To be a critical reader means for me: (1) to affirm the enduring power of the Bible in my culture and in my own life and yet (2) to remain open enough to dare to ask any question and to risk any critical judgement. Nothing less than both of these poi...
Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understan...
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in...
The Rough Beast snorted. “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.” Caperton studied him. “Somebody at my job just said that.” “It’s true! You have to be able to tell the st...
I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life- some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was...
Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect gr...
Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gen...
Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, a...
I am love, I love air, water, sun, green, hands, butterflies, birds, fish, cats, trees, you - walking, swimming, dancing, exploring new places, exploring tiny things, exploring thoughts, dreams, bigger than me dreams, like cloud dreams, like mountain...
There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine’s critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another p...
It's easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow the bills are paid and there's wit and self-sufficiency and divine inspira...
Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or ...
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary o...
There is nothing wrong with being Human. What is wrong is how so many take for granted the gift of our being human and never learn that we are also to be HUMANE, hence our HUMANITY. We are born Man but it takes years of education, trial and error to ...
For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors....it's the knowledge that a house can be...
Love is a figment of our imagination; becoming whatever we wish it to be. We customized our feelings to control love, resembling a wind being tossed about whichever way it suits us. Love is a game for the fittest, if you are weak at heart it will des...
When he came home early, he was dreary. There, he'd sit by the fireplace, his worn hands gripping the newspaper a bit too tight, his eyes held to it, unseeing, towards the words, the meaningless grouping of letters on that newspaper. The fire would c...
People that hold onto hate for so long do so because they want to avoid dealing with their pain. They falsely believe if they forgive they are letting their enemy believe they are a doormat. What they don’t understand is hatred can’t be isolated ...
It's all a matter of perception. What one person deems to be important may be just as equally unimportant to another. What one deems to be right may seem very wrong to someone else. Your moral compass and values may not always be totally in sync with...
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a...
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are de...
