Hunting Silence
To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors.
On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology
A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.
The Uglification of Michigan Lake Towns
America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history.
Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and...
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself.
Boom Towns Go Bust
Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.
Sigmund Freud’s Grief
In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost.
American Holland and Dutch America: On the Exoticization of Culture
Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the play is influenced by the stage and interacts with it.
Manual Training for All
Jobs in construction, health care, and manufacturing technology need not lead to dead ends...
Paranoia and Perfect Love
It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings.
Safe at Last
As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars to heaven, yet she returns each day, as close as a whispered web or a patient beetle on my boots.