We’re searching for a rabbi. We’re looking at the red tag rack at SteinMart, we’re pondering the pumpkin bagels—it’s the season!—and grumbling about the uniformity of American bagels—give me a Vilna bagel, misshapen and seasoned with salt and ash. We’ve got a moment between a root canal and a routine cleaning to call, iPhone-to-iPhone, a cousin who has a cousin who knows a cousin of a promising young rabbi frozen in Butte, and we’re asking each other, when, at Trader... Read more
For a young woman beset with all manner of insecurities, the early nineties in southern California were the perfect storm. Or fire. Or fault. During my college years at the University of California, Riverside, I often felt my center could not hold. But because I didn’t know how to deal with the center, I focused on everything outside it—the more explosive, the better: Desert Storm, the LA Riots, fires, and, of course, earthquakes. I walked dutifully to class amidst yelling... Read more
My middle son’s name is Asher. He is named after the protagonist of Chaim Potok’s classic bildungsroman My Name is Asher Lev. In the month before Asher was born, my friend Thom Smith loaned me a copy of the novel. Many books have affected me profoundly, but this one remains very near the top. I had always loved writing and music, but the community in which I was reared did not value the kind of writing I felt compelled to... Read more
I possessed a consummate ideology before I had children. It was a perfectly distilled comprehension of man, God, and government. I knew with certainty that if everyone would just turn off the television and read Important Books, we could live alongside one another the way the Almighty intended when he crafted laws of the universe that so clearly comported with my belief system. It was all so obvious to me, which made the fact that some people disagreed with my... Read more
The ongoing conversation about contemporary literature and faith that I have been having with Dana Gioia and Paul Elie across half a dozen print and online venues, though it has touched on a dozen different issues, ultimately comes down to one: “absence” versus “presence.” The question Elie has raised, you may recall, is whether we currently have novelists who “treat the main themes and the big claims made for religious belief.” That claim has been subject to a series of... Read more
Guest post by Stuart Scadron-Wattles “The problem is that people are no longer seeing,” said Linnéa Spransy, a visual artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. “It goes way beyond seeing,” replied the biologist Calvin DeWitt, as he turned towards her. “We are not pondering. That’s what Psalm 111 encourages us to do, and we don’t do it.” Cal DeWitt is an environmental scientist and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin who had been invited by... Read more
A few years back, I watched an interview with a middle-aged woman who was educated, attractive, and well-spoken. She was also in jail—had been for thirty years and would be until the day she died. In her youth, as part of a drugged-out cult, she’d stabbed a young mother to death, slit her husband’s throat, and helped chase down and eviscerate a pregnant girl. She was penitent in the interview, but admitted that she was not particularly remorseful during her... Read more
Outside our trailer park, a set of railroad tracks ran from east to west, dividing us from the police station that sat half a mile down the road. When you drove over the tracks, and felt the car pull itself over the split asphalt, it seemed like you were being locked in or released, depending on which way you were driving. I used to walk along the tracks at dusk, singing and talking to myself, the fields stretching westward behind... Read more
In yesterday’s post, I began to explore the questions posed to me by W. David O. Taylor about why marriage is often treated in such an unseemly light in much of current TV and film. Having addressed the divide between what is being pitched or written in Hollywood and what is being made there, a divide whose numbers alone would likely assure Taylor that more redeeming efforts of the kind he describes are being made than meet the screen, I... Read more
Recently a friend put me in touch with Christian author, W. David O. Taylor (editor of a book of essays titled For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts), who is writing an article about a two-pronged question pertaining to my profession: Why is there such an overall dearth of healthy onscreen marriages in television and film? And where might we find some exceptions? Taylor was hoping to reach someone in the industry who might have... Read more
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