Author and former Congressman Bruce Barton (1886-1967) famously said, “Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think that there are no little things.” If ever a generation ought to be aware of this, it ought to be ours.
The problems of the world, everyone keeps saying, are so massive as to be overwhelming. Professor John H. Bunzel, former president of San Jose State university, saw it this way: “We are living in a time of irony and immense paradox. It has been said that the biggest problems in the world are really so tiny—the atom, the ovum, and a touch of pigment.” We are so conditioned to look for the spectacular and the dramatic that we are apt to overlook the possibilities that lie in...