I lay my head down on the steering wheel of my car and burst into tears. From the back of the car, my seven-year-old son bleated over his seat, “I’m sorry, Mama! I didn’t mean it!” Outside the day wasn’t cold, but it was gray nonetheless, and the grungy, not-hardly-big-enough back parking lot of Politics…

I lamented my lack of preparation for the season. I longed for answers. I wished for a different experience of waiting. I hoped for 2011 to be wrapped and ribboned and placed under my spiritual tree with an explanatory card from God. (There is still time, God! Gifts accepted through Epiphany.) On the fourth Sunday…

Perhaps it’s embarrassing of me to admit this here at one of the dedicated hubs of their overall fan base, but until I was a fellow faculty member two summers ago at the Glen West Workshop hosted by Image, I had never heard of Over the Rhine—the musical/marital duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist.…

Was there a horse story in your childhood? My wife Anne cherished Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, C.W. Anderson’s The Blind Connemara, and Marguerite Henry’s Stormy and White Stallion of Lipizza. When she wasn’t reading about horses, she was riding them. In the saddle by the time she was in elementary school, Anne rode both English…

With few exceptions, most of the new people I meet cringe perceptibly when I inform them that I teach high school freshmen. “Better you than me,” they might say. Or, “God bless you. That must be so difficult.” I think that the assumption that underlies that response is that teenagers must be terribly difficult to…

Sometimes with my Christmas cards I include a favorite seasonal poem. So consider this post a greeting card for the season. First, I can’t resist sharing the poem that has been my meditation this Advent. I always treasure Advent’s special spirit of hushed longing. This year I’ve found it expressed in a poem not written…

[Note: This post contains a spoiler for the film Melancholia in the last paragraph.] Sometimes it sidles up to you, out of the corner of your eye. You catch a glimpse and turn your head: Was that it? Nah. Like a mouse scurrying around that we don’t accept as an actual rodent until the fifth…

For reasons both practical and spiritual, I’ve mostly resisted the consuming pull of the sexual abuse saga at Penn State. But with ubiquitous news feeds and family or friends always there to fill you in, not to mention my own curiosity, one tends to be better informed than one’s better intentions would have it. On…

My mother lives in a little yellow house on John Street in Whiting, Indiana, where the Chicago skyline looms across the northern edge of town, where British Petroleum’s refining towers, which flank the town’s southern edge, burn both night and day, their white eyes flaming through the rain that has made me late for my…

One of the most brilliant moments from any episode of The Office takes place in season four’s opening episode, “Fun Run.” Michael Scott (Steve Carell) has organized a 5K to promote rabies awareness (long story), and decides to prep himself for the race by eschewing water all day and consuming a double order of Fettuccine…