It is a phenomenon that still startles me. On weekend evenings from May through October, as dusk settles down upon my suburban home, small fires appear all around me. The suburban men I call my neighbors spend their weekend days doing what suburban men in the Midwest have done for decades: playing golf, mowing lawns,…

I am re-reading Shelby Foote’s massive, three-volume history of the Civil War. Foote, who played the role of courtly southern scholar and mischievous scamp on Ken Burns’ heralded PBS Civil War documentary, was one of my favorite human beings. He was erudite, witty, and—a startling claim for a historian, really—supremely soulful. He could sift through…

I’ve probably been depressed all my life. How else does one explain the nine-year-old kid who sat on the playground bench and wrote after-the-nuclear-holocaust short stories? Nevertheless, it’s what I did. But depression doesn’t fit easily within the Christian template. “Consider it all joy,” the apostle Paul writes, “when you encounter various trials.” I struggle…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

Philosophers don’t usually make good rock ’n rollers. Philosophers write dense, convoluted, esoteric arguments about highly theoretical concepts; a prospect that typically doesn’t elicit much wild abandon out on the dance floor. So you have to tip your scholar’s cap to Tonio K. The 70s rocker was as deeply indebted to twentieth-century existentialist art and…