“I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness / Keep all our bad ideas / Keep all our hope / It’s here in the smallest bones / the feet and the inner ear / It’s such an enormous thing to walk and to listen” —The Weakerthans, “My Favourite Chords” I need to be…

Dave and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary this October, sitting across from each other at our wooden dinner table with the long crack down the middle. In the candlelight, we gave up on conversation and watched our four-year-old as she delivered one of her surreal monologues. Occasionally we locked eyes, our expressions wondering at…

I did the math, and during the average waking hour I’m 2,227 feet above the earth. It’s a height that obscures one’s vision—too high to see the particularities, not separated enough from the dirt to see that all of it together is a particularity called creation, and me a part of it, and less and…

This morning, with my wife at work, my four-year-old daughter at pre-school and my infant son asleep in the next room, I watched the 1955 Danish film Ordet directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, recently voted the #1 film religious or “spiritual” film in a poll facilitated by Image and voted on by forty critics and…

There’s a 1920s film clip, available on YouTube, of George Bernard Shaw jauntily arguing that anyone who can’t explain his cost to society should not be allowed to live in it. Said the celebrated playwright: “[I]f you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the…

A friend is dying. She’s older, my mother’s age. I’ve known Georganne, as I’ll call her, since my first book was published and she asked if I’d like to give a reading at the private library where she was a trustee. Her voice struck me on that first phone call with its bossy-but-breathy quality, no-nonsense…

See how thy beggar works in Thee / By art. —George Herbert A long table was set up on the corner of Boylston just outside the main branch of the public library on the edge of Copley Square filled with cellophane bags of bread and Styrofoam plates of lunch meat, and sliced cheese. I had…

Letter writing, the kind with real ink and paper, has become something of a cultural anachronism, like rotary phones or washboards. Mention that you plan to spend the afternoon writing a letter, and be prepared to meet the same quick-blinking surprised faces you might receive if, pushing back from a restaurant table, you say, “Excuse…

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading through the final pages (finally!) of my upcoming book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a collection of essays about faith and popular music, mostly in the 1990s, and the musical twists and turns life (mine and others’) has taken since then. For the most…

When was the last time you saw a big-screen hero kill, gut, and cook a squirrel? Be prepared for that if you see Winter’s Bone. I wasn’t. Let’s not even talk about the chainsaw, which figures prominently at the end of the film. Let’s focus on Ree Dolly, the seventeen year-old girl “bred and buttered”…