Tom Adams
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I was doing my best to ignore all the Trump hype about America’s 250th anniversary. His celebration isn’t mine. So, I figured I would sit this one out and pretend it wasn’t happening. The arrival of a Special Issue of Sojourners magazine gave me a different and healthier way to approach this important landmark. Today’s post reflects on the 250th and possible responses.
This week’s post is about the gift of faith and how it widens and deepens as I get older. We all have faith in something. Otherwise, it would be hard to go on in a world filled with uncertainty and evil.
I am coming to the end of leading two weekly book discussion groups of A Marriage that Changed the World: Lois and Bill Wilson and the Addiction Recovery Movement. For over three months I’ve been meeting with one group on Sunday morning and another on Monday morning, one in person and one on zoom. As we read Chapters 18 and 19 about Bill and Lois’ final years this past week, I was moved to tears several times.
I got some unexpected gifts from seeing a billboard reminding me that May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Today’s post is about those gifts and the challenge of appreciating the mental health challenges we each face with compassion and understanding. I might not...
This week’s post is part of a series aimed at increasing awareness about how families are impacted by addictions and how they recover. Most days I experience painful evidence of alcoholism and other addictions being passed from generation to generation. Learning and writing about the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and Al-Anon Family Groups (Al-Anon) and the addiction recovery movement they spawned is one way to hopefully slow this cycle and pass on awareness of recovery to current and future generations.
I find myself thinking a lot about the 2026 mid-term elections and what they might mean to local communities and our nation and the world. Today’s post explores some of the questions that I believe will shape these elections.
I’m writing from Dublin, a city that understands the math of motion. It was here that one of the most rapid wholesale migrations in history occurred. Driven by starvation during the potato famine, and met with deafening silence and inaction from England just across the water, the Irish scattered. They fled to New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. They were nomads created by desperation and hostility from those abusing their power, and they were often treated poorly by their new homelands.
It’s often unclear what sparks curiosity and where it leads. Recently, I found myself wondering about the founders of Netflix—remembering the early days of DVDs arriving by mail—and whether they were still involved.
Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, April 22, 1951, Lois Wilson hosted a lunch at her Stepping Stones home for the wives of A.A. members from the U.S. and Canada attending the A.A. General Service Conference in NY, her neighbor and friend Anne Bingham and other wives of local and regional members of “wives’ groups”. This little-known meeting was the first step towards a Clearing House, the precursor of the Al-Anon Family Groups, a world-wide Twelve Step fellowship for families and friends of people with drinking problems.
It’s not hard to see the tensions between a life committed to love and justice for all and one focused on destroying enemies and protecting the few. Easter Sunday 2026 offered one of the clearest pictures of this contradiction. This post is about the importance of play in a world in distress.
Tom Adams writes and speaks on topics vital to the intersection of our personal lives with our community and global lives. He has for decades been engaged in and written about nonprofit leadership and transitions, spirituality and spiritual growth, how we each contribute to a more just and equitable world and recovery from addictions and the Twelve Step recovery movement.