Mary is no theologian in an academic sense. But as Luke tells the story, she and Elizabeth are the first theologians of a new faith. Their gift is an intrepid willingness to look for God's purpose in their own and one another's lives. If they are blo...
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innoce...
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these op...
The walls were coming down around me, but still, I couldn't imagine telling the truth. Not now. It was too late. How can I tell Mom and Dad what we'd done? It would ruin everything. It would ruin their image of me; it would ruin every thought they'd ...
People ask me how to start writing. I tell them that 'Creating Creates Creativity'. Put your notes and outline aside. Start with one anecdote or conversation, and that will lead to another and another. It's the steps, the path, not the final destinat...
While Owen and Miles talk sports, I people watch. And this is what I see: teenagers trying to act like adults. Or how they think adults act. But mostly they look ridiculous, and I wonder what they don't want to do something that's more fun than drink...
It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even ...
The Brandy Diet is one of my personal favourites – you don’t lose any weight, but if you drink enough of the stuff then you neither care what you look like nor what people think of you. Also, if you’re very lucky, you can lose days.
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we sho...
In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered-if I could slip out of camp unobserved-whether I just might be ab...
Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity." I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers. "Ju...
The idea only true or right "meaning" would be that shared by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private preoccupations, ...
Maturity is a needed component of faithful, loving relationships. And if not directed into the healthy channel of permitted adult behaviour, romantic and sexual jealousies can literally tear families and communities apart. A permanent solution like m...
Some people view love and romance as a sacred bond between two individuals. Other people see love as a game, where the goal is to manipulate another individual and gain emotional power over a partner. People who view love as a game are much more like...
I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could sl...
Mma Ramotswe decided to go back into her office. There was a curious thing about male conversation that she had noticed - men often ended up poking fun at one another. Women did this only rarely, but men seemed to love insulting one another. It was v...
It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience. The natural connection is the other way. To say that one person’...
In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and...
Mouths are self-loathing and prejudiced, because one mouth will never talk to another mouth—it’ll only talk to two ears. Likewise, the hatred is so great that one mouth will never listen to another mouth, even if it’s saying I love you.
Was he willing to blend into the life of another human being for the rest of his days, and have hers blend into his? That, of course, was the Bible’s bottom line on marriage: one flesh. Not separate entities, not two autonomous beings merely coming...
