King David, You, Me and Idleness It isn’t as if King David opened his eyes that morning, to ask, “What are the 3 most effective ways I can take this blessed God-Given-Life and invoke the worst conceivable miseries upon me and on everyone I love, am obligated to?” Or “How can I best take the […]
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Making an oratory of the heart… The phrase, “oratory of the heart,” is not common parlance. I first encountered it in Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God,. I had to stop and think about the word oratory. It’s not one we hear in daily conversations. Oratory is defined first as as eloquence in
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A joyous lent? It isn’t something you can understand easily. At least I can’t. That essential connection between joy and sorrow. The sorrowful agony of the man on the cross and the joy of the resurrection. I think it’s why we write poetry. Because the two emotions sound wholly opposed, as if they live in
Certainty: Is there anything more seductive to those of us so hungry for…what exactly? Is it knowledge and wisdom? Or is it more often for affirmation that what we think and believe, even insist, is the truth. In the year 1900, Lord Kelvin took the podium at the British Association of Science to announce: “There
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High Desert Winds “For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from
In pursuit of excellence: TB12 America’s national passion for football was for many, many years pure mystery to me. I could not understand the attraction of watching a bunch of guys pushing and shoving and occasionally badly injuring one another. For me, football was a total bore. Despite that history, I am one of Tom
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If we are not frightened by brutality are not my words, instead, they are those of St. Augustine as he wrote about the serene, loving and Christlike words that poured from the mouth of the brutally tortured and dying martyr, St. Vincent during yet another of the successive regimes of persecution against Christians in the
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Since I, Claudia is now published, I have been writing a number of articles to promote the new book. And thought you may be interested in reading a couple of them. Here is the article called Delicacy first published at Serious Reading. “I was worried when my latest novel declared itself done at just under
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Last year, I selected one from a list of preset questions that comprise “author interviews”: “Do you view your writing as a spiritual practice?” Surprised at the question, I stared at the words for a while before realizing that yes, I did think of my writing as spiritual… even a spiritual practice. And wrote this
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I Claudia is Done! Kill the Monster! Finishing anything always involves paradox: That oxymoronic combination of relief and sadness. Okay, maybe, but “kill the monster”? A strange phrase to use when completing a long project- one that has taken a year to finish…like a book. Or is it? I’m a writer but the paradox is
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