I've always been interested in definitions, because in the Bible, the Ten Commandments are there but there's no real clear definition of what sin is, in a fundamental sense - how we can use the words to evaluate our lives as we go along: Am I doing s...
What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of simplicity but the...
I've worked with a lot of gay and lesbian organizations. I sit on the board of the Empire State Pride Agenda. I've also done a lot of work for Broadway Care/Equity Fights AIDS. I think it's important because, when we can be of service to others, it o...
Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an...
If you think that your life is nothing but pain and suffering, then it is very obvious that you have been directing your daily thoughts in the direction of the darkest side of life. However, the truth still remains; which is that we all have a bright...
There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of tru...
We make time for what we truly value. We build habits and routines around the things that really matter to us. This is an important principle to understand as we seek to build our lives around the gospel. Do you want a cross centered life? A cross ce...
When I first lived in a model apartment... It was two bunk beds to a room, and the bathroom was constantly in use. I was bringing in Lucky Charms cereal, and one day an agent put a stop to that. She said, 'You're making all the girls fat.' They took ...
I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own co...
For every minute that a book entertains you, the author of that book invested several minutes of their lives. Please show your appreciation by taking a minute out of your life to leave us a review. It not only means a lot to us to know you enjoyed ou...
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking ...
I think at the heart of so much restlessness of the day is a spiritual vacuum. There is a yearning for meaningful lives, a yearning for values we can commonly embrace. I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our ...
We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness a...
It’s now clear that many of our most sophisticated abilities are made possible not by specialist brain areas dedicated to specific tasks, but by lightning-fast coordination between areas that control more general tasks, such as movement and hearing...
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consi...
No one is perfect. Sometimes, it is the imperfections that make us more alive than those around us. It’s the happiness of truly breathing and living in freedom of ourselves. Even though we may look broken to the world, there is always someone who s...
I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. ...
The very fact that we need to struggle for approval proves that we do not approve of ourselves. Having to convince ourselves of something means we do not really believe it. That is why we contort ourselves grotesquely, lose sight of who we really are...
Through having different conversations, I have 'real-eyesed' how common and easy it is to make decisions based on unquestioned belief systems, traditions and concepts we were raised with...by the very same humans who followed the exact same unquestio...
It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brai...
Mama Montana: [to her son Tony] You know, all we read about in the papers today are animals like you and the killings. It's Cubans like you who are giving a bad name to our people. People who come here to work hard and make an honest living for thems...
