I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended ...
Jenny Marzen is who again?" Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. "And Jenny is my number one fan?" "No, but she likes you. She r...
Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ we seem to have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not hav...
An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it...
Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and, except a short historical part, and a few sketches ...
,' it used to be called, even by Jews. 'The Jewish Question.' I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flir...
Your Barney?” Cole’s eyebrows shot up. “Yours?” “He’s mine all right!” Claire replied. “Everyone in this family belongs to everyone else – belongs with everyone else, rather. I’ve looked after him for a year now – ironed his shi...
Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us...
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy...
It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is havin...
Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the hu...
Beware of ‘god men’ and ‘god women’. Even people who have not been depressed for a day in their lives get sucked into the seductive delusion of spirituality. If you must seek, seek by yourself, sitting in an armchair at your desk after office...
There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our g...
Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library...
Well, I never been to much school, you understand, but it seems to me that you're assuming something you shouldn't assume... that God sees the world like you do; one thing at a time, from just one spot. Seems to me that he's supposed to be everywhere...
One day, an unusually exciting event interrupted the rhythm of our regular middle-class teenage lives. A Russian woman, the mother of a girl in our class, was run over by a New York City bound train right in the center of town. Our classmate left sch...
It cannot be denied that as institutions, churches do good work. They operate schools and hospitals. Their charity outreaches, which take care of the homeless, sick, and hungry, have real impacts on communities. And while there are certainly hellfire...
Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four ston...
I admire nudity and I like sex, and so did a lot of people in the Thirties. But, to me, overexposure blunts the fun…Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear. Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible until it was touched and t...
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from ...
Okay, time to get serious. I let my smile fade slowly and lowered my pitch, as no human woman could have. “I’m not joking this time. If I see it, it’s mine, and you won’t get it back at the end of the school year.” I growled, deep and long,...
