And so we’re off! — 2014, a new year, ready or not. Resolutions or not, there’s something about recognizing the end of a year and the beginning of a new one that’s downright refreshing. The earliest public celebrations that we know about are Babylonian, dating back thousands of years. I’ve been spending a lot of …
*A version of this article is also available on The Huffington Post. “We, three kings of Orient are,” intone the guys in robes and crowns. But were they really three, or kings for that matter, and from where exactly did they come? Every year at this time, questions about historicity – what really happened (and …
In the spirit of the season, my recipe for The Very Best Hot Chocolate Ever (or TVBHCE for short. Hah.): I like to start with the biggest mug I can get my hands on, not because it’s required to make a successful cup, but because I’m greedy. We have a few such mugs — a …
What if we were to extend our notions of neighborhood to the nonhuman natural world? We’re familiar with the courtesies and manners appropriate for our human neighbors (whether or not we accept them). But what about the heron, the salamander, the fox, the speckled trout? I had a wonderful opportunity to meet and hear Wendell …
It was only when I began revising an essay that I discovered what it was about. I had thought the piece would be a simple meditation on what I’d learned about Cyrus the Great over these past few years – the sexy “messiah” byline, author of the first declaration of human rights, all that… and …
What if I took a psalm a day, read it, took a walk, and returned to my desk with jot-able thoughts? There are the year-of-living-some-way books, the applications-of-a-classic books, the travel-across-somewhere or enduring-peculiar-deprivations books,… Why not a scholar’s-nonscholarship-of-a-biblical-book book? Turns out, there are several reasons not, not for me, anyway, not now. The house where …
These mid-August days, some 2500 years ago, witnessed a violent turn-about in power — regicide followed by a week of king-less days. Imagine for a moment the uncertainty, the chaos. Imagine the mother of the assassinated king. Still alive, for the time being — a foreigner in a court conflicted about its cosmopolitan nature, a …
I have sunk low. From the formal correspondence with perfect spacing that I learned to execute back in grade school – letters hand written, of course, in slow loopy cursive – I have adopted a curt and, I’ll admit it, error-filled email style. If there’s a salutation at all, it often runs like a dog …
Sunday morning, and everyone else is at church. Well, not everyone, exactly, and that’s just it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about not-church church. This morning, post beach vacation at the in-laws and suddenly solo for a few days, I feel adrift. The writing projects, both fiction and non-fiction, that have so energized me …
Stories and food, that’s all we really want. Maybe a drink. As we sat on the tarmac, delayed for a transatlantic flight, everyone around me poked at the screen on the seat-back in front of her, hoping to get them going with the promised movies or television series. When the plane took off, and those …
