Archive

While I was in college, the local priest got me to come along with him on his nursing home rounds and play old hymns on the broken piano in...

We are familiar with the “disenchantment” thesis about modern culture. When Max Weber suggested it in the early twentieth century, it seemed to fit many aspects of Western life...

C S. Lewis has never been my favorite Christian writer. I admit this sheepishly, given his stature. The virtues of his most influential work, Mere Christianity, are real. But...

I have often seethed at the pigheadedness of bureaucrats. Their roles in the ecclesial and academic worlds are particularly galling. Knowing little (or choosing to ignore what they know)...

Things don’t turn out as we expect. People don’t either. Take friendship as an example, or perhaps just a parable. Among Guy de Maupassant’s hundreds of stories—biting and penetrating...

I had thought of calling this piece “Against Memory.” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but I had my reasons. I’ve started regularly waking up in the middle of the night, often for hours...

Colorado, where I live, is a great place to go stargazing. Up in the mountains, the heavens are particularly vibrant and clear. I go out at night when I...

There’s a car mechanic I have known for years. Ed knew my father and worked on his cars; he knows me and my cars; he knows my wife; he...

I have long known who Mischa Elman was: one of the great violinists of the last century (1891–1967). But only last month did I finally manage to listen to him....

The American modernist poet E. E. Cummings ended up as a somewhat lonely, politically conservative Unitarian. It happens. He wrote some glittering verses glorying in the natural world and...

I do not understand war. Even in the present time, for all my deeply felt moral and religious commitments touching on today’s conflicts, the reality of war itself seems to...

Sometimes I will exclaim, when dealing with irritating and difficult people on the phone, “What’s wrong with these people?” Actually I do this a lot, not just on the...

Disappearance is usually felt as something bad. When things disappear, we sense the pull of death, the call of the dust, the loss of the palpable good. I have...

A colleague of mine is extraordinarily productive: reams of articles, books, editing duties, institute-leading, fundraising. It’s the kind of performance his peers envy, all the more because lurking behind his...

Years ago, I spent a month with my family in Burundi. I had once worked there when still single. During this visit, my daughter took French lessons from a...