In this series on Old Books, I’m choosing books with these questions in mind: What questions do they answer? What problems do they correctly diagnose? What wisdom do they provide that is lacking in today’s discourse? What metaphysics do they propose or expose? Every book I’m examining may not necessarily answer each of those questions,… Continue reading OLD BOOKS, Part IV: On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner
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OLD BOOKS, Part III: Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry
In this series on Old Books, I’m choosing books with these questions in mind: What questions do they answer? What problems do they correctly diagnose? What wisdom do they provide that is lacking in today’s discourse? What metaphysics do they propose or expose? Every book I’m examining may not necessarily answer each of those questions,… Continue reading OLD BOOKS, Part III: Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry
Return of Joy
“For a long season, O Lord,I considered as an impossibilitywhat I now know as unshakeable truth: That after loss, pain, tragedy, tears,sorrow, doubt, defeat, and disarray,I will hold a more costly and precious joythan any I have held before;and this not in denial of my loss,but manifest in the very wreckage of it.” from “A… Continue reading Return of Joy
OLD BOOKS, Part II: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher
In this series on Old Books, I’m choosing books with these questions in mind: What questions do they answer? What problems do they correctly diagnose? What wisdom do they provide that is lacking in today’s discourse? What metaphysics do they propose or expose? Every book I’m examining may not necessarily answer each of those questions,… Continue reading OLD BOOKS, Part II: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher
OLD BOOKS, Part I: The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
In this series on Old Books, I’m choosing books with these questions in mind: What questions do they answer? What problems do they correctly diagnose? What wisdom do they provide that is lacking in today’s discourse? What metaphysics do they propose or expose? Every book I’m examining may not necessarily answer each of those questions,… Continue reading OLD BOOKS, Part I: The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
OLD BOOKS – Intro
I have something to say today in praise of old books. I’ll start with a lighter story of how I discovered my new favorite bookshop in the entire world. Then I’ll share, in a series of posts, a few of the important old books I’ve been reading this year, and why I feel they are… Continue reading OLD BOOKS – Intro
Do the Next Thing
And the heart does not die when one thinks it should We smile; there is tea and bread on the table. “Elegy for N.N.” Czeslaw Milosz (Selected Poems) For over a year now, my teenage daughter has been going through a complex chronic pain journey that has pummeled our family in myriad ways. My last… Continue reading Do the Next Thing
Crisis, Fatigue, Rilke, Prayer
When I go through a season of suffering or crisis, I am rarely able to write about it during or immediately afterward. It takes my soul and mind time to sift through it, to see what heals and how, what rises and what settles. And writing takes energy that is in short supply at such… Continue reading Crisis, Fatigue, Rilke, Prayer
Something Wildly More
One of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, once said in an interview with Bill Moyers that human beings “exist wildly in excess of any sort of survival mode that could be posited for them.” She said that if you use animal behavior as a model or correlation to human behavior, “you’ve simply excluded everything that… Continue reading Something Wildly More
Piles (or What I’m Reading)
I don’t know many writers who only read one book at a time. (If you are one who does, I’d be fascinated to make your acquaintance and would try to question you about the reasoning behind your reading practice without making you feel as if you were a specimen under a microscope.) I have piles,… Continue reading Piles (or What I’m Reading)