Michelle Obama called herself a “single mother” last week and we’ll probably be hearing about it years from now. Some Obama opponents consider it evidence the president is an absentee father, others that he’s gay, others simply that the Obamas don’t understand the plight of single mothers. Here’s proof, thousands told themselves, of what Obama …
I guess I stopped writing about personal things here because I didn’t like the person I had become. I felt stupid, the faith and family writer who gets divorced. This was compounded by coming to DC and finding myself—though alongside very decent and honorable people—exposed as well to a few ugly people for whom gossip …
Some of you might like my meditation on what Good Friday means to the parent of a dead child. Here’s an excerpt: “It is a great mystery to me, how God can know what it means to be forsaken, and because he is three-in-one, know also how it is to look on your dying child, …
Preach and heal. This is what Christ asked of his apostles, before sending them out in pairs: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matt. 10:7-8) Churches struggle to conjoin them. …
Some of you may like my essay at Good Letters. An excerpt: “Sometimes this broken world hacks away at our flesh. Other times it hands us the blades, and we sunder ourselves. Drink down whatever forgetting medicine invites you and the stump will stop hurting, but as God is my witness, you will not move …
There is nothing to be done but weep. Cry out for the children with bodies shattered, for the ones covered in blood not their own, for the ones who didn’t die instantly. Cry out for those who fell protecting them. Cry out for the parents in their waiting. Cry out for sisters and brothers. Cry …
Back when I thought I knew something about God, I sought arguments. God is this, and God is not that, and those scriptures you think say one thing actually mean something else, don’t you know. I thought her simple and silly, though good-hearted. Hers was the Sunday School God, the “Jesus Loves Me” God, a …
Maybe you are like me and you are like most of us and so you imagine that your looks and your brains and your accumulations matter. Sometimes this works well for us, because if nothing else we can imagine the strangers we pass on the street are slower-witted, less noble, less burdened by uniqueness. We …
Some of you may appreciate my latest Good Letters post over at Patheos, in which I make the entirely reasonable suggestion that Penn State’s football stadium be leveled, as a small act of communal repentance. “The forgetting can’t happen soon enough, according to sports writer Adam Jacobi. “The school just needs a continuation of the …
Some of you may like my latest offering for Image — an homage, if you will, to those noble members of the political, legal, financial, and insurance professions to whom I sometimes refer in the collective as “that bunch of bastards.” Here’s an excerpt: “Loggers are dispatched to the Pacific Northwest to fell a tree. …
Some of you may appreciate my essay at Patheos about the long silent witnesses to Jerry Sandusky’s crimes against children, and the propensity for most of us to avoid the courageous and costly choice. Here’s an excerpt: “We all imagine we’d choose bravely: We’d lead a revolt against the slaver. We’d turn our backs on …
My children woke me to pray this morning at 5:45 a.m. Actually, they woke me playing Legos and making the range of dramatic voices and sound effects that are, apparently, part of early morning Lego play. But then I pleaded with them to go back to sleep, and they tried to comply, in a form …
If you were to write down the names of everyone you trust — truly trust — what size paper would you need? I needed the back of a receipt. There are ten names on this scrap of paper. Ten people I know would never share any of my confidences, never twist the personal things of …
Some of you may like my latest essay at Image. Others of you may hate it, depending on your view of property rights, downsizing, and confrontations. Also, there’s a cuss word. An excerpt: “Owning others’ unhappiness is why I’m accommodating, and a desperate desire to be liked is why I’m the smiling, gabby, flirty guy …
Yesterday was Stephen Caleb’s birthday. He’s twelve, and there are now only 364 days between him and the onset of teenagerism, which I associate — at least among American kids — with sloth and self-indulgence, ignorance and idiocy and all-around brain malfunction, the latter now being scientifically proven at last. We are all of us …
When we don’t think we can control some things we take charge of what we can. This is why the functionary fastidiously maintains a constant distance between his stapler and his tape dispenser, and why the abused child has a ritual for pajamas and tooth-brushing and curling up tight that he enacts like the body’s …
Some of you may enjoy my latest post at Image. Here’s an excerpt: “I told Caleb about the time when he was two, and he fell from a second-storey porch to the hard-packed earth below. I told him how I turned too late, and saw his little rain-booted foot disappear from sight, and heard the …
This morning I drove past the house where she died. The light today is the way it was then, a light that doesn’t warn you how peace comes at a cost this day, how once she’s sleeping she won’t wake again, no matter that she is stronger than little girls are supposed to be, no …
I realized this morning that part of the reason I haven’t written here in so long, the reason I balk at the thought of it, is that I got the most hate-filled letter I’ve ever received, back in July, in the form of a comment someone tried to post here. The writer claimed I was …
There’s certainly no distinction to breeding, and so Father’s Day must be intended to celebrate something other than one’s ability to procreate. It began in tragedy, which is maybe the truth of too many things, the world’s way of daring us to bring beauty from ashes. Two hundred and ten fathers erased from their homes, …
I was asked to speak to some graduates last week, and so I spoke to them about finding their place in the world and about endurance in the face of suffering and about decisions that once we make them can never, ever be undone. I don’t know how to talk about these things any more …
Some of you may appreciate my latest essay over at the Image Good Letters blog. Then again, some of you may not. I thought including kittens might make this one a little lighter than much of my recent writing, but oh well. An excerpt: “I bring my sons to the cathedral every Sunday and we …
I am rarely humble yet often humbled, which is maybe the surest sign that God has not given up on me yet. I remember, years ago, standing in judgment over a friend who came to me seeking grace. I offered him Bible verses, I lectured him on the stern truths of the Christian sect in …
Someone told me recently, “You’re a good man, Tony.” This made me think of a James Taylor concert I heard about once. In the hush between sets, someone in the audience shouted, “I love you, James!” Taylor stepped to the microphone and replied, “That’s because you don’t know me.” Do you ever feel some days that …
Some of you may appreciate my latest essay at Image‘s Good Letters blog. An excerpt: “. . . I offered him my experience: we accumulate suffering as we grow older, so that the things which once brought us happiness no longer ameliorate the pain. Those things that give us gladness, however, give us even greater …
Some of you may enjoy my latest essay at Good Letters, the Image blog. The title is “In the Flesh,” and here’s an excerpt: “These are the sweeter moments, but the rare ones; more often than not there is tugging at my clothes, usually by hands sticky with jelly or orange juice. They yank on …
I don’t know the first thing about how to be a father to a fifteen year-old girl. Today is her birthday and if she had lived I would be puzzling this out, what I think about clothes and boys and music and especially boys, because all my babies are beautiful and perhaps Caroline most of …
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 …
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 …
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 …