Jul 20 2015
My parents are among the few best people I know. Inseparable—it’ll be five decades this year—they found each other and created a warm, safe, and joyful family for their children, and they taught us by their very example everything I value about life: how to love unconditionally and how to show love; that faith in …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-what-my-faith-is-good-for/
May 27 2015
I have begun work on a very interesting, long-term translation project with a historian of literature, who is writing a book about Dostoevsky. For this project, I am translating hundreds of pages of obscure notes and reminiscences about Dostoevsky, some of his own writing, and comparing existing translations. Not only have I re-immersed myself in …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-why-i-brush/
Dec 10 2013
Every Advent, early in the season, my parish has a “wishing tree” standing in the back of the church. It’s a Christmas tree with little tags hanging on it, like ornaments, and each has the first name of a child, gender and age, and a wish that child wrote down for a Christmas present. These …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-indiscriminate-care/
Nov 24 2013
It so happened that I live much of my time at intersections of theistic faiths—but especially in that mine field that is the space between people of religion and people without one. My regular readers know that I grew up atheist, in an atheist state, in a secular Jewish family, that I spent my professional …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-taking-them-seriously/
Nov 11 2013
The Lord is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 27:1 NIV) About six weeks ago, I was brought to the nearest emergency room and, after a night on a stretcher, was admitted to a hospital, where I spent a few days before returning …
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Mar 19 2013
In the Gospel of John, there is a man among the disciples of Jesus who is absent on Easter Sunday, when the risen Lord appears to them to cause the first furor and relief and the awakening of faith. Thomas Didymus is told of this but refuses to believe until he has hard and undeniable …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-seeing-and-believing/
Aug 02 2012
Faith is love and hope. Yes, faith has ingredients – look, and you will see them. I see them because I didn’t have them both for the longest time: the time I was dying of faithlessness. I see them because this is how it came to me: in parts, and assembled into a whole. Because …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-the-ingredients-of-faith/
Jun 05 2012
I speak relatively little about policy. I speak about faith. But there is much happening in the Catholic Church today — much good, but very much strife as well, and the past couple of months my world has been fairly filled with the ongoing conflict between the Vatican and the, let’s say, “modern-thinking” elements of …
Permanent link to this article: http://onmounthoreb.com/on-unregulated-grace/
Apr 15 2013
On optimism, hope, and fish.
April 15, 2013
Between working on a book about Leonard Swidler, writing for the site you are reading right now, family, and discernment, I don’t have much time to write fiction, but on occasion I do it still. In bits. Between breaths, in a sense. During the Triduum, I started a story about Peter. I’ve thought a lot …
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