It’s Labor Day–an opportunity for each of us to reflect on the value of our labor. Those who read this blog regularly or even occasionally know that I believe I have the greatest job in the world. For those who are finding this out for the first time, let me repeat—I have the greatest job in the world. As a matter of fact, it is so great that I don’t consider it to be a job at all. For me,... Read more
While the President of the United States tweeted his usual string of petty Saturday morning irrelevancies, then went to play golf, millions of Americans spent some hours yesterday watching the memorial service for John McCain from the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. I was one of those millions of Americans, alternating between tears and laughter as a true American hero was remembered and celebrated. I have nothing unique or particularly insightful to offer, but a few themes were present that... Read more
My youngest son was born in 1981 and grew up as Americans began, for the first time in my lifetime, to be aware of simple ways, such as recycling, that each of us can contribute to the health and maintenance of our planet. After a picnic at a Wyoming lake with his grandfather and me, my son (then about five years old) noticed that Grandpa had just thrown all of his garbage, including a couple of plastic containers, into the... Read more
Today is the first full class day of the semester at my college. Everyone has stories, many of them of the horror variety, about the first day of school—mine were full of cognitive and emotional dissonance from my earliest years. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait for school to start—I’ve loved just about everything about the life of learning ever since I can remember. On the other hand, there was all that non-learning stuff that I was not good... Read more
One of my favorite staff writers for The New Yorker is Rebecca Mead; she’s been writing for the magazine for more than twenty years. Her article in this week’s edition, “The Return of the Native,” is one of her best articles as well as a sobering look at what has happened to our country in the past two years. Rebecca Mead: The Return of the Native Mead was born in England and worked with a green card in the U.S.... Read more
Last Tuesday, on the sixth anniversary of my blog, I posted my first blog post–an essay that I had written several years earlier at the first writers conference I ever attended. I applied for the conference at my wife Jeanne’s insistence; the extreme introvert in me screamed “No!” but I applied anyways, fully expecting I would be rejected. Hail Frieda, Full of Grace I wasn’t. My assigned workshop was “Literary Essay”; each of the fifteen members wrote daily 500 word... Read more
Six years ago today, after a great deal of resistance, I finally followed the advice of several people whose opinions I respect and began this blog. I moved it to the Patheos platform a year and a half ago. Over a half million visits from 180+ countries later, writing here regularly has provided me with more joy and opportunities for growth than I could have possibly imagined. My latest book, published last year, was entirely a product of several years of... Read more
In Lies We Believe Abut God, Wm. Paul Young (author of The Shack) tells the story of how one of his friends reacted to his speculation that we have the opportunity to choose God even after physical death (just one of many interesting non-orthodox ideas in this fascinating book). His friend’s viscerally negative response let Young know that he “had entered waters that were considered sacred. My intention made no difference. I had stepped on a land mine . .... Read more
I grew up in hunting country where at the appropriate times each year the males of the species took their preferred firearms and started shooting things. I remember my father returning from a day of hunting with a partridge or two or even a squirrel in his backpack (much to my mother’s consternation). Every third year or so he would hit the jackpot and get a deer, setting us up with meat for most of the upcoming winter. My older... Read more
I’ve been thinking about ashes lately. I just finished reading Sara Miles’s City of God, a memoir about taking ashes into the streets of the Mission district in San Francisco on Ash Wednesday (“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”). And we buried the ashes of a family member in the back yard last Wednesday. Bean, our Boston Terrier, died almost a year and a half ago; the small wooden box containing her ashes have been on the nightstand... Read more
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