• Bored at the Museum

    When you enter the room where it’s hanging, even before you fully register what the painting represents, the pleasure is already there, just as you turn the corner and see it on the wall.

  • Carrying Grief

    Even if it is helpful to know that deep grief is quieting, it is consoling that some are closer to our particular pain. Most people immediately become awkward when I mention the miscarriage. It makes sense to me, as I act similarly around people who have more extensive familiarity with death than I do. I have never experienced the death of a child I have given birth to, have never yet experienced the death of a parent or a spouse. I am not old; I still cannot, as my professor told me in college, really understand Lear. But at twenty-five, watching Lear carry the body of Cordelia and cry, “Why…

  • Miami Miami

    You are sitting on the couch watching football some Saturday afternoon. Maybe it’s halftime of your home state's annual Civil War game. Maybe two top ten teams are warming up for kickoff. Or you are just flipping channels looking for a close contest. But as score updates scroll along the bottom of the screen, one stands out: Miami University. "Wait, Miami University of … Ohio? Why is there a Miami University in the State of Ohio? Isn’t Miami in Florida?"

  • Interstate Rest Stops for Those in the Slow Lane

    Even if you don’t have kids in tow, dropping out of the interstate fast lane for a few minutes certainly can’t hurt. Reduce the blurring effect of modern transportation. Ignite your curiosity. And experience what Ray Bradbury called the “pores of life” instead — its finer features, texture, and details. 

  • Wonder, Love, and Mushrooms

    That is a surprising progression — from mushrooms to meaning, but it is possible because all things are united by their ultimate cause. The thoughts we draw from reality are like the fruiting bodies of a vast interconnected “network of being.” Beyond this, the Christian encounters reality not merely as “being” but also as a created order — an order that is, as Gerard Manely Hopkins puts it, “charged with the grandeur of God.” The inky cap mushrooms along my favorite walking path owe their existence to a creator. This gives my interactions with them a truly personal dimension. God is the giver. They are gifts. And I am the…

  • Annie Dillard on No One But Us

    A blur of romance clings to our notions of 'publicans,' 'sinners,' 'the poor,' 'the people in the marketplace,' 'our neighbors,' as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday School watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart…

  • Sterne on Religion Without Morality

    "As, therefore, we can have no dependence upon morality without religion;—so, on the other hand, there is nothing better to be expected from 'religion without morality;' nevertheless, 'tis no prodigy to see a man whose real moral character stands very low, who yet entertains the highest notion of himself in the light of a religious man. "He shall not only be covetous, revengeful, implacable,—but even wanting in points of common honesty; yet inasmuch as he talks aloud against the infidelity of the age,——is zealous for some points of religion,——goes twice a day to church,—attends the sacraments,—and amuses himself with a few instrumental parts of religion,—shall cheat his conscience into a…

  • Dave Barry on How to Argue Effectively

    I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

  • Pieper on the What it Means to Philosophize

    To philosophize means to remove oneself, not from the things of the everyday world, but from the usual meanings, the accustomed evaluations of these things. And this is not motivated from some decision to think "differently" from the way most people think, but rather for the purpose of seeing everything in a new light. This is just how it is: in the everyday things (not in some separated sphere of an "essential" world, or what have you) to be able to see the deeper visage of the real so that the attention directed to things encountered in everyday experience comes up against what is not so obvious in these things…