We are always coming in on something that is already going on.
Read MoreJust finished reading Andrea Palpant Dilley’s Faith and Other Flat Tires (Zondervan) and found a lot to like and ruminate on. One point she makes that I find interesting is that, for her, the fact of suffering seems more an argument for the existence of God than an argument against God.
Read MoreThis post is a solemn one—in the old meaning of that word: something both deeply significant and joyful (as in a solemn occasion, like a wedding or a coronation). In this case the solemn occasion was a burial, and is was both deeply significant and joyful.
Read More“I discover the holy . . . [by] peering under the edges of the ordinary.”
Read MoreIn a copy of The Great Divorce that C.S. Lewis gave to Joy Davidman a couple of years before their marriage, Lewis wrote the following: “There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”
Read MoreOne of the most common questions for (and among) Christians, members of a supposedly “exclusive” religion (which I think is bunk), is “What about those who never hear of Jesus?”
Read MoreI have in recent months been surrounded by people who have good reason to want to know what is going to happen to them and to those they care about—involving health, life and death, jobs, relationships, eternal fate, and so on.
Read MoreI have just returned from three weeks in California, mostly in my hometown of Santa Barbara. Among the good conversations with friends old and new was one that reminded me of the challenge of bridging the gap with people who live in widely divergent understandings of life.
Read MoreI am in my home town–Santa Barbara, California–these last three weeks of January. Trying to write, sometimes with a warm sun on my back.
Read MoreReflecting on the rapidity with which your whole life can collapse (in the context of living in Stalinist Russia where you could be an average citizen one day and in the concentration camps the next), Solzhenitsyn says the following: “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.'”
Read MoreMy brother-in-law, who has just lost his son and wife, was talking about how difficult it is to care these days about many everyday things, including his work. Yes, after great loss most things seem trivial.
Read MoreOne of the things I have been wrestling with, given the recent loss of two loved ones, is God’s attitude toward death—and therefore what my own should be.
Read MorePlanning a funeral or memorial service is a values-clarification exercise–“What was important to him?” It’s also a guessing game of sorts—“What would she want?”
Read MoreThe room is maybe five feet by ten feet, an enclosed porch actually. It was Pamela’s inner sanctum (for better and worse). It’s where she went to think and search and smoke and read and think some more and smoke some more.
Read MoreWe thought we had entered a season of grief and suffering with Jamie’s death in the avalanche. Now, with the death a few weeks later of his mother Pamela—largely from grief I myself believe—we find this season turning into a long winter.
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My 38 year-old nephew, Jamie Pierre, died this week in a tragic ski accident in Utah.
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A darkness came over the extended family last night with the news that Jamie Pierre—father, husband, son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend—was killed in an avalanche in Utah (Sunday, Nov. 13).
Read MoreHave you noticed that when you learn a new word, you start noticing it everywhere? Same when you write a book.
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