death 30

Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure.

President Carter showed what was possible when people came together for a cause and acted out of decency.

But our culture’s celebration of Halloween suggests that we know yet more. We sense not only that we are dust and will return to it; we also sense that life…

A Non-Believer Ponders Life, Death, and Staring into the Abyss

We are not meant to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals, with gray faces, morphine drips, and flickering television screens. We are meant to live, die, and live eternally…

The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with…

No one even tried to keep me. The dead, not an argumentative sort to begin with, never had the chance. The living, God bless them, had been so thoroughly tutored…

How do you measure the beauty, fittingness, and purposefulness of Hewitt, his family, farm, and community? I hope no one tries to innovate an inventory to do it.

Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend…

When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they…

This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope…

Many religions understand suffering to be laden with the potential for spiritual awakening through a reduction of worldly attachments. But Christianity has a unique understanding of suffering that offers a…

With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?

Too soon the mistletoe will be a garland.

My father cried the day his stroke began, as he lay in the emergency ward, watching himself lose his speech and his strength. He cried the day after the stroke…

Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.

A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about his grandparents’ farm (the book’s title…

At the height of the political tension in King Lear, the corrupt usurpers of Lear’s throne are at the helm of Britain’s defense against French invaders. Cordelia, Lear’s truly beloved…

Louisville, Kentucky.  “Reading Florence King is like opening a blast furnace,” reporter Liz Trotta said of her years ago. That fire is now out. The writer and satirist died on…

Earth's the right place for love.

Modern persons have a problem with limits, three in fact. They want every good thing to be unlimitedly available for their desires, and scarcity is taken for a cause of…

Hidden Springs Lane. There is something especially sad about opening up a hive full of dead bees. Several weeks ago I wrote about my hives and my hope that they…