Diagnosis: Generalized anxiety disorder, mild to medium major depression (you read that right—it’s not an oxymoron), and a pinch of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. I received this summary after speaking with a psychiatrist for an hour, a few weeks ago, finally ready to surrender to the idea that maybe, maybe, I didn’t need to endure days-long…

Originally, I was going to title this post, “Something Funny Happened on the Way Home to Watch the Golden Globes.” And it was funny, to be sure; but in the context of the day in question, only to a point. Let me explain. Earlier that day, I had gone to church in Hollywood. I had…

When I was little, I had a bad habit of hanging around neighbors’ houses. I would knock and knock at their doors, whether they had kids to play with or not; I would ask questions about the house, their day, what plants they were growing in the garden. And eventually, I was sent home with…

When I first heard Michael Knott singing about a woman suspected of eating her husband, the Eucharist was the furthest thing from my mind. The chasm separating communion and cannibalism was wide, or so I assumed. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt something like a fist balling up in my…

One of the students in my Glen Online course, “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice,” emailed me to ask what exactly I meant by “strolling along with a poem.” In the lecture for the lesson she was working on, I’d said that “I sometimes read a poem as if I were taking a stroll through it…

The ambition to some day become a writer was planted in my head sometime around 1980 in a Long John Silvers restaurant in Conneaut, Ohio. I was seated at the end of a Formica table, a plastic basket of crispy fried fish and brown hushpuppies in front of me, listening to my grandfather grill my…

Take care of each other. That was the second of three “pearls of wisdom” my father offered as my wife and I were packing up early on New Year’s morning 2012 to head back from South Jersey to Asheville. I remember one other occasion on which he offered a father’s wisdom. Then, like now, I…

I’ve been waiting for a chance to share this movie with you for two years. In Lucky Life, the new film by Lee Isaac Chung, three friends—a writer named Mark, his wife Karen, and their friend Alex—drive to join their friend Jason at a North Carolina beach house. They’ve been friends for years, but this…

I read that famed biologist E.O. Wilson provoked a tempest by claiming a genetic basis for social cooperation that has the politically unfortunate side-effect of undermining a widely embraced explanation for the persistence of homosexuality. If he’s right, we’re stuck with an uncomfortable reality that homosexuality is a choice, or a learned behavior, or something…

The old year ends and the new year begins, a seamless road towards eternity. So as we prepare for that endless prospect, it’s good to remember those that have already entered it. I was sitting with my father at the dinner table a few weeks ago, surrounded by family. Memory calls most after it has…