Best wishes to you all for 2012. May grace, peace, joy, love, hope, healing and happy surprises be yours in the year ahead. And jobs all around for those who need them. I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t;... Read more

I’m not sure if this will work, but it might be fun to try. We’re going to tell a story. I’ll start, then we’ll take turns continuing from there in comments. Whoever goes next adds a sentence or two and together we’ll find out where the story goes from there. (I’m told this is actually how they wrote season four of Lost.) Since we can’t just go around in a circle (I mean, we could, but that would involve, like,... Read more

We’ll go up through October with these. November and December would seem less like a “year in review” than like a “remember last week?” kind of thing. JULY “Anti-government, anti-democracy“ They do not believe in it. They do not believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people. They cannot believe in it because they do not believe in government. That word, to them, means one and only one thing: tyranny. And so they respond to... Read more

APRIL “Lawnmowers and $40 nachos“ Sharing, whether out of neighborliness or by contract, requires all sides to be magnanimous, generous and deferential. Or, in other words, the arrangement would only be worth the potential savings if nobody was a jerk — if nobody was the sort of advantage-seeking jackwagon who never refills the gas can or who tries to get others to pay more than a fair share of maintenance costs. If people insist on being jerks, then sharing can’t... Read more

The end of December is a good excuse for highlighting some notable posts from earlier in the year. Let’s revisit, rehash, reheat and re-serve a couple from each month. JANUARY “Don’t you know that you can count me out“ By pretending to believe that America is on the verge of collapse into a totalitarian tyranny, they can pretend to themselves that they are the vanguard of a courageous resistance. The Red Dawn fantasy isn’t all that different from any other... Read more

“Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven Has Come Near,” Richard Beck writes, noting that we bring all kinds of baggage to that word “repent.” Beck wants us to liberate ourselves of that baggage — along with our other baggage, literal and figurative: When people ask “What must I do to be saved?” Christians don’t, as a rule, say things like “If you have two shirts give one to the poor.” We don’t see that action — giving away excess possessions —... Read more

Back when I still worked in a fully staffed newsroom — back when there still was such a thing as a fully staffed newsroom — we had a rule for the holidays. Once per year we would allow one headline beginning “‘Tis the Season …” and one beginning, “Yes, Virginia …” But only one per year. And that was probably still one too many. The “Yes, Virginia …” headline still seems irresistible, with about 500 recent examples in Google News,... Read more