The Wittenberg Door

Enchanting Axioms: The Snake Oil in the Water We Drink

As-Long-As-Your’re-Happy . . . Follow-Your-Heart . . . Be-True-To-Yourself . . . Believe-In-Yourself . . . Live-Your-Truth . . . Be-Your-Best-Self . . . Do-What-You-Love — the aphorisms of our day are elegant. They sound like beautiful advice. They’re certainly enticing. Who wouldn’t want to be their best self?

Work and Leisure: A Pieper Primer

I am convinced that the busyness of our age detracts from our ability to see the worthy work we do, to see ourselves as whole persons. Filling our days does not necessarily lead to fulfillment.

Facing Loss with Job and Faust

“Adonai has compassion,” sang the psalmist, “for he understands how we are made, he remembers that we are dust.” Perhaps in our dust of grief, we see clearly for the first time.

A Really Real God

If an invisible world is a reality, then a creator is probable, as the deists suggest, and perhaps even plausible. God may well be really real, just as I had supposed in my childhood years. I believe so.

Staring Into The Abyss

Man must face the reality of his own existence and his ultimate fate. To stare into the abyss of eternity, to examine and grasp the meaning of life, is a necessity.

The Keeper, The Tiller, The Question

A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man

A Flat Surface Upon Which to Eat

It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then. But as we make our resolutions and focus on ourselves, it’s worth considering the parable of my table.

Confession

“I don’t roll on nobody,” I said, abysmal grammar and all, but a jail cell is no place for linguistic niceties. My voice was...

First Hack: A Techno Myth

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while that god stands right behind us, unseen, not believed in, multiplying his box of miseries into every pocket in the museum and beyond.

Ruddy Glory: The Resonance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future? Assuming that he was well aware of the increasing indignities and sufferings endured by his much-maligned people in the wider world, I can only think so.