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I’ve also been struck by the number of people in the book-producing-and-selling business who are uninterested in their product. On the retail end, there was the manager of a bookstore…

We’ve recently started the annual tradition (three years going strong!) of holding a wild game dinner with our friends and church community. Each family brings a dish harvested from the…

We live in fractured days, lacking in harmony, civility, and comity. “Comity,” an old word for courtesy and kindness, is related etymologically to the Sanskrit word for “smile.” As it…

Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm…

I did some research with the help of a “dumb phone finder” which told me the functions, network compatibilities, and reviews of the available flip phones and other simplicity-oriented devices.…

County Highway is not county-specific. It’s for all of America outside major cities. Well, outside of New York and Los Angeles, for sure. In the second issue, there’s a piece…

Gatsby’s character yearns for the infinite; he sparkles with something unusual in the midst of the lavish wealth and chaotic parties of Long Island’s frivolities. Gatsby has “one of those…

Like Bob Dylan, Hamer’s life was marked by protest and songs of protest. Her protests, however, grew from her personal experience on the ground in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk…

The children’s pastor made his point about who was serious or not when it came to serving God. He could have closed the service, and I would have been out…

Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the…

The overall message is: here, readers, we have discovered a whole new mysterious island filled with these strange savages, previously unexplored. You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing out there! So…

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human…

We can never ossify the world because it is always moving and changing like the river. Yet we can open ourselves to this ever fluctuating movement. This is manifested in…

For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the…

Before we totally condemn the Athenians as selfish, entertainment-addicted bad citizens—which, to be fair, they sometimes (or often?) were, just like us—it is worth considering what such shared democratic spaces…

I’ve been told that workers have had to step away from the register while checking out paying customers to chase away repeat shoplifters as they hurled all kinds of epithets…

Criticizing the ministry-industrial complex does not mean professional resources have no place in ministry. It is not so much their use as their guiding role in congregational life that prevents…

We need to love smaller, more energy-efficient houses and cars in order to love people more. We need to give up much of our casual oil consumption for leisure. We…

children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…

My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial…

In her introduction, Hudson calls The Soul of Civility “a humanistic manifesto.” And she’s right: the book is steeped in humanism, in more ways than one. First, Hudson underscores the…

None of us gets to choose where we land. But if we cannot choose the times in which we live, we can choose how we live in the time we…

Maybe we can just call it something else, like, “Living with family and friends in a neighborhood designed to encourage the building of social capital, relying on them in real…

It is not solely (or perhaps even primarily) about there being more hours of work and therefore less time for reading. It is about the possibility of work hovering over…