Essay: Us and God
There is no Us and Them. There’s only Us and God. That’s one of the lessons of the Bible. Another is that God shows us the way to live, and [...]
There is no Us and Them. There’s only Us and God. That’s one of the lessons of the Bible. Another is that God shows us the way to live, and [...]
Reading George Wallace’s collection of 48 poems A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles is a kaleidoscopic, whirligig experience. It is a rushing, often breathless torrent of images, allusions, emotions, [...]
Science fiction seems to be about the future, and, a lot of times, it is. Writers will grapple with the nuts and bolts of how a spacecraft might be constructed [...]
What do Virginia Woolf, Robert Heinlein, C. S. Lewis and Douglas Coupland have in common? For me, it's a used bookstore in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where I stopped during a [...]
Christopher Moore’s 2005 novel The Stupidest Angel tells the story of one extremely clueless — albeit extremely powerful — angel who visits the California coastal community of Pine Cove to [...]
Jim Brosnan's books about two years in his life as a baseball player --- The Long Season, published in 1960) and Pennant Race (1962) --- were the first and last [...]
Talk about Shakespeare’s great King Lear tends to focus on the action of the play and its meaning. A self-satisfied monarch, blind to the consequences of his actions, splits his [...]
In the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray the Our Father. In Genesis, Abraham shows us how to haggle with God. It’s about Sodom and [...]
John Boyne’s 2015 novel A History of Loneliness was a difficult book for me to read, mainly because it deals with the crimes of hundreds of pedophile priests who preyed [...]
Two new books about the history of paper — both tell the same story, right? Well, not really, and, in their differences, the books reveal much about the writing and [...]