Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put th...
This kiss was different from the first one under the olive tree. That one had been unplanned, she was pretty sure. This kiss had intention and hunger branded all over it. It was like one of those kisses you read about in fairy tales—but Alana had n...
The mission that God has given us is a highly relational mission. Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you" John 20:21. Jesus came into this world, lived in obscurity for 30 years and then spent three years relationally investing in t...
It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow t...
Observe the difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing l...
When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now,...
To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how ...
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; i...
I don't know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luc...
Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a gen...
For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that name; a...
We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives - for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control - and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our w...
...listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer befor...
I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the s...
But, and here comes the rub, all of us feel that we are in complete control of our desire for things. We would never admit to an ungovernable spirit of covetousness. The problem is that we, like the alcoholic, are unable to recognize the disease once...
In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportati...
It's always something here - if there isn't a riot, then someone's usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don't have to feel ashamed of our ...
I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do wit...
Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher...
One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on "going it alone." Somehow we've come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we're very reluctant to reach out f...
It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, h...
