Books

I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world. If that sounds like woo-woo nonsense, it feels even mor

“If you want him to move toward you,” I continued, “you need to move away from him and create some space for longing. I don’t think Paul ever gets a chance to miss you. You’re always pursuing him, and he is turning away to create space. If you would create some space, he would have some space to long for you in, and then he would pursue you.”

Mama’s love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before.

When asked how he survived the horrors of the Holocaust, renowned Austrian psychiatrist (and my personal hero) Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and freedom.” The experience of Frankl, who lost everything and everyone he loved in t

Many of us form profound attachments when we read. Sometimes we attach ourselves to characters, imagining them as our friends or lovers or most profound enemies; sometimes a book’s author draws us, perhaps because of a persona he or she projects, perhaps—especially if we are writers or would-be writers ourselves—because we admire and envy.

God intended the family to be an incubator in which we grow the maturity, tools, and abilities we need. Once the incubator has done its job, then, it’s supposed to encourage the young adult to leave the nest and connect to the outside world (Gen. 2:24), to establish a spiritual and emotional family system on one’s own. The adult is free to do whate

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly t