In the final scene of Anne Tyler’s novel Back When We Were Grownups, the uncle of protagonist Rebecca gives a speech at the party she has arranged for his 100th birthday. Throughout the novel, he has been an endearingly complex character, quite mentally alert for his age but with spells of irritability or of dissociation…

What’s wrong with this picture? A Sunday afternoon in March, sun breaking through the clouds and casting onto the wall. Last week’s roast chicken simmering into stock on the stove. Craig at his desk, typing up the selection for lectio divina at the weekly meeting of our Benedictine group. My nephew in a club chair,…

In 1990, when the New Kids on the Block were so popular that Walmart carried sleeping bags with the band members’ faces emblazoned on them, I joined the masses and bought the band’s second album, Hangin’ Tough. It felt good to be at one with the masses. Up to that point, I listened almost exclusively…

Earlier this week, I was deep in the weeds at work when the shadow of a deadline for my next Good Letters post began creeping over me. “I’ve got you down for Good Friday,” our long-suffering editor, Greg Wolfe, noted in a friendly nudge on Monday, before I got around to asking him exactly when…

Note: Read part 1 of this post here. Five minutes later, I rang the bell again. Students opened their eyes. I asked them to write in their notebooks, reflecting on what they had just experienced. There’s no right or wrong experience, I said. Whatever you experienced is your experience. They wrote. Then we talked. One…

One morning this semester in “The Holocaust and the Arts,” a course I’ve written about several times this year, I asked the students to spend a few minutes repeating internally, with their eyes closed, a phrase I adapted from Ruth Kluger’s book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. The phrase: “my memories, our memories”. Born…

Maybe you are in love with a girl. Maybe she is too young for you, or you are the wrong religion, or you have a terminal illness, and so you will grieve her more than would otherwise be the case, which in itself is no small thing. Maybe each time you tell someone about her,…

When we see a frantic streak of red and white charge down a city street, we know what it means: Emergency! In the new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Kid with a Bike, that frantic streak of red and white is the emergency. His name is Cyril. He’s 11 years old. He wears…

This post serves as an introduction and guide to the ArtandFaith.com Top 25 Road Films list. I first read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer in the summer of 2005. I pulled it off the shelf because I needed an excuse to step away from the TV, which during those humid, late-August days was broadcasting 24-7 the aftermath…

In 1990 and 1991 I was a combat engineer with the 5th Marines, and we were part of the invasion of Iraq during Desert Storm. I saw the nifty new technology, the almost playful ways we had devised to murder one another, and a deep sadness sank into my heart. It felt a lot like…