As is true of anyone who is long on love and short on cash, Isaac likes to find things around the house, wrap them up in scrap paper, and give them to people. Tonight at dinner he gave me a present wrapped in old construction paper and about a half-mile of tape. The words “I …
My work with non-profits over the years has given me the opportunity to sit down with a number of philanthropists. I’m just now flying home from visiting Tucson, Arizona, where I met with several people who have led very different lives, but who share a characteristic that I wish were more true of me. Quite …
My first thought, upon hearing of Amy Chua’s now famous (or infamous) essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers, is that it’s irrelevant to me. The odds that I will go out and father a child with a Chinese woman are exactly zero. Further, even if Chua has brilliant mothering tips, there’s no way I’m going to …
On Tiger Mamas, bad art, and the heart of a child Read More »
I’m trying to do sit-ups. I’m inhibited by three year-old Isaiah, who has crawled onto my chest and put his warm face against my neck. He’s crying in frustration with a shirt that he can’t seem to make fit right, but which he resists letting anyone help him with. I wrap my arms around him. …
I started a garden last summer. It went to weeds, and then the weeds grew parched under the relentless Kansas sun, and then they withered and died. I traveled more than I’d anticipated, and when I was home other things competed for my time, if only fatigue. I think on that garden and I fear …
When I was a little boy, I was a pagan. Like our ancestors who had lost sight of God, yet saw visions of him in the luminescent peace of a harvest moon, or the spine-rattling fury of a thunderclap, I believed in supernatural things. I believed there were rituals and incantations to invoke them, or …
When young men take up guns and set about killing to satisfy whatever dark insanity has possessed them, I think of my sons. I think about the world in which they walk, a world that is physically safer than most people have ever known, but which is singed by the devil all the same, and …
If you believe God loves His children, and then you suffer something terrible and tragic, you have to face head-on the question: Is there God? Close on its heels comes the second query, just as hard: Why does He sit quiet as we suffer? Now, you can avoid these questions for a time. You can …
I’ve got all four boys to myself and I’m trying to plot a course halfway across America, a course that doesn’t entail careening off an icy highway to our deaths. They are, meanwhile, chasing one another about upstairs, with occasional crashes that sound to me, hunkered in front of a computer below, like they are …
I’ve been thinking about what I can resolve to do differently. There’s plenty I could name, but it’s the resolve that gets you, isn’t it? There’s a scene, towards the end of The Untouchables, when Jim Malone (Sean Connery), his body riddled with bullets, wheezes at Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) through blood bubbling up from …
This is the time when we resolve to do things differently. I’ve certainly resolved to do a number of things differently, but most of these are neither here nor there to most of you, and probably little different from your own resolutions about Bible-reading and body fat and general niceness towards one’s fellow man, no …
The SitG New Year’s Pop Culture Leave-it-Behind Countdown Read More »
