...he would tell stories about the Holy City, about Solomon, a just king, a poet-king, a monarch with a thousand concubines. We weren't quite sure what concubines were, but we guessed: a concubine ... Concubines! One thousand! One thousand women in a...
I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, te...
This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is importa...
Wal-Mart is so large, its reach so great, that it has created an ecosystem in which its suppliers and competitors, and their suppliers and competitors, and their customers, all operate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets the rules, of that ecosyst...
Otis, on the other hand, didn't miss home a bit. He had always hated the stairs in our house in Massachusetts. He was now five years old and very large for a golden retriever. I thought he was fat, but Bruce insisted he was just "big-boned". Either w...
What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment ha...
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days ...
The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the 'gospel' or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the 'gospels', the narratives of Our Lord's life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the . ...
God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood i...
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confron...
Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. "Wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage." 0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven The 'truth that lies behind a word t...
Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone ...
A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbol means nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if yo...
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads. So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "thi...
To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you And know there is more That you can't see, can't hear Can't know except in moments Steadly growing, and in languages That aren't always sound but other ...
Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometime...
Carine McCandless: With almost a year having passed since Chris' disappearance my parents' anger had turned to desperation. Their guilt was giving way to pain. And pain seemed to bring them closer. Even their faces had changed. She convinces herself ...
Melville Crump: The man said there was a certain amount of money buried down in this park. Lennie Pike: That's right. It was under a big W. Say what is a big W? Ding Bell: If we find out, we'll send you a wire. Melville Crump: It's only a possibility...
Gordie: ...the main guy of the story is a fat kid that nobody likes named Davie Hogan. Vern: Like Charlie Hogan's brother. If he had one. Chris: Good Vern. Go on, Gordie. Gordie: Well this kid is our age but he's fat. Real fat. He weighs close to one...
Mason: I finally figured it out. It's like when they realized it was gonna be too expensive to actually build cyborgs and robots. I mean, the costs of that were impossible. They decided to just let humans turn themselves into robots. That's what's go...
Mr. Bernstein: Isn't it wonderful? Such a party. Jedediah Leland: Yeah Mr. Bernstein: What's the matter? Jedediah Leland: Bernstein, these men who are now with the Inquirer, who were with the Chronicle until yesterday... [... ] Jedediah Leland: Berns...
