Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I got to teach Episcopal Sunday school last week, a rare privilege, and it was in a New York church so the kids had plenty to say. Teenagers, and if you expect them to sit in rapt silence as you tick off points of theology, you’re in the wrong place. They made plenty of noise, […]
Read MoreThe sudden rise of Mike Huckabee in the Republican jousts is a cool plot turn, one that makes you lean forward and turn up the sound. An amiable, well-spoken Southern conservative with a Gomer Pyle face challenging the teeth-baring Giuliani and the sleek Romney. You watch him field questions for a few minutes and the […]
Read MoreI sit in wonderment at the story of W. Lance Anderson, the president of NovaStar Financial in Kansas City, who while handing out subprime mortgages to any applicant wearing shoes and a shirt managed to sink the company’s stock from $40 in June to $1.72. This is a man who earned $1.7 million in salary […]
Read MoreA chill gray day under lowering skies and I left home without my cell phone and didn’t go back for it — thought, Naw, I’ll just use a pay phone if necessary — and felt awfully lost without it for the next 24 hours. The problem with pay phones is that you have to stand […]
Read MoreI was all set to be a raven for Halloween and don a long black cape and a beak and feathery wristlets, but I got stuck that afternoon at the neurologist’s who I’d gone to see about chronic headaches and I sat in his waiting room reading old Peoples until finally he put me through […]
Read MoreBright chill October days of sweet dry smells, smoke and apples and pigskin, memories of touch football games on grassy fields strewn with dry leaves. “You go deep,” our QB said, thinking that a big lanky kid like me must be a good receiver, so I galloped deep looking back over my shoulder, but I […]
Read MoreThere is a natural division of labor in politics: The Republicans fuss about the sanctity of marriage and getting God back in the schools and the Democrats about health care and the $8 billion that vanished in Iraq, and so far the Republicans are doing a better job. God is in the schools, the same […]
Read MoreIn Baltimore with friends Sunday morning, a splendid fall day under blue skies, we marched off to the nearest church and found ourselves in an old brownstone temple of 1852, wooden box pews, stained glass on all sides, old tiled floor, for a high Anglican-Catholic Mass, a troop of choristers in white, altar boys, bearded […]
Read MoreIt was a big week, what with Stanford beating USC in football, of all things, and with a second-string quarterback starting his first college game, and on the same day political riots in Bern complete with rock throwing and tear gas — the Swiss! Acting up in the streets! — and on the very same […]
Read MoreSitting in Cleveland, waiting for a plane, I reached in my pocket for scrap paper to write a phone number on and found the epistle for last Sunday. St. Paul said, “As for those who in the present day are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty […]
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