From her vantage point, looking up at [Ian] through the water-spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shor...
The Bible speaks of the Word of God as added. Sometimes it's planted by the wayside, and nothing grows there. Sometimes it's sown among the thorns and represents the person who makes the decision an then goes back to his old life of bars and chasing ...
When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that...
Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a...
He couldn’t look back at the children. He couldn’t think of it. All he could do was watch the eyes of his wife. He pulled her to him, her body soft, her skin warm. She was life, she was his. He took her lips and tasted his freedom once more. The ...
Let me paraphrase what Paul is saying here: Jesus married the Church - Christians, you and me, us. The Church is His literal bride. He laid His life down for the Church. And Paul writes that husbands should love their wives in the same way that Jesus...
A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would...
You think I don’t know what I want? You think I love the idea of relying on my looks for life? No! It’s pathetic! In my head, I have a nice, quiet, normal job that involves me running my own business. I carry a briefcase around my office with imp...
The marine underworld stretched below the ship and embodied many secrets. The disappearance of Olga had become one of the mysteries that would remain with Stefania and her family. The disappearance of her baby sister and sudden departure from her hom...
Our faces are so close to one another right now, and all I can do is selfishly think how easy it would be for me to lean forward and kiss him like I’ve dreamed about for the last couple of weeks. One kiss, and then I’d let him go. One kiss, to re...
Over the years of being stuck in this shit hole called life, I had debated religion and church, souls and freewill, heaven and hell. I had come to a few conclusions. Mankind was too self-serving to understand what He had wanted from them. It wasn’t...
I come to you for help. We've been silent far too long. Many of you have turned your backs on Arman. Many never bothered to know Him at all. But Arman the One God. He created Er'Rets and everything in it. He gave each of you life and purpose. He love...
Getting a handle on why wolves do what they do has never been an easy proposition. Not only are there tremendous differences in both individual and pack personalities, but each displays a surprising range of behaviors depending on what's going on aro...
...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different sche...
I’m an old man, now. I’ve been alone since my 17th birthday. I’d wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and pouring wine and cracking jokes and harmlessly teasing th...
Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to deve...
There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down w...
As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smalle...
It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use o...
Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a ...
