My friend Richard and I were talking about our lives. We were talking about being better stewards of our time and our attention. You know the conversation. You’ve had it too. He said, “It’s not so much the tyranny of the urgent. It’s the tyranny of the distracting.” The Tyranny of the Urgent is an […]

A lathe spins. More accurately, a lathe makes wood spin. You put a chunk of wood between points. While the wood spins, knives cut. They cut away perfectly good wood, leaving a pile of chips on the floor, and a baseball bat or a chair leg or a table pedestal or a stair baluster on […]

Hope and I took the exit indicated by the GPS: “At the end of the road, turn left.” We stopped at the light and looked around. All the stores had writing in Chinese. We were in Chinatown in Chicago. The last time I visited was when I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember much […]

(This first appeared April 23, 2009.) We know little about Simon the Zealot. I mean, we can read about the Zealots as a political movement in first century CE Israel. We can read about their desire to throw Rome out, to take Israel back. But we know little about him other than that he is […]