I’m a compulsive giver of advice. Despite my demonstrable lack of ability to run my own life like a person, I appear to believe that I could do well running yours. Now and then my friends have to basically say, “That’s great and all, stop helping.” I have the stereotypical guy thing where the wife just wants to be heard and commiserated with, and the husband insists on trying to solve the problem. Because of this, which I’m trying to... Read more
View the self as a challenge to be met, not a problem to be solved. (Or, for that matter, a threat to be avoided!) Read more
Some great pictures here. Read more
“Festival,” he explained to Salai, “is like lightning. It has no history, and it has no future. It lights up everything for a brief second. It passes. It leaves nothing of itself save its effect. The lightning itself is never there to be pawed over by future generations. A pageant, dear Salai, gives an artist a chance to zigzag through time like lightning, like a wild, irresponsible thing.” Read more
feature: …Now, after decades of runaway incarceration fueled greatly by the War on Drugs, California is in the midst of what one expert calls “the biggest penal experiment in modern history,” diverting tens of thousands of inmates from state prisons to local supervision. California’s so-called realignment leads a growing pack of sentencing and legal reforms nationwide, all designed to change how the US treats low-level offenders—most of them facing drug charges, and many suffering from addiction. more Read more
“Authentic Pauline Letters, In a Venn Diagram.” Happyish! Read more
in Christianity magazine: In a basement under a church in London I’m meeting with three men who are in a support group. An unusual support group. ‘We were tempted to say that we meet in a nuclear bunker in an undisclosed location,’ says one of them with a wry smile. They have been talking in private for a while, but believe now is the time for their voices and unique experience to be heard more widely. All three are evangelical... Read more
at AmCon: …There’s a lot going on here. There’s Sophie’s quest for identity (she has three different surnames throughout the novel), a quest she seems to be trying to escape—she wants to surrender to an identity, sink into it, rather than having to go out and conquer and defend it. She doesn’t want her conversion and subsequent changed life to be about her search for self, but about her encounter with God. There’s a grim consideration of suffering and how... Read more
from Catholicism for Cutters: …Within a day of relative silence and solitude, I found not peace but an inner restlessness. It’s always been there—and perhaps always will be—it’s driven me in my academic pursuits and in my drug abuse, at my best and at my worst. And it was certainly what drove me to the Church. But I always found the famous quote from St. Augustine—”O Lord, our hearts are restless until the rest in You”—to be more of a... Read more
I read Gail Caldwell’s 2010 Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship basically because Wesley Hill recommended it so highly. I think my appreciation for the book was more muted than his, but it’s a very quick read, and it did portray the small intimacies of friendship between two difficult, standoffish people really well. The short version of the story is that Caldwell met Caroline Knapp when they were both adults and had both quit drinking: Caldwell... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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