This isn’t a story that creeps like fog, but a story that strikes like a thrown stone. Though Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery manages both. It begins with a sky of perfect summer blue, as though God Himself had painted it fresh for a village fête, and ends with Tessie Hutchinson screaming under a rain of … Continue reading The Lottery: A Sermon in Sunlight
Month: December 2025
Sunset Over the Pennines
There are evenings when the world seems to exhale — slowly, like an old scholar closing a book he’s read a thousand times and loved each time a little differently. Tonight, the sun slipped behind the Pennines with the poise of a fading monarch, leaving behind a trembling rim of gold as though reluctant to … Continue reading Sunset Over the Pennines
The Legion in the Swine: A Short Sermon on Empty Souls and Borrowed Flesh
Some passages in Scripture read like thunder: sharp crack, sudden light, then a silence in which something ancient vibrates in the bones. The story of the Gadarene demoniac is one of them. A naked man shrieking among the tombs; chains snapped like wet wool; a village too afraid to bury its dead without one eye … Continue reading The Legion in the Swine: A Short Sermon on Empty Souls and Borrowed Flesh
All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
Alan Bennett has never quite been my usual flavour — a bit too cardigan-and-cucumber-sandwich for my tastes. And yet All Day on the Sands, this modest, meandering little play, has fastened itself to me like damp sand between the toes. I suspect it’s because these were precisely the sort of ‘holidays’ we had when I … Continue reading All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
The Laughing Maw: A Fool, His Blind Eye, and the Human Condition
Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (attributed), The Laughing Fool, c.1500–1510. Oil on panel. Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. In art some faces smile, and some rupture. Faces that split open into something older than laughter and far more dangerous. The Laughing Fool belongs among these ruptures. He greets the viewer not with the civility of portraiture but with … Continue reading The Laughing Maw: A Fool, His Blind Eye, and the Human Condition
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