In our time, there is a fashionable sport which requires no equipment, no training, and very little courage. One simply sits down, opens a screen, and begins to despise strangers with excellent confidence. It is convenient because it feels like action, but it is mostly posture. It also has a small side effect: it eats the mind from the inside, slowly, politely, like rust that never announces itself until the … Read the rest
A man I knew used to carry a small object in his pocket. Not a charm exactly—he would have laughed at that word—but something smooth he could roll between his fingers when he was anxious. He said it helped him focus. It gave his hands something to do while his mind calmed down. Later I saw the same man in a church, doing almost the same thing with a prayer … Read the rest
I have no interest in mocking anyone’s faith. Not because I am afraid of offending people, but because faith is often where people keep their most tender parts: grief, hope, guilt, gratitude, love. If you kick that door down with sarcasm, you do not prove you are intelligent. You prove you are careless.
And yet, if something is truly sacred, it should be able to breathe in daylight. Questions are … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
It’s amusing, really, how people insist their religion is eternal while living on a planet that can’t even keep a hairstyle for more than a decade. Civilizations come and go, continents drift, and yet we imagine our particular faith—born on one patch of soil in one historical moment—to be the final revelation. But if the gods of Egypt could overhear us from their long sleep, they’d probably chuckle. They had … Read the rest
