Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.
/.../he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber. Harold's backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well...
I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The...
Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends...
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.
vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment.
Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.
Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered t...
Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive proble...
Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.
People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.
When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.
