Readers respond to “An Open Letter to Owen Wilson” Well this is a first for The Dude Abides, but at the urging of my boss/friend, Michael Cooke, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, I’m going to post here below some of the many responses readers sent me at my suntimes.com address. I hope you find them as edifying as I did. And if you’re one of the authors, thank you so much for writing. Grace and stuff,God Girl__________________________________________________________________ Thank you, thank... Read more

NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING: GOD GIRL’S NEW BOOK AVAILABLE NOW AT AMAZON.COM YIKES! Click HERE to PRE-order Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace, due out from Zondervan in August 2008. (That there to the left is a hint of the cover.) Read more

THANKS, RO Rosie O’Donnell posted our letter to Owen Wilson on her blog this a.m. And we thank her, as way more people will see it there than here. Blessings, sister. GGHQ Read more

Another angel gets her wings: Madeleine L’Engle has died A favorite of mine since childhood, Madeleine L’Engle died Thursday at a Connecticut nursing home. She was magic. Pure magic. And so full of grace. She once said, so beautifully, something that’s been on my mind of late: Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth. Madeleine said so many things that were... Read more

An Open Letter to Owen Wilson This is a bit of a departure for me as I’m not in the habit of writing fan letters. In fact, the last one I sent was a bubble-lettered note to the actor Jon Cryer about 20 years ago in the wake of his earth-moving (for a 16-year-old alt-chick from the suburbs) portrayal of Duckie Dale in “Pretty in Pink.” But under the circumstances, I thought it was OK to err on the side... Read more

Resto nella pace, Maestro. Luciano PavarottiOctober 12, 1935 – September 6, 2007 A singular voice of wondrous beauty and seemingly unfettered strength has been silenced, and the music of our world is diminished for it. We will miss you. Click HERE to read Bernard Holland’s obituary for Maestro Pavarotti in the New York Times From Bono at U2.com: “Some can sing opera, Luciano Pavarotti was an opera. No one could inhabit those acrobatic melodies and words like him. He lived... Read more

Katrina: Two years hence Ninth Ward, New Orleans Bay St. Louis, Mississippi They reeled and staggered like drunken men;they were at their wits’ end. Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble,and he brought them out of their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper;the waves of the sea were hushed. — Psalm 107:27-29 Read more

Lagniappe A great prayer from a great man. “Jesus, for some reason you’ve given us another day and you’ve set us in Narnia and there are people who still think it’s frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but don’t know how. God, I pray that what you’ve called both of us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would... Read more

PICK DU JOUR:Filmmaker’s faith in art, God and U2 pays off There was a fabulous story in Tuesday’s LA Times by Reed Johnson about Lebanese-Mexican filmmaker Fernando Kalife’s new film, 7 Dias (7 Days). It’s the tale of a rabid U2 fan and his struggle to fulfill a promise (actually, a bet) to bring the Irish super group to his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. OK, as U2 fans, we’re compelled to read already.But, wait, there’s more … As Johnson describes... Read more

A belated merci mille fois … To Jean Prescott of the Biloxi, Mississippi Sun Herald for the wonderful article about The God Factor earlier this month. Very happily for us here at GGHQ, not only did Jean’s piece run in the Biloxi paper, it was picked up (via the McClatchy wire) in more than a dozen other newspapers, from the Miami Herald to the Idaho Statesman. Here’s Jean’s great piece, from the Aug. 3 edition of the Sun Herald:Book peeks... Read more