Please note: This post contains plot spoilers for some of the films discussed.  We go to the movies to get out of here. To go somewhere else. And sometimes, that’s enough. But it’s best when we come back bearing treasure, like Bilbo Baggins returning to Bag End in The Hobbit—wiser for his adventures, richer for…

It was in grad school that I first heard mention of artistic “process.” “What’s your process?” was a favorite question posed by zealous grad students to famous writers paid thousands of dollars to read from their work for forty-five minutes in a musty auditorium. I always rolled my eyes when someone asked these kinds of…

As the latest political scandal broke over the past weeks, the same explanations and reflections were trotted out. “It’s never the indiscretion,” they always say, “it’s the cover-up. If you just come clean, people will forgive you; it’s lying about it that does you in.” I don’t know about that. I recall many a public…

In the fall of 2006, I enrolled in a class I’d thought about taking for years. This class—a four-year program called Education for Ministry, administered by the graduate theology school at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, and held in Episcopal parishes nationwide—demanded three hours of seminar each week during the academic year,…

A recent article (opinion piece, really, though not presented as such) in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, “Is contemporary young adult fiction too dark?” Well, it didn’t so much ask it as answer it. In writer Meghan Cox Gurdon’s opinion: Yes. The essential complaint Gurdon has is with the dark subject matter of…

As my Good Letters colleague Jeffrey Overstreet did recently with his two-part post, “Something that I’m Supposed to Be,” one can adapt a longer talk into a blog post. In Jeffrey’s case, the talk was his plenary one at last year’s Glen Workshop, an occasion just as unforgettable in person as its recent written counterpart…

My father’s had one of those years—the ones people frequently compare metaphorically with the suffering of Job—one series of extraordinary hardships after the other—major career changes, my mother’s devastating illness, a new two-hour-per-day commute, a complete upheaval in all that was settled and familiar, even the recent death of our beloved 16-year old cat—all this…

For Easter this year, my older sister gave my two-year-old daughter a potential future heirloom to wear to the midnight Paschal liturgy: a dress of cream-colored raw silk, with ruffles, pintucks, and little puffed sleeves that delicately ringed Anna Maria’s arms. The lined skirt puffed out from the high gathered waist, and in pale light…

Having thought, for many years, that I’d spend my life aching for what I’m about to say, it feels strange to write these words down. But I’ve spent the past five months knowing it, knowing it to my bones. I am in love. And there aren’t enough poems or pop songs to capture what I…

In Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a man races against predators and time to rescue his family from a deep pit, which rains threaten to fill. Breathless and bloody, hounded by vicious enemies, he doesn’t know if he’ll make it in time, or if he’ll be able to do anything but fall down and die when he…