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 …
This past year, most of my scarce scraps of writing time have gone into revising a novel, which is currently in the hands of a small number of potential agents and even a potential publisher, though I’m sure I’ve jinxed myself by saying so. I have been writing a few other things, which I usually …
Here’s an excerpt from my Christmas Eve post over at Good Letters: When I read about the boy hiding under his bed, first inviting the world he knew to watch him die, then hiding from it in that darkened place, I thought about the cave where a savior was born. I thought as well about …
This is not a comment about the reasoning of a Slate essayist, who wrote recently that the white Santa is outdated. This is not a comment about the Fox News talking head who took umbrage, asserting that not only Santa, but also Jesus, is white. This is not a comment about the predictable crowds who …
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 …
This news from the BBC, about a rise in the number of pagan winter solstice celebrants in the UK, is disturbing. How could people raised in the Christian West miss the point that Christmas is about shopping until your debt rivals that of a Wall Street bank, gorging yourself for a month straight, salivating over car and …
A woman and her boyfriend beat her two-month old baby to death on Christmas Eve in Detroit, and the Wayne County Prosecutor suggests parenting classes might help stem the tide of such abuse. While we lose the traditions and practices of civility and self-restraint, while we laugh at the Church as anything more than a …
The writer who has inspired me more than any other, on the birth of the God-child: “But if there is the beauty of what is majestic and powerful, there is the beauty also of what is humble and powerless. Like any child, Jesus as a child has one power only and that is the power …
A MEDITATION ON THE INCARNATION BY ST EPHRAIM THE SYRIAN We confess one and the same individual as perfect God and perfect Man. He is God the Word Which was flesh. For if He was not flesh, why was Mary chosen? And if He is not God, whom does Gabriel call Lord? If He was …
He sees her as we circle the parking lot a second time, an aimless, wandering circle, a time-killing circle while we wait for their mother to finish a bit of shopping. I have already seen the woman — a girl, really, with tangled dark hair and downturned gaze. She sits on a little concrete median …
Stephen Caleb is now our willing accomplice in perpetuating the Santa myth. Some of you might recall my last year’s Wall Street Journal piece arguing that there’s something to be said for encouraging, for a time, your child’s belief in the magical. But there’s also a point at which a kid is no longer going …
My Christmas quest was simple enough: buy toy cowboy guns for my boys. Caleb and Eli have boots and hats, bandanas and sheriff’s badges. But they don’t have holsters and guns. Without those critical components, however, you’ve really just got yourself a Village People costume. We’ve made do until now with two wooden pistols that …
