family 133

A person cannot multitask while performing it; instead, all else disappears, and only the person for whom one is caring in this physical way remains the focus for several minutes

My mom knew that she could not transfer the entire corpus of Western thought to us because she didn’t have it. But she did have love

The politics of Jesus are “brutally modest.” “Jesus’ life seems to have been mostly one of local, familial labor and relations, carried out in the compass of a small town…

Join Ben Christenson and others for a discussion with Clare Morell.

Jess never missed calling me today, even when I was half a world away. This marks the eleventh year that my phone will not ring.

There is not a lot of time for sentimentality when you’re in the final week of madly preparing to list your empty, but very much “lived-in,” house

He seems pleased that he’s protected me and mine. Or maybe ours.

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

Like Mary and all Israel waiting for the Messiah, like a mother welcoming a child, we are to “wait for it with patience.”

Decades of sorrow and searching for clinical evidence have strengthened his resolve, tempered now by experiences that add up to more than disparate bits of empirical data.

My addiction, rather, is of a more respectable variety.

Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.

Her work is certainly redolent of sorrow and, as she describes it, the eternity that dwells within her. But her words also carry hope and surprising faith that she will…

Williams reminds us of a lesson that we should have already learned good and hard, namely that rejection of Christianity does not result in blissful liberation and self-expression.

Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of…

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…

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears…

In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost.

It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world…

Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century.

Behind this type of play, though, is a genuine longing for beauty—a desire not only to appreciate the beautiful things one has seen or read or heard, but also to…

Yet at times, if only for a moment, I feel the shadow over my days is transformed into pure spirit. Such thoughts give me a surprising sense of quiet joy.

Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice.

With a clear sky above us, no one restricting our movements, we learned—sometimes flailingly, like chickens with our heads cut off—how to marvel.