Many new parents keep the ink and skin prints of their infant child’s hands and feet. Often, in some craft project in school or scouts or Sunday school, hands are captured in plaster, with “happy mother’s day” scratched above in a font named “indecipherable.” I understand. We probably have one or the other around, too. […]

(First published December 5, 2013) Q: Did anything give you chills when writing A Great Work? That’s a really odd question. Except that I have an answer. I was looking at chapter 8 of the book of Nehemiah. It’s the one where Ezra starts reading the book of the Law, and the Levites start translating […]

Sheepscot Bay is just off the Maine coast. It’s part of the Atlantic Ocean and is much too large for an iPhone camera to contain. And yet every day, at beaches like this, we pull out our phones and cameras. We do our best to capture the sounds, the images, the perspective, the immensity, the […]

In the fall of 1982, I was in grad school in Texas. Nancy and I had gotten engaged in July, and I left for school in August. We had only started dating in early July and our first date was after we had decided to get married on a walk in late June, so we […]