I just returned from posting letters in our mailbox, 3oo feet from our house. It’s a cold, foggy day, and over the crunch of gravel under my feet I heard the sibilant song of a little bird. Five little notes. They transported me to spring. I spotted the bird — a drab grey thing perched…

Some days, I’d prefer to leave the amusement park and just go someplace else. It is on these days that I ask God, “Do you not care, anymore, about your people? Are you just going to let them die, asleep, complacently living a life of outward ablutions and inward materialism?” I was in Costco the…

Sometimes, the truth is so simple that it’s difficult to believe. Take manipulation, for example, which is to control another person’s behavior, generally without his knowledge, and in an unscrupulous manner. The word is not used in a positive sense. Manipulation employs deceit; and deceit is a lie. Deceit, also, is not a positive word,…

Before the world of Facebook, we’d find ourselves at a bridal shower, say, and The Person in Charge of Embarrassing Games generally began with something innocuous, like, “List your five favorite books about sex,” or, if this were a church function, “List your five favorite books,” to which, of course, we would all have to…

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