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Over the past year as we’ve been adapting to the new language of the liturgy, I’ve found myself thinking that this would have been a good point for me to have converted to Catholicism since the self-consciousness of not knowing the responses as well as those next to me in the pews would be ameliorated […]

Tomorrow is my birthday so today I did the life expectancy calculator at  http://calculator.livingto100.com/calculator This year, I was told I will live to 87, a year less than last year’s calculation, I think largely in consequence of my lack of good exercise. Apparently, I could add 4.5 years to my life by exercising more.

There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles. Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.

In today’s e-mail. I’ve chosen not to identify the online bookstore behind these recommendations. They’ve suffered enough.

I found the notion of a religion designed to humble the proud thrilling. I also loved the Quran’s habit of the question—“Do you not understand?” (2:44); “Have you not seen?” (31:20)—despite the fact, because of the fact, that these questions were rarely answered. Stephen Prothero, God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.

Never losing the drive to get them ready for the cold hard world that they will someday attempt to join and that will, in the end reject them. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.

Some months ago, I stashed away a link to An Abduction in Instapaper and finally got to reading it last week. I was drawn into the story immediately. Hadley writes in a wonderful voice, giving the opening almost the feel of non-fiction: Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened […]

He had read somewhere once that different kinds of smiles came from different parts of the brain, that a genuine smile, a smile of real pleasure, came from one site, and a polite smile, a smile only intended to signal pleasure, came from another. This smile came from there, that other part. Susan Miller, The Lake Shore Limited.

The key justification for the widespread anti-gay stance of many Christians today is scriptural. It’s hard to get past the scriptural prohibitions on homosexuality, even if we were to discard the Old Testament texts as having been superseded by the new covenant, there are still the passages in the Pauline epistles. So given this, then […]