The woman in this picture has just related to a film crew how she killed her newborn daughter by strangulation. She killed eight of her newborn daughters, in fact, and can lead you to the tree-shaded plot of ground where she has buried all of them. The earth is rich there, rounded and fertile. The mound where the infants lie rises over them in a gentle slope, like the swell of mother-flesh. This woman is not unusual in her Indian... Read more
Awhile back, a well-meaning (and very successful) friend said to me, “I just wish we could buy you a house in Bethesda so you wouldn’t have to live so far away from here.” We had been talking about our families and children, and in particular, I’d been narrating the details of my epic, every-Saturday-morning drive across the city to my daughter’s ballet class (which I wrote about for Good Letters here.) Yep, every Saturday morning, Scott Simon on the radio,... Read more
Part Two: Beyond the Image Guest Post By Daniel Siedell Have you ever been underwhelmed by a painting? Have you been excited to see a well-known and often reproduced painting on tour at your local art museum, your hopes built up to be utterly transformed and…nothing? Often the painting appears tiny and timid, even vulnerable, surrounded by a crowd of people thinking the very same thing you are. Or it appears less colorful, less dynamic than it had in the... Read more
I finally saw Brave this past weekend, and I can definitely say that I had the reaction I imagined I would: weepy and joyful, my mind filled with the film’s images long after my husband and dog fell asleep. I had deliberately avoided seeing the film because I knew that its plot would strike my heart deeply: a young girl struggles against her mother’s difficult love to discover both who she is and who she isn’t, and in the movie’s... Read more
For my daughter, Evangeline Sofia, who celebrated her first birthday on the second day of October. “Can you build me a tent in the living room when you get home, Chad?” My wife Becki made this request via Google chat. “A tent?” I replied, laughing. “In the living room? What?” When we were children, my sister Alyssa and I built tents in our living room, draping sheets over strategically positioned chairs. But it had been years since I had roughed... Read more
I recently came across a short devotional on the Abraham and Isaac story. You know the one: God tells Abraham to take his only son up a mountain and burn him on an altar. God ultimately spares Isaac and never intended him to actually die. It’s a harrowing scene nonetheless, and one that many unbelievers cite as a reason for rejecting God. I’m not going to attempt an apologetic here. What I want to explore has to do with the... Read more
The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, incised upon the tablets. —Exodus 32:16 And the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God, with the exact words that the Lord had addressed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the Assembly. —Deuteronomy 9:10 Thereupon the Lord said to me, “Carve out two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to Me on... Read more
“Aren’t you a little young to save the universe?” “Yes. Yes I am.” Phineas Flynn gets questioned about his age a lot, which is to be expected when you are a three-foot wunderkind with a triangle head and expertise at building, with your silent half-brother, time-travel machines and antigravity devices. Phineas and Ferb, a Disney Channel cartoon entering its fourth season, may be the smartest thing on television. Stuck in perpetual summer, the show’s eponymous stars devise elaborate machines to... Read more
When I saw my eye doctor recently for a potentially serious condition, she recommended that I eat eggs. “Lots of them, especially the yolks.” I laughed, remembering what an elderly friend, now passed away, once told me. Her husband was a physician, and early in their marriage (which would have been about fifty years ago), whenever she was angry at her husband about something, she would prepare herself an egg for breakfast. Consistent with the medical advice at the time,... Read more
I belong to a movie group that meets monthly in one another’s living rooms to discuss a current film. As soon as I read that this month’s host had chosen The Words, I thought uh-oh. Most movies about writers get it so wrong, with their scenes of furrowed brows on smooth, comely faces; crumpled pages littering the floor; and ta-da: a finished manuscript. In Little Women (the version with Winona Ryder and Gabriel Byrne), Louisa May Alcott puts down her... Read more
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