grace, gratitude and growth. 

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