• The Trip to Fallsburg

    “Fallsburg. Calling at Fallsburg,” the announcer said as the train hissed to a standstill. I hadn’t planned to leave the city during my trip, but after elbowing through the swarm upon swarm of tourists, even a day’s escape sounded like heaven. Every town has a list of unmissable sights; however, I found delightfully little written about Fallsburg. When one of the few reviews mentioned what sounded like missing the open arms of a tourist trap, I bought my ticket.

  • When I Feel Small

    Maybe, though, just maybe, it’s ok to face the fear as a small Whitefoot mouse does. “The little life she had, she loved dearly, and so far she had taken excellent care of it.”

  • The Courage to Let Things Be

    And that’s where the heart of the matter lies—not just in how we read a story, but in how we engage the world itself. Do we approach the world to live with it—or to take it apart in order to dominate it?

  • Neuhaus on Disruptive Writers

    There are writers whom you read because you’re told you must read them. Having done so, they then become part of your history, along with foreign countries you have visited or great music you have heard. It’s all part of the never-ending process called learning, and a very good thing it is. But then there are writers who catch you up short. They are personally disruptive; intellectually and spiritually disruptive. They cannot be fitted into anything so smoothly incremental as a "process." Their claims demand a decision, and contingent upon that decision is a change of disposition toward a host of questions. The thought cannot be resisted: "If he’s right…

  • Eliade on Heirophanies

    From the most elementary hierophany — e.g. manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree — to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.

  • Muggeridge on Irony

    Built into life is a strong vein of irony for which we should be grateful to our Creator. It helps us find our way through the fantasy that encompasses us to the reality of our existence.

  • Lewis on Art and Real Life

    That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.