I’ve been thinking on the incongruity of sharing a name with the saint who went into the desert to wrestle demons and aloneness and thereby work out salvation. I sat at an oval window this morning and looked on the sunfired clouds below and wondered into what wilderness I am once again hurtling, and whether …
Somewhere between a speed too slow to get killed and too fast to get away, a grasshopper found himself clinging to my windshield wiper. He wrapped his thin wire legs around black metal and held on with that baleful, narrow-headed look grasshoppers have. I kept waiting for him to let go, to tumble and topple …
Faith is this knowing in the center of you that will not leave. It has been to you a light that guides, light that illumines the worst of yourself, weight that steadies, weight that holds you where you do not want to be. Perhaps, when it first stirred inside your chest, you tried to build …
Church is light streaming in, mingled voices, the expectation — sometimes against all experience — that this time God will meet you here, or at the very least, that you will leave your miserable ways long enough to meet Him. It doesn’t happen every week or even more than a few times in your life. …
“The Father turns His face away. . .”, goes the song. How comforting, then, to read in the 21st Psalm (22nd in the Protestant Bible): Nor has He turned away His face from me; And when I cried out to Him, He heard me. Which reminds us that Christ on the cross, while fully man and …
I must confess that my first reaction, upon hearing about the thug who had his seven year-old tattooed with his gang’s symbol, was that the solution seemed pretty straightforward: a bullet under the chin of the sperm-donor, along with a good home for his son, and if someone will pay for two plane tickets to …
Wife tells me that when baby Isaiah went for his two year-old check-up this week, the doctor announced that he was to receive two shots. “Two shots!” Isaiah shouted with glee. “Two shots!” Either he thought he was going to play guns with his brothers, or he believed shots is a new kind of candy. …
My family and I were on vacation, and so I missed the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. I mean, July 10th happened where we were, it’s just that he wasn’t on my mind. I used to be a Calvinist. Many people I love are Calvinists. Others worship in churches that subtly advocate Calvin’s stern predestinationism, though …
Because circles, for the love of God, aren’t square Read More »
Sometimes the words don’t seem like they’ll get close to the truth of anything, and so I just stop writing. That’s not completely true; I’ll write fiction perhaps, because those people in the stories inside my head haven’t yet worked themselves into corners where the words are like sunfaded fabric or covered-over grass or the sigh …
I couldn’t believe, when I first read it, that Harvard’s chaplain is an atheist. Then I felt stupid for being surprised. That die was likely cast when Harvard’s overseers struck Christo et Ecclesiae from its place surrounding Veritas on the university’s seal. What need Christ and Church, after all, when we can have unadulterated truth? Somewhere in …
I have an arrangement with myself, which is that I can only have a Starbucks hot chocolate (two-percent milk, no whipped cream) on cloudy days, or on Sundays when I catch the early service at a different church, or on Mondays when the thought of going to work presses me down onto my bed like …
I’m in the midst of a writing frenzy at present, so for your reading pleasure I present an excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” which may be found in the volume of her speeches and essays, Mystery and Manners. This came to me some weeks ago courtesy of Adam DeVille, who …
