Six days ago: an ambulance ride with my 11 year-old to a trauma center near the South Carolina coliseum where he and 2,000 other youngsters have been wrestling. His neck braced, a board under his back, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes as he chuckles at the paramedic’s dad jokes. I am not …
The recent tragedy of a driverless Uber car killing a pedestrian in Arizona is raising questions about the future of this technology. I think we should ask some more fundamental questions, like where scientists get the chutzpah to work on driverless cars in the first place, especially when there are so many more important projects to which …
Another revelation of systematic, years-long sexual exploitation of girls in England, and the accompanying failure of men whose jobs are to protect the vulnerable. A failure driven by ineptitude, class bias, and fear of racism accusations amidst a judicial machinery that responds more reliably against thought crimes than actual crimes against children. You can read …
Since the day Cain raised a rock to Abel’s head, men have been about the business of slaughtering one another. Oceans of blood spilled and still something pierces our innermost hearts when it is a child who does the killing, when his victims are other children, when his motive seems nothing other than to fill …
My oldest son’s English teacher had this great idea, corresponding with the class reading Hamlet, for we parents to pen whatever wisdom we’ve tried to impart to our children and give it to them, so they have the option of sharing some of it when the class goes over Polonius’s advice to his own son …
Redesigning my blog was not a rational decision. I mean, consider the facts. Fact One: Nobody reads any more. The data are pretty conclusive. We’re all eye-glued to our apps, or gaming, or enjoying the golden age of television. Sometimes all three at once. Nobody wastes time on long sentences stacked like shelves in a musty …
I guess before you read the rest of this you should decide how you feel about the fact that I didn’t vote for either of them. Nor did I vote for the Libertarian, or the lady who makes Bernie Sanders look like Milton Friedman and whose name I’ve already forgotten. I voted in every other …
“So, Dad, did you know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are having a debate tonight?” “Yep.” “Are we watching it?” “Nope.” “Why not?” “For the same reasons we don’t watch German porn, or videos about how to treat gangrene.” “Dad.” “Also because I rented Jungle Book.” “Dad.” “Trust me—it’s the new one, with the digital …
I used to write much more about my children, but they’re growing despite my best efforts to conserve groceries, and they’re online in their various ways, and so it makes sense to let them tell their own stories, in their own time, in their own ways. I mean I know there are writers who tell …
From my latest essay at the Image Good Letters site: I am a tense and irritable man with occasional bouts of cheerfulness tempered by fatalism. I am a hard man with whom to live. I spent yesterday griping at my kids not to drown in the river, not to pick up snakes, not to fall …
Here’s an excerpt from my latest Image essay if you’re interested: Isaiah returned to the scene of the crime to survey his work. It was a damned atrocity. Paint ran haphazardly against the grain, tacky pools of it collected on the surface, and thick rivulets had crawled down the sides and hardened. “Look at it,” …
My youngest boys, Isaac and Isaiah (10 and 7), depart today for a week-long summer camp, which is a cause for excitement on their part, and quiet trepidation on mine. “Keep your money in a stinky sock,” I advise them. “If somebody picks on you, that’s the opportunity to forgive and turn the other cheek.” I …
It feels almost unseemly, hurling another post at you so soon after the last, given my long absence before. Think of me as the gregarious but wayward uncle, come to inhabit your kitchen for the Christmas season. He’ll likely take up his bag and be gone one morning without so much as a goodbye, but …
I will tell you something about courage and cowardice. I will speak primarily about men, because I am a man, and because the evil that grieves me was glimpsed by men, and these men turned away their eyes. News accounts from England reveal that over 1,400 children in the borough of Rotherham were systematically brutalized …
Related to my previous post, I have an essay at Good Letters digging into the hypocrisy of evangelicals, as represented by the American Family Association, who simultaneously support the Drug War while demanding that we reject child refugees from that war. Here’s an excerpt: We sponsor both sides of this war; we constitute the primary …
I don’t think they love their children any less than I love my own, which tells me something about what their lives must be like, to send their babies away. Their children stream northward in droves—as many as 60,000 this year—and we don’t want them. We don’t want their skin lesions and their hungry bellies, …
“I’m sorry I shot you in the face with my Nerf gun. Do you forgive me?” My son knows he is supposed to ask for forgiveness, just as his brother knows that sooner or later he will be expected to say yes. He knows to say it because he knows he is supposed to forgive. …
Some of you might appreciate my latest essay for Good Letters. Others of you may not like it at all. Maybe it’s proof that I’m no less angry today than I was ten years ago, when some of you first started reading my little missives. I’d like to think I’m angry about more important things …
“Which world do you want to live in?” My oldest son, just days from his 14th birthday, glares back at me. Behind him in the car sit his brothers. Their hands are pressed to their faces. One of them is crying. Caleb begins to explain why he smacked them. Eli was needling him about something. Isaac, …
The day after an amazingly talented actor pushed heroin into his vein and died, I saw yet another study purporting to show that we live in the best of times. It’s hard to disagree. Infant mortality and poverty are plummeting. Our lifespans are being extended. More people worldwide are literate, and more of them can …
Well, I’d intended for any manifestos I write to be published well after my death, if not to spare my children the embarrassment, then to avert desecration of my grave. In grad school I learned, by way of a miserable course of study in econometrics, the word “orthogonal.” In two-dimensional space, it refers to lines …
Do you ever look on your children, and wish they had better than you? Back when we were shopping my embarrassingly confessional first book, my agent at the time told me I needed a ministry to accompany it. She said this as a realist, not an enthusiast. You need a platform to sell your wares. …
I come now to the question in my heart when I began: what can my sons say to a deceived and soul-sickened world? You might remember the story of a girl murdered that awful day in Columbine. As this story goes, one of the demoniac boys asked if she believed in God, and when she …
What is the cost of a calling? You can be called to be a parent; you can be called to be a plumber. But having a child, or picking up a pipe wrench, is not—in and of itself—to pursue a calling. The world is filled with parents and plumbers, after all, who don’t do their …
Many parents carry within our hearts—sometimes in a cramped and even despairing corner—a vision of what we hope our children will become. This vision lives deeper than our wish that they be doctors or NFL quarterbacks, deeper even than our desire for their happiness. Our heart-dwelling hope is that they will be good and true, that …
Every month, money flies from my checking account to the education savings accounts of my children, because I don’t want them to become hobos. This is one way I allay my fear the world will eat them up. It’s a mark of a good parent to worry over where—and whether—his child will go to college, …
My mother died while I was at the beach and so while my children spent their days on the shore, I spoke by phone with the many professionals who position themselves between the living and the dead. My thirteen year-old wanted to build a sandcastle. He has so many preoccupations these days, perhaps chief among …
We read somewhere that the Pilgrims survived on a few kernels of corn and were thankful, so we settled on an exquisite Thanksgiving torture wherein we set bowls of steaming, buttered, gravy-addled food in front of our children who have been begging to be fed for hours, and make them name their blessings before they …
The latest Conversations on Philanthropy is hot off the presses, and if you subscribe you’ll soon have a copy in the mail. If not, however, and you’re just dying to read my review of Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, then you can click here. If you’re not sure about …
One of my sons asked about an historical figure, or maybe it was some living politician whom history will soon forget. My son wanted to know whether this man was a good guy, or a bad guy. This is our most fundamental typology for strangers. For all others, it is blood and love. Are you …
