Freshly baked bread smell fills our house. Hope is baking the bread for the liturgy tomorrow at the School and College. Each piece has a special stamp and the fact that we cannot just eat this sweet smelling bread is difficult: behold liturgy comes quickly, but not quickly enough. I made the case that our son and his friend Andrew could eat the bread with Biblical precedent, but Hope shushed me and shewed them out of the kitchen and away from... Read more
We were driving through Houston the other day and got stopped at the corner. There was an upstanding group of citizens waving placards and protesting. They started to chant: “Stop the coup! Stop the coup!” This is not about that. There are serious issues in the nation, but this is not about those either.I am not minimizing their wrath which may be, for all I know, perfectly justified. There was not time to find out at that corner sitting at... Read more
The house sat in the parking lot, somehow still standing, in the domain of the new, palatial, magnificent Kroger. This store gave us, the kids of the neighborhood, free hotdogs, free ice cream, free everything or so it seemed. Yet the house loomed there enduring, haunted we were told. How could it endure against gleaming chrome of the Kroger? We wondered, because wondering is what kids do. We were afraid, because the house was dark where Krogers was bright. Why... Read more
A temptation of graduate school is what my mother once described as “Pompous Assery” . . . the perfect ability to be a pompous ass, make an ass of oneself while being pompous about the action. Bad enough to fall into foolery, but to do so with comic pomposity is worse. “I have not always avoided this” he said meekly. The stop sign was there. The car ahead of me sort-of-stopped. I cannot be sure, but I was close enough... Read more
Politicians, like preachers, can make pompous speeches. Academics, God forgive me, have been known to do so as well, but politicians are particularly vulnerable since they must appeal to the people or at least the percentage of the people allowed to vote. Academics need only appeal to tenure committees and those are fellow travelers with the Spirit of our Age. That is our very selective electoral college. Since politicians are eager for votes, clicks incarnate, they go big or end... Read more
“Memories are always partly untrue,” writes Daniel Nayeri. “A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.” Nayeri nonetheless offers his readers the gift of his most precious childhood memories, recounting them as if he were his 12-year-old self writing for his teacher, Mrs. Miller. Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story), his newest work, is a memoir aimed at a middle-school aged audience, but adults will find this is a book to come back to again and again. Nayeri... Read more
What should we do? Love God and love our neighbors. That is today’s agenda, because it is always the agenda for a Christian. If God is good, if God is love, then returning that love should be easy, but this is also the same God who is perfectly just. We are not so much perfectly just. Too often we find loving God easy, because the God we love is real, but we try to ignore aspects of the Divine Nature that are... Read more
Some tyrants are great and terrible, say Stalin, but other evil folk may just be the running dog Pulitzer Prize winner who empowered him. Most of us do not have the talent to even reach this level of tyranny. We lack the talent for spinning our mind control to millions. There are smaller tyrants who are simply narcissi having a moment of power and when the grift is revealed, they disappear. Frank Baum, of Oz fame, created a race of balloon... Read more
Sometimes we are stupid. At least sometimes I am stupid. I should not confess anyone else’s failure! I am most stupid when I dialogue with someone else and assume, or pretend, I know that they are foolish or utterly wrong. I see the grit in their mental eye, but miss the log in my own sight. That is the moment of epic folly on my part. Another soul, created in the image of God, has a passionate belief and I... Read more
A civilization cannot survive for long if it stops asking the right questions. I used to think there were no bad questions. Kind, overly kind, teachers even suggested this was true. Enough years of examining self and seeing my flaws showed me that this was not, quite, right. There are bad “questions.” Bad “questions” are insincerely asked. Sometimes as a student, I would ask a “question” that merely was a way of showing how much I knew, or thought I... Read more
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