A proper respect for nature means that you can’t pollute the air, poison the rivers and chop down the forests indiscriminately without suffering greatly.
The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.
Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.
Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth – those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.
Good and productive labor is valuable, and it doesn’t mean you have to have a fancy job description. You don’t have to become rich. You can be ordinary. Happiness lies there. Do good work, create good work for others.
My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.
Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.
Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.
To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.
I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.
In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government – as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance – people feel powerless.
I have written about some truly great writers – John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.