An honest Christmas can be a tricky thing to excavate, buried under so many distractions constantly trying to take the focus off of Christ’s birth. Even for the seasoned Christian, between the neighborhood nativities, light shows, caroling, potlucks, and church services, it’s easy to let the season become just another…

It’s probably fair to say that a great many things are not as they seem… or, perhaps more specifically, they are often a function of what they seem. At the risk of briefly revisiting painful high school memories, a mathematical function is the formulation of a set of variables in…

Perhaps you find it helpful, as I do, to intentionally fit life’s pieces together from year to year so that we aren’t later overcome with a summary sense of meaninglessness when confronted by a seemingly senseless series of circumstances. …

The utility of history is that, most fundamentally, it is the story of you, or, at the very least, the story of billions of beings not so very different from you. Consequently, the most simultaneously horrifying and humbling insight to be found in the cumulative chronicles of our past is…

This past season saw the culmination of my graduate studies, and, very likely, the end of my collegiate career. The graduation ceremony itself was preceded by the strenuousness of finals, and succeeded by all the usual pomp and circumstance associated with the consummation of the academic tradition. Then, no sooner…

One of our most basic magnetisms, in some ways even more fundamental than the drive for mere survival, is our desire for community. A powerful social stigma is attached to solitude, rooted in the idea that the more people we surround ourselves with, the healthier we are mentally and the…

The room went completely dark. That’s how she knew the time had come. Disparate spotlights illuminated the scattered potential of a life-long dream now stretched out on the mat before her. Ever since she was old enough to direct her attention and perform her own first awkward somersault, she had…

Back in early 2020, when it became apparent that this “novel” Coronavirus thing would come to disproportionately dominate the social landscape for the foreseeable future, I remember thinking rather simplistically, Finally! Here was something challenging to be overcome — perhaps even the defining feature of the decade — for better…

We occupy a unique niche in creation to be sure. It isn’t exactly self-evident what we are doing here, but, in addition to that by no means insignificant dilemma, we are also constantly in the process of dying. Although those two details may seem unrelated, their simultaneous symbiosis demands that…