There’s a reason I’m not a journalist: It is quite possible that I have the worst “news judgment” ever. More than once, during those periods that I’ve actually done a few essays or reviews for news organizations, an editor has gently had to explain to me that you can’t really write about something once its…

Upon seeing Mickey Rourke as has-been mat star Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler, I became nostalgic. When I was a boy, you could get the TV wrestling matches from Memphis on Saturdays, wherein Jerry “The King” Lawler took on the likes of Tojo Yamamoto (managed by the dastardly Saul Wiengeroff). Me and my…

Laura Miller announces her nonbelief right in the subtitle of her recently published The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. And the explicit premise of her book is that an avowed non-Christian can love The Chronicles of Narnia despite their Christian sub-text. So I must confess that I opened Miller’s book with some skepticism…

Why was it love at first sight when, accompanied by my boyfriend, Blake, I first saw Bruce Springsteen perform in 1977? Was it because of my up-and-down relationship with Blake? He hadn’t even wanted to go to the concert at the Augusta (Maine) Civic Center. Or was it because I just loved Born to Run…

This week I opened one of my favorite blogs and read that the writer had lost her husband. He flatlined at the gym during his morning workout. Just like that. I’ve been trying to write about something—anything—else all week. But my thoughts keep coming around to him, to her, to their two little boys. I’ve…

I can’t quite pin down why I can’t stand Pepsi’s new “Refresh Everything” ad campaign, which makes commercial use of the nation’s bad luck and blue mood by making happy, colorful signs with positive words on them. Every morning, I walk past buses with “JOY,” “TOGETHER,” and, most annoyingly, “OPTIMISMMM” emblazoned on their sides, like…

Over dinner two weeks ago, my cousin Rick used the word “orphan” to describe how he felt this past Christmas, the first since his dad, my uncle, died last August (my aunt had died in 2002). I nodded in agreement and sympathy—my mom died in 2000; my dad in 2005—but I wondered, too: Can a…

Two days after Obama’s inauguration, the crowds barely gone and the Mall barely cleared of trampled water bottles and blankets, the March for Life came to town. It was a Thursday and I headed to work early, looking forward to the post-inaugural respite of an empty metro train. Instead, the turnstiles and trains were crammed…

My latest musical obsession is Christian rock from the 1960s and 70s, a time before there was such a thing called Christian rock, and particularly attempts to re-interpret liturgical music in pop and rock forms. It is mostly bad, or at least weird, and while some of it is good, it has led to me…

My nineteen year-old son is a sophomore at a college a few hours drive from where I live. The campus is huge, spread across many tree-lined blocks. My wife and I both went to far smaller schools, and were surprised when our firstborn chose a university so large, but it has the programs he wanted…