Some of you might enjoy my latest Image essay, “Confessions of a Gnostic Reader.” Here’s an excerpt: “You needn’t be theologian or historian to grasp gnosticism: disdain for the flesh, and a faith that there are secret, spiritual understandings that only the smartest and best flesh despisers can divine. It’s a spirit very much alive …
Sometimes I am overwhelmed, as I stand with my sons in the cathedral, by the feeling of safety. It’s not something I ever felt in church as a child. In those days I felt out of place. I thought I was pitied or judged because my parents weren’t there. I felt condemned by an angry …
You know you’ve been flying too much when you sleep through the better part of an in-flight emergency. It wasn’t the exclamations of my fellow passengers that stirred me from my takeoff doze, so much as the sense that what had been a lifting sensation was now most definitely a sinking sensation. And most of …
I’m happy to announce that every couple of weeks I’ll be writing essays for Good Letters, the blog over at Image. Some of you will recognize Image as one of my favorite literary journals, and so you’ll know how honored I am that they asked me to join them. My first essay went up a …
