“Since dullness is the chief enemy of art,” wrote John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, “each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.” I love how Gardner did that. He could have said it more simply. “Each generation of artists must be more creative than the last,” is how…

“As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy,” Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer writes in his new book, The Believing Brain, “we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods.” Humans have evolved, it seems, a tendency to…

It is darkest night, and it is the last night my four children will ever go to sleep thinking their mother and father will always be married. Tomorrow we tell them it’s not to be that way. My heart quails at the thought of what we have planned, how it would be better to slap…

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…

“Why,” asks the title of a recent movie review by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir, “are Christian movies so awful?” He asks this after watching Soul Surfer, a film targeted at American evangelicals, about a one-armed surfer girl. It’s supposed to be a true story, insofar as anything can be true once it has been plucked…

It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs. It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can…

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…

I did the math, and during the average waking hour I’m 2,227 feet above the earth. It’s a height that obscures one’s vision—too high to see the particularities, not separated enough from the dirt to see that all of it together is a particularity called creation, and me a part of it, and less and…