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What to Remember
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...
This Shining Night
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...
The Less You Know
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...
Baffled Joy
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....

Machine
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...
Prayer in a Time of War
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...
Those People
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...
Coming and Going
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...
Boundless Prayer
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...
Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Other Thinkers
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...
Standing in the Cold
Winter is a bad time. Whether for a season or for a life, it dampens the self. Or so a recent writer claimed. “Mankind endured a long winter of...
The Fullness of Time
How long, O Lord? The question is posed repeatedly by the Psalmist. It continues to be posed across the ages, uttered even by our lips in the shadows of...
Christian Urbanism
Cities have figured prominently in the Christian imagination: City of God, City of Jerusalem, the Heavenly City. The single English word “city” has varied referents that easily blur our...
A Terrible Grace
Music is a divine balm in the midst of the world’s sorrows. Music is also a sorrow in search of a balm. It offers a sui generis grace, one...
Voice of the Voiceless
We all seem to be desperately searching for roots. From the fussy private pastime of Ancestry.com, to the loud public toppling of statues and debunking of old pedigrees of...