In the opening scene in Jessica Elisa Boyd Art in Heaven, we find her protagonist, William, an Anglican priest, in a life-or-death crisis at the edge of a large body of water. At the end of the scene, in which we are invited to share his inner conflict in the vast and inscrutable context of nature itself, he reluctantly chooses…

…it surprised me to find this book by Sam Harris so helpful in my own search for a deeper meaning in life; and I was more surprised still to discover, halfway through, that Harris’s path had led him to the study and practice of…

This powerful and still most timely book was published in 2006, and it came to my attention by pure chance, as I searched through my shelves to see what could be donated to the local library. Here was one, I thought, that looked interesting, and set it aside to read. I have no idea how it reached…

Meet Carm Goode. Or Miles Forthwrighte. Or should I say “and,” since they appear to be one and the same […] You’ll note that Carm seems a jovial enough fellow, Miles a bit of a curmudgeon; Carm a free spirit, Miles clearly academic. Which seems to be how they work, not so much in collaboration as in friendly…

[…] look at it from the point of view of the lay reader—one who is not principally a student of either of those areas of scholarship. In this light, my first observation is that this is not a book to be read from cover to cover…

I went to bed worried about shipwreck nightmares. I had been reading Dead Wake, Erik Larson’s gripping account of the 1915 Lusitania atrocity, in which the Cunard ocean liner, with nearly two thousand passengers and crew aboard, was torpedoed by

I learned two things in personal conversations with Michael Dennis Browne (and probably a lot more, but these two stand out!) for both of which I’m grateful. The first, many years ago, at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, was