Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram! I think and talk and write a lot about culture, understood as the complex of ideas, symbols, customs, creations, activities, beliefs, and structures that characterize a particular community or heritage. Here in the U.S., people tend to be somewhat familiar with …
Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram! My friend Ted Berger passed away on Thursday at age 86. There will be too many tributes to count, I am certain, no doubt more eloquent than my own yet equally heartfelt. I want to offer a very condensed bio in …
JANUARY SALE! Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off! I took part recently in a large online convocation about the future of the arts in this country. The 30 or so prominent individuals who conceived and organized it …
A year before Trump was first inaugurated in 2017 was the last time I felt motivated to quote Marx. Now I just can’t help quoting myself quoting him: “History repeats itself,” wrote Karl Marx in 1852, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” He was referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon. One hundred …
I have a thing for old black and white movies. Especially in anxious times, they slow me down and calm me. I think it has to do with telling a single story rather than flooding viewers with a barrage of plotlines, images, and settings. It almost feels as if someone is reading to me. I …
A few days ago I stumbled on a startling truth I want to share with you. Do you know the concept of “mirror worlds?” It has a few meanings. The one I’m using describes a parallel dimension that mirrors the world as we know it, but everything important has been flipped, monsters instead of mates, …
In 2018, the egregious Trump strategist Steve Bannon—erstwhile investment banker, Hollywood executive producer, and cofounder of Breitbart News—was interviewed by the writer Michael Lewis, who inquired about the Trumpists’ strategy to vanquish the Democrats. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to …
We watched the three-part documentary Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity on Amazon. I highly recommend it. Shorter, who passed away last spring at 90 years of age, was imagination and creativity personified. The film illustrates a point I’ve made countless times in my writing and speaking, that many people vastly underestimate the degree to which young …
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan “The law of unintended consequences is never broken.” I thought I would find many citations when I googled this, but since I found none, I’ll attribute it to myself. Quite a few people I know have been expressing …
I’d never heard the term “moral injury” until I read about it last week in a New York Times article about a crisis among doctors precipitated by the accelerating treatment of healthcare as a privilege rather than a right, a profit center rather than a social good. (This phenomenon rhymes with much I’ve written about …