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May 2015

May 08, 2015

Sugar, Sugar, Part 2: May 8, 2015

Continued from yesterday. When the editors of Good Letters first asked if they could rerun...

May 07, 2015

Sugar, Sugar, Part 1: June 10, 2011

I’ve written before about my father’s alcoholism. From my adolescence until his death, I spent...

May 06, 2015

My Rainbow Connection, Disconnected

By Chad Thomas Johnston It was a Saturday night and my wife, Becki, wanted to...

May 05, 2015

When We Die

A text from a friend: “What do you believe happens when we die?” She’d recently...

May 04, 2015

Las Madres: Art and Death in the Arizona Desert

"The artist is a beggar because she is empty, waiting to be filled. But the...

April 2015

April 24, 2015

The Soul of the Law

At the beginning of the old Norton Anthology of English Literature (4th Ed.) appeared this...

April 07, 2015

Saving the World: A Reflection on Germanwings Flight 9525

A couple of weeks ago, a German man decided to kill himself. There are thousands...

April 03, 2015

It Is Finished: Christ’s Words from the Cross

When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head,...

March 2015

March 09, 2015

Sojourners in the Darkness

My mother, an uneducated woman in her sixties, said she would ask [his murderer] to...

February 2015

February 19, 2015

After the Killings in Chapel Hill

It’s less than forty-eight hours since Craig Stephen Hicks shot and killed three Muslim students...

February 12, 2015

The Collision

All I saw of the deer at first was the eye: domed, amber and pellucid,...

January 2015

January 29, 2015

The Sublime and Beautiful

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, one of the great aesthetic dichotomies involved the sublime and...

January 26, 2015

Is My Truth Your Truth?

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of...

December 2014

December 22, 2014

In Memoriam

If you live long enough in a place, people will start to die there, but...

December 04, 2014

Angel Trades a Shotgun for a Shovel: An Interview with Terry Scott Taylor, Part 2

Guest Post by Chad Thomas Johnston Photo taken by Phillip G Brown Fine Art Photography Continued...

November 2014

November 26, 2014

Death and the Absurdity of Heaven

I remember, as an undergraduate, reading Spinoza for the first time. I came across the...

November 06, 2014

The Photographic Eye of God

He called himself Weegee The Famous. Weegee, for short. His real name was Arthur Fellig....

October 2014

October 27, 2014

Riding the Waves

My sons argue over Avengers characters. The littlest insists he’s Captain America. Another claims Hawkeye....

September 2014

September 10, 2014

Songs Dead Men Sing

Guest Post by Cathy Warner In the backseat of our minivan I swig an individual...

August 2014

August 22, 2014

How to Talk to the Dying

Since being diagnosed nearly seven years ago with a lethal cancer, I have backed my...

July 2014

July 22, 2014

Lavender and Pennies

Whenever you detect the mysterious smell of lavender in a house, it means a friendly...

July 21, 2014

My Own Desert (Tortoise) Father

I didn’t spend enough time with Oscar this summer. For forty years I've believed time...

July 17, 2014

Ovarian Cancer and a Circumcised Heart

Circumcise therefore the thickness about your hearts. —Deuteronomy 10:16 Her dying and death circumcised...

July 08, 2014

Quitting the Cancer Battle

I am not a hero. After my last post, some readers wanted to know how...

June 2014

June 24, 2014

Emily Dickinson Erased

Don’t go to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. There isn’t anything there. Not her...

June 18, 2014

The Mercy of Sickness before Death

Just so you understand: I am dying. I am in the end stage of metastatic...

May 2014

May 16, 2014

Avoiding the Mirror

Guest post by Cathy Warner I have circled around this story several times, trying to...

December 2013

December 24, 2013

The Cave of the Heart

Not long ago a young man announced on a video chat site that he intended...

December 13, 2013

An Almost Human Happiness

A typical plot complication on reality shows involves the unexpected twist, a challenge that the...

November 2013

November 07, 2013

Daniel Amos’s “Dig Here Said the Angel”

Dedicated to Billy Corgan, who challenged Christians to “make better music” and branch out beyond...