I hold the bottle out into the rain and watch as the steady flow slowly fills it. When there is enough, enough that Beth can clearly see, I close the bottle and hand it to her. She raises a skeptical eyebrow, but accepts the bottle. "It's our rain Be...
What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisingly vulgar expression of an ideological tradition ...
Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her story...
Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard a...
Impatience is a form of unbelief. It's what we begin to feel when we start to doubt the wisdom of God's timing or the goodness of God's guidance. It springs up in our hearts when our plan is interrupted or shattered. It may be prompted by a long wait...
He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was...
So the peasants are used as targets in war?” I doubted. “Does the Overhead feel that is necessary to kill off one of their own? Peasants are being placed as diversions on the front line like they mean nothing—” “Would you rather save the st...
They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually anything, I'm not stupid as that, but def...
In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility...
Doubtful, but it did work... "Annabeth?" Percy said again. "You're planning something. You've got that I'm-planning-something look." "I don't have an I'm-planning-something look." "Yeah, you totally do. Your eyebrows knit and your lips press together...
I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village as a blacksmith or something equally masculine. But it didn’t reall...
each of us humans has a moment-if not many-in which we lapse. for some, the transgression involves sex. for others, simply doubt or a rage so all encompassing, it impels us to make irreversible decisions. but whatever the transgression is doesn't rea...
[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Prote...
Harry — I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!” And she sprinted away, up the stairs. “ does she understand?” said Harry distractedly, still looking around, trying to tell where the voice had come from. “Load...
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping...
He reached the ground floor and flung the door open, fleeing into the street. He glanced back and saw that she wasn't following, so he slowed to a halt. His pulse raced. The entranceway was dark, the door swinging slowly closed. Movement to his left ...
Guidance, like all God's acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensur...
There are times I have Doubted. Times I have lost my way- without my anchor I would probably be lost still. Yet I know there is a purpose in all of this-even if after almost a millennium, I still do not know exactly how God works. But I do know that ...
One thing this night taught her beyond all doubt - all males were lunkheads, all of them. She recognized that protect the poor helpless girl and don’t worry her little wee head tone. “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to run into a situation I ha...
Be honest: did you actually read [the above geometric proof]? Of course not. Who would want to? The effect of such a production being made over something so simple is to make people doubt their own intuition. Calling into question the obvious by insi...
The ideological premise, however, "can" not be defective; it is sacrosanct. ... Whatever does not seem right, whatever does not fit, must be explained by something wrong outside of the ideology; for its perfection is beyond all doubt. In (t)his way t...
