One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when...
Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is...
People are going to think I'm morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don't mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it's nice when it happens. But when you've invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and yo...
As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all en...
If there's one lesson I can pass along to people in situations like mine, it's that the best way to see a program through -- and it took me a long time to learn this -- is simply to accept the help, cooperate, and let others do what they think is wor...
Getting responses on "Through the Milky Way" that it is creating an emotional investment by some of my readers. A gentleman I have know for awhile took the book on a vacation to the beach. While reading it, his wife came up to him and asked him why h...
God I am looking for the one thing I have never felt but once, and I would walk through heaven and earth to find it, if he would but let me find him, so that I could feel it; and if I were to feel it again I would never leave that feeling, or him tha...
Every year, about 10 billion farm animals go through America's horrific factory farm system: cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, lamb. There, they are subjected to unimaginable and torturous confinement in vast factories where they never see the light of da...
If you fear the unknown you are certainly not alone. Many of God’s children refuse opportunities to step through doors and into gloriously new territories. They are either too comfortable in life, or unwilling (mind you I did not say unable) to tru...
Worldly influences would hinder use of our agency afforded through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. But we are agents who can act, and that affects everything in terms of how we live the gospel in our daily lives. It affects how we pray, how we study t...
One of the ultimate ironies of eternity is that the adversary, who is miserable precisely because he has no physical body, invites and entices us to share in his misery through the improper use of our bodies. The very tool he does not have and cannot...
I have to say, if someone literally said to me, 'You're going off to a desert island, what is the one thing you would bring?' I would say, 'It's my concealer or you can just kill me now.' I've thought this through! Because I would find, like, berries...
What is the Christian's responsibility to this world? Is the Christian's responsibility simply, as the "Great Commission" suggests, to share the Good News of God's Kingdom to others, with the goal of making disciples of all nations and perhaps also, ...
When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of t...
I'm normally late, so I just kind of throw on the sort of thing that's at hand. And then I'll go through phases of wearing the same thing again and again and again - and my wardrobe is mainly about black and white, so it goes together. I'll play with...
When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that ...
If you have put your faith in Christ and have spent significant time in the Word of God, the tough times can be like a magnet that draws you to the Lord Jesus. Nothing is going to happen - ever - that will catch Jesus Christ by surprise. He is able t...
May we be prepared, whatever happens, rather to undergo a hundred deaths than to turn aside from the profession of true piety, in which we know our safety to be laid up. And may we so glorify thy name as to be partakers of that glory which has been a...
Holiness is the strength of the soul. It comes by faith and through obedience to God's laws and ordinances. God then purifies the heart by faith, and the heart becomes purged from that which is profane and unworthy. When holiness is achieved by confo...
Christmases are never the same. They change from year to year, and they are never really perfect, no matter how hard we try to force them to be so. What is perfect is the miracle in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago and the love of God that continues to burs...
I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere di...
