Metamorphoses
Five years ago, I wouldn’t have understood this book. Now, I’ve cried my eyes out over it. Perhaps the most painful thing about this story is the many clues as to what, exactly, Gregor had become.
Of Truckers and Trudeaus
In his 1927 introduction to the Policraticus, translator and political scientist John Dickinson cites Luchaire and Guizot on the ideological conflict between feudalism and the “ecclesiastical-Roman” conception of the commonwealth...
Humanness: A Unique View
Christianity speaks of body and soul not as two entities coexisting temporarily, or a meat machine driven by a magical mind, but as inseparable parts of an individual.
Should Women Think?
This is our dilemma: If we think too much on the evils of the world, perhaps the pain will only overwhelm us. Or will it? After all, we give birth. And yet, too often, we surrender our minds.
Depression and Recovery
They say a person in a coma can hear voices around them, even though they can’t respond. They say maybe even touch and smell, and who knows, maybe the light the doctor shines in one eyeball and then the next. If there is a limbo, a place on the edge of hell that’s neither the living world nor an active purgatory, you’ve found it. It’s a place where you don’t have to sin to enter its dark waters. It just takes you, because you fell.
The Arbitrary God
No one should accept a made-up patchwork god that can’t live up to the claim.
The Dog and the Handler
Here, we come upon what the dog knows: The scent of truth that eludes our inner handler and all his or her reasoning and overthinking. That truth is that there is both good and evil in the world, and thousands of years of human effort through religion, good works, social engineering, morality, ethics, and all the best of human love have failed to advance us in goodness or even in moral sophistication. There is nothing new under the sun.
The very, very best we can do is to reimagine the world as something it isn’t: to exchange the truth for a lie.
And that’s not doing anything at all, in reality. We never find out where the dead bodies really are.
What God Cannot Love
The problem with reality is this: What are facts? Are they knowable or merely a consensus of perception? When is our perception ever complete? Question that even a little bit, and the brink of madness reaches back toward us. Maybe nothing is knowable. Maybe reality is illusion and invention.
This Is No New Beginning
A few years ago, I thought that when they left, I’d have to become someone else. I tried to picture that person in my mind. Career Lady. Or maybe Writer Lady. Or Volunteer Lady. They all seemed too detached, too isolated, or too busy trying to fill my time with other people’s problems.
I had no idea, from inside my white picket fence existence, that I had already learned how to live in the world beyond our family’s front gate.
The Greening
What is this grey? My morning’s window is a minor river, and the sun and sky are blanketed by a never-ending fleece. Late into the season, the trees still stand...