We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Browse Topics
Christianity
The Dog-Eared Page
The Good Samaritan
from The Gospel Of Luke
Once a certain scribe stood up and said, “Rabbi, what must I do to gain eternal life?”
June 2017
Readers Write
Leaps Of Faith
An immigrant’s decision, a gambler’s dilemma, a daughter’s grief
March 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Why Religion Endures
On a spectrum of postures toward religious faith that runs from organized hostility to muffled contempt to resigned forbearance to never-crosses-my-mind indifference to against-my-better-judgment curiosity to serious interest to fellow-traveling to heartfelt engagement to missionary fervor, where do you place yourself, and how does that dispose you to others’ positions?
March 2016
The Sun Interview
Embracing Ignorance
Jack Miles On His Path From Belief To Disbelief And Back
We’re all stuck with ignorance as we move from quandary to quandary. What I want to do is make a case for religion as one of the means to cope with this irremediable human condition.
March 2016
Quotations
Sunbeams
March 2016Man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. . . . This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.
Quotations
Sunbeams
That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.April 2012
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
A Grief Observed
I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation (“You, Madam, to the right — you, Sir, to the left”) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.
October 2015The Dog-Eared Page
Houses Of The Spirit
When I asked my six-year-old son, Dev, why he wanted to go to church for the first time that Sunday morning, he gave perhaps the only answer that could have nudged me into folding my newspaper and moving toward some faith I’d never bothered with before. He wanted to go, he said, “to see if God’s there.”
July 2015The Sun Interview
The Mystic And The Warrior
Radical Priest Matthew Fox On Loving And Defending Our World
The mystic in us is the lover. The mystic says yes. But the prophet in us is the warrior, and the warrior says, “No, this is unjust. No, this is suffering that we can work to relieve.” That’s the rhythm of the mystic and the prophet, the lover and the warrior. It’s not enough to be one or the other.
July 2015
Poetry
Selected Poems
— from “Storm On Galilee” | What’s instructive is not / that he walked on water / but that he seemed so unharassed / by the possibility of complete / and utter catastrophe.
May 2015
Subscribe & SaveSAVE 52%
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today