The stones are gray and sandy brown, scoured and pitted and cracked by time and salt air. During my week here, the sky stays a pale, cold blue. The North Sea is surprisingly calm. Long diagonal ridges of rock—craigs, the Scots call them—expose themselves like bony spines at low tide and slip underwater at high.…

As soon as I settled into my theater seat to watch 127 Hours, I felt uneasy. Why had I decided to spend the next ninety minutes of my afternoon watching what I knew would be a story of one person, virtually alone, in a desperate struggle for life? It’s not like I didn’t know how…

My boyfriend can do almost anything. Forgive the love-besotted hyperbole, but hear me out. He can mend a ceiling, rewire a wall, re-tile a roof, carve a chess-set, play about twelve instruments, build a bench, remodel a house, replace plumbing, landscape a yard, make a perfect fire. He plays baseball, tennis, basketball, ice hockey, soccer,…

Earlier this month, one of the best shows on television aired its final episode. A few friends and I huddled on a sofa to eat hamburgers and watch the series finale of Friday Night Lights—and I won’t lie, I grabbed a few extra napkins to use as tissue, just in case. Before the episode began…

Having written a memoir filled with confessions, I can attest to two things. First, it’s much easier to confess someone else’s sins than one’s own. Second, I’d rather confess my own sins—when I must—to a faceless assembly of readers, rather than a living, gasping person. I most certainly prefer literary confession to looking the person…

As a New Yorker who took up calligraphy in the wake of 9/11, a thought occurred to me one day. What if—in the spirit of “Show, don’t tell”—one found a more refreshing way to establish common ground among Abraham’s oft-estranged offspring of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? What if one were to mount an exhibit in…

Note: This post contains spoilers for the first season of Downton Abbey. Last month, Masterpiece Theater’s newest period drama garnered thousands of besotted fans. Downton Abbey opens with news of Titanic’s tragedy and closes with news that Britain has entered the war in 1914—in between, the show provides an entry into Edwardian upstairs-downstairs intricacies within…

I shouldn’t admit this, but my introduction to tweeting was the eighteen-day Egyptian revolution. Of course, I’d heard of Twitter, but had dismissed it as of no interest to me. Yet, as with so many of my disdainful preconceptions, experience forced me to change my view. As I surfed TV channels and internet news sites…

Memory makes it possible for us both to bless the past, even those parts of it that we have always felt cursed by, and also to be blessed by it. —Frederick Buechner Lately, I’ve been thinking about blessing, mostly due to Tony Woodlief’s beautiful blog post earlier this month. “I pay attention to how blessings…

Evil spirits. Mr. Hyde and Hannibal Lecter. Face-huggers and blood-suckers. Norman Bates and, yes, you guessed it—“heeeeeere’s Johnny” (Jack in The Shining). Many of the classic characters from the world of horror films are present and accounted for in The Arts and Faith Top 25 Horror Films, a list that is likely to prompt a variety…