Tag Archives: Travel
Home and Abroad for Christmas
For those of us who share — or try to share — Athanasius’s faith in the Incarnation of the Word, the world on Christmas Day can look like a highly charged place. If God’s action is not remote and distant, or localized in a special place, but abroad in the universe through the mysterious union of God and humanity, the whole crazy, kitschy apparatus of Christmas becomes a little easier to appreciate.
Memory’s Neighborhoods
I wrote about the different ways, and places, we’ve chosen to commemorate the Civil War and its aftermath for the Washington Post: The truth is that there is a great deal of history we have chosen, or allowed ourselves, to forget. The Fort Pillow garrison, I learned, consisted not only of whites and former slaves […]
My Back Pages: The Guy Who Came Into the Cold
(I wrote this for The National in Abu Dhabi in February, 2009. It is no longer extant on their site, so I am posting it here) Just over a hundred years ago my father’s family settled in the town of Luck in northern Wisconsin. Winter descends there in October or November and lingers until April […]
Chicago Diarist: Nowhere to Lay His Head
(I wrote this in June 2010) The storms on Wednesday night were very intense out here. We lost power before 6 p.m. After the cell passed, we called ComEd for an estimate of its return. The hour came and went, and so we went to a hotel. A baby girl in our care needed a […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 