Category: Uncategorized

Emotional isolation is traumatizing for human beings. You’re not wired for it; it’s a danger cue for your nervous system. — Dr. Sue Johnson The issue in intimate relationships, partnerships, marriages that are in distress, says Dr. Sue Johnson, is not that there is conflict. It’s that the conflict is occurring in a milieu of…

Healthy eating can be distilled to one simple rule— wilderness survival is simple, love can be distilled to one simple rule— Any time I write a man into a play as the protagonist’s romantic partner, he is always lucid, clear, and simple—simplicity not as a synonym for unintelligent, but for pure. Purity of heart, Augustine…

Growing up, I was taught to scoff at the explanation of the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand that insists that Jesus’ “true miracle was getting people to share.” On the surface, this explanation seems like a flattening of the miraculous to some sentimental platitude. If it’s an exegesis that is part of…

I ate juicy blackberries at work today as part of my breakfast. They were plump, large-as-my-thumbs, and sweet but ultimately unsatisfying. I remembered what blackberries from the brambles in our backyard tasted like in my childhood. They were crisper, tangier, they were smaller and less genetically enhanced, like the woman in front of me in…

Commodity fetishism is not simply an obsession with things. It is not materialism, but rather a kind of dematerialization. When use takes a back seat to exchange, commodities become vehicles for a flight into transcendence. Idolatry is embedded in whole economic and social and political systems that hold us in thrall. In an unjust system,…

Tell me a story, you said—you’re a writer: Write me something beautiful. I looked right down through your wine-dark pupils into the milky night sky of your soul. I began to write out this story on your spine, tracing hieroglyphics on your neck, invisible ink of dead skin cells from my fingertips. Once upon a…

As a Christian, I reject the two assumptions found in conventional economics: scarcity (to the contrary, God has created a world of abundance) and rational, self-seeking, utility-maximizing humanism (a competitive conception of human nature that I believe traduces our creation in the image and likeness of God). Eugene McCarraher, The Nation Bless us oh Lord…

I think the largest lie that we can be sold is that our woundedness weakens our ability to love. A few caveats: our pasts are not, well—past. They live in our hearts, in our minds, in our present fears, in our patterns of being, and in our habits of relationship. They shape our responses to…

Red hot pokers, Self-righteous spitfires, Steaming wounded vindication, Pull chord to stop stop Stop Alighting from bus to the dark, From victim to partner From judge to redeemed From snarl to knot From flight or fight to walk together— Snow falls, light flakes, Covering scarlet sins of rage That melt and do not stick To…