Megan Tan

July 21 was what some might call a “scorcher,” with temperatures approaching the 90s even before 11 a.m. That didn’t stop campers and counselors from heading down to the Boys’ and Girls’ Club annual carnival and enjoying the scene.

Blue: Wavelength 440-490 nm; frequency 680-610 THz; ranging from navy blue to cyan as one of the primary colors. And there are other truths, other ways of seeing and being blue.

“In our ideologically oriented world, every term has to be defined. When we say ‘common good,’ we don’t all have the same definition. We have to have room for individual freedom as well as social commitment to cooperation,” the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy said.

It was a cold Thursday morning in February. NPR’s Susan Stamberg waited anxiously in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — not an uncommon locale for her, considering her regular art reporting. But this time was different.

When Rocco Landesman was young, his uncle would give his brother and him $5 for every F they got in school. His uncle, after all, went on to found a personal management company, its motto being, “We take the sting out of success and put the fun back in failure!”

Magic flutes, valkyries, rampant consumption — some themes in opera can be hard to relate to, and not just for the audience. Singers, like actors, perform best when they can lose themselves in a character — when they can find that common thread that connects them with their role. But how do you find something in common with a 13th-century family in Florence?

Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his final hour before his execution in the Hall of Philosophy. Clad in a makeshift striped prison uniform, the Rev. Al Staggs portrayed Bonhoeffer at the Interfaith Lecture at 2 p.m. Friday in his presentation, “A View from the Underside: The Legacy of One of the Spies for God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

It’s cool outside and probably cloudy, since the sun is still deciding whether to make an appearance this morning. You blink several times, shove your gate pass blindly in the direction of a sleepy attendant and wheel your bike through the Main Gate. You enter the Welcome Center, glimpsing a simple black-and-white sign guiding you toward your destination. You open the door. A blast of heat. You take a seat with 20 other Chautauquans of all ages. You breathe deep and begin.

If there are traits that the Rev. Tony Campolo embodies, they are enthusiasm, energy and joy in taking action, so I was surprised that he and his wife Peggy had moved into a retirement community. “Yes,” he said, “I did move into a retirement community, but you should not retire. I was with some UCLA students. They were so cynical. I said to them, ‘I am 76, and you are 23, and I am younger than you. You are as young as your dreams and old as your cynicism. I am still dreaming.”

When the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell calls the afternoon Interfaith lecturer “one of the best lecturers of our time,” you had better pay attention. The aforementioned lecturer was Gary Dorrien, Episcopal priest, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. Dorrien has published a dozen books and more than 100 articles.

SLIDESHOW: Scenes during the Firemen's Picnic on Sunday, July 10, 2011.

Fishing. It has inspired some great minds, such as Washington Irving: “There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.”