Essays
The ones we let in
I’m not a pet person. It’s not that I don’t like animals. Like people, it just takes me time to warm up to them,...
A long ugly story
Sometime in the fall of 1979 I got a phone call from a friend of my older brother. He wanted to know if I...
That ain’t gospel
Many moons ago, I had a mentor who liked to tell a story about an intern they’d once worked with. So talented was this...
‘Cold or not, God is present’
I think about the shoes.
I think about the shoes; 60 of them, lined along the east bank of the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary....
The garden
I sat on a wooden stool in my garden one mid-September evening enraptured by an orchestra of crickets. They sounded louder this year, like...
2021 in the rear-view
The space-time continuum seemed to warp this past year, contracting and elongating: While the post-election, pre-insurrection days when election truthers seemed crazy but not...
Swimming with whale sharks
I’ve been riding my bike a lot, and we had tens of thousands of cycling miles between us, but I haven’t had the feeling...
Naked Belief
My favorite professors were the ones who’d set me up a space heater before I arrived. Even in the early fall months, just as...