“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.” —Wendell Berry I suppose if anyone’s to read what follows, I should up my bona-fides. I’ve struggled—if a…

The longer you live in a small town, the more you see, so I like to walk. On one of my longer routes, I trek past the Cobbossee Stream, where I often see immature bald eagles, looking for breakfast. After the steep incline of Winter Street, I cut through a Civil War-era cemetery, filled with…

If you read my last post about Christian reticence in the workplace, you should know that not only have I had to wince a bit in hindsight at its full-frontal approach—despite my best efforts to pre-empt this in the writing itself—but even better, I was “outed” by my co-workers in the very midst of finishing…

Two conversations come to mind when I think about the relationship between art and life. The first one occurred some Sunday afternoon during adolescence, after Mass with a friend named Tim. Tim and I were the self-appointed rebels in our Confirmation class, courageously informing our instructor about the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the ubiquitous use…

Fond of firearms as I am, liking war movies as I do, and following Mark Wahlberg’s transformation from rapper to thespian with awe (as who could help but be), I rented Shooter not long back. There I beheld the latest depiction of a pervasive attitude in modern Western culture, one that applies to all institutions,…

As America magazine’s June 23-30 issue pointed out, it was extraordinary to find the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue (June 9 & 16) devoted so prominently to God, including a series of short reflections collectively entitled “Faith and Doubt.” Predictably, given its fundamental skepticism about religious matters, the New Yorker wouldn’t be able to conceive…

One night during the summer of 1967, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the front yard of my uncle’s house in Louisiana. Like my father, my Uncle Paul was a dentist, and on the night that the cross was lit, he was not actually at home, but had gone back downtown to his…

I can’t sleep in hotel rooms. The fluorescent lights, the vent’s false breeze, the sealed-off city behind its funeral parlor curtains—all of it triggers a feeling of body-lessness, a sense that every other pulse available to me is inhuman. Lonesome nights on work trips always end with me sprawled across a giant bed, contemplating the…

I wonder how long I can pull off this gig; how long I can get away with writing this blog that “outs” me spiritually while working in an industry like Hollywood that is far more hostile to Christianity than, say, apropos the metaphor, homosexuality. How long before my fellow writers on a brand new job…

It’s said that stories help clarify the stupefying succession of years we call life—so that we see it truly, live it honestly, face it nobly. Even tales of the grimmest matter are not meant as prose fugues, as lyrical anesthesia for the meek or desperate. Literature is equipment for living, said Kenneth Burke, and a…