Jonathan Simcoe

The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion.

We can reclaim the household as the fundamental unit of personhood, the place where we all are best known and cared for.

We hear of a lingering kingdom, in the extreme North-west more or less in what was left in the old lands of The Silmarillion, under Gilgalad; and of other settlements, such as Imladris (Rivendell) near Elrond; and a great one at Eregion at the Western feet of the Misty Mountains, adjacent to the Mines of Moria, the major realm of the Dwarves in the

The wayward son is not defined by his prodigality but by the welcome of a father who never stopped looking, who is ever scanning the distance, and who runs to gather him up in an embrace. God is not tapping his foot judgmentally inside the door as you sneak in, crawling over the threshold in shame. He’s the father running toward you, losing his san

And Gandalf coming looked at it, and said: ‘Verily this is a sapling of the line of Nimloth the fair; and that was a seedling of Galathilion, and that a fruit of Telperion of many names, Eldest of Trees.

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

Addiction, she says, “is always a story that has already been told, because it inevitably repeats itself, because it grinds down—ultimately, for everyone—to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.”

In August 2013, I happened upon a paper titled “The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless,” by Ronald Hamilton, which appeared to solve the conundrum. Hamilton’s essay, posted online, presented hitherto unknown evidence that the wild potato plant was in fact highly toxic, contrary to the assurances of Treadwell, Clausen, and app

He imagines that nature is beyond him. Beyond his understanding. Beyond his control. Maybe he prays to nature, to the fertility of the forest that provides for him. He prays because he knows he doesn’t control it. He’s at the mercy of it.