I've been quiet on here and I know it. Life gets in the way – work, family, the ordinary grind that doesn't care if you've got something to say. I've also been putting the hours into a book. A publisher had shown interest, enough that I let myself believe it was going somewhere, and they've … Continue reading The Same Address, A Different House
Category: My Words
Thoughts and memories-a-plenty!
Watching the Empty Horizon: The Fisherman’s Widow, Mary Kelly, and Life’s Unforgiving Sea
The Fisherman’s Widow by Hendricus Jacobus Burgers (J.H. Burgers), as published in The Illustrated London News on 5 December 1868. When I first came across the story of that engraving – The Fisherman’s Widow – hanging in Mary Jane Kelly’s poky little room at 13 Miller’s Court, it hit me like a punch to the … Continue reading Watching the Empty Horizon: The Fisherman’s Widow, Mary Kelly, and Life’s Unforgiving Sea
The Swept Place: Why Some Churches Feel Wrong
There’s a peculiar kind of illness that has nothing to do with the body. It creeps in behind the eyes and presses down behind the ribs. It isn’t caused by lack of fresh air or poor hydration or an overlong breakfast. It’s spiritual, or at least — if that’s too much for polite company — … Continue reading The Swept Place: Why Some Churches Feel Wrong
A Geography of God and Other Small Mistakes
after Helen De Borchgrave’s A Journey Into Christian Art There are some errors, those plush little falsehoods, that sit in the drawing room of the modern mind, sipping tea and nodding along to themselves. They’re not lies, exactly. Lies require intention. These are something worse: assumptions so thoroughly digested that they pass for fact, like … Continue reading A Geography of God and Other Small Mistakes
The Lie of the World and the Truth of Easter
There are mornings in this country when the light itself seems to remember something we’ve long since tried to forget. Easter Sunday is one of them. It arrives not with the brashness of Christmas – no gaudy excess, no sentimental avalanche – but with a quiet insistence, like a truth that’s been waiting patiently at … Continue reading The Lie of the World and the Truth of Easter
