I forgot. Early spring isn’t really a very attractive time of year.

You’d think I’d remember, but I never do. Poets are so full of good words about spring that I get lulled into thinking that a good time will be had by all. And then the weather warms up, the sky goes from concrete white […]

I finished reading “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett, and I was really conflicted about whether to say anything about it or not. It’s a hot-selling fictional treatment of how a 12th century English cathedral might have been built. That could have been a great book … heck, judging by the sales, a lot […]

My current workload allowed for a morning off, and so I’m whooping it up in my usual way — hanging out at the bookstore, perusing books I probably won’t buy. It’s not completely unfair to them, since I do occasionally pick one up. And besides, I’m thoughtful enough to patronize the cafe and always leave […]

Ben Stein, who you may remember as the boring teacher in “Ferris Bueller” but who is really an all-around smart guy, gave a short interview to Money magazine (HERE) and expressed doubt that the economy is really in all that much trouble. But he did think there was a problem a lot worse out there, […]

Just got back from some time in Death Valley. My mom and I were hoping to catch some of the wildflowers. We missed the peak season but still saw many thousands of little purple and yellow blooms littered across the oceans of bubbling ochre sand. Here are some of the more choice images. I was […]

I almost forgot that I got a request for a blog post re-run the other night from Nicodemus. Since I don’t get many of those (or any, come to think of it), I’m happy to oblige. Especially since the information I’m passing along on there is one of my favorite observations about how the Orthodox […]

When I got a dog, I found out that some of my assumptions about dogs were wrong. I thought dogs bounded around all day long, since dog-people regularly remark on the lethargy of cats. Nope, I don’t know what breed of dog those people had, but our Clementine maps her day out in terms of […]

If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner.
– St. Isaac the Syrian

Bread is food for the body and holiness is food for the soul: prayer is food for the intellect.
– St. Evagrios the Solitary

Throughout Lent, we change the hymns we sing after the Gospel reading in Orthros. At other times of the year, we ask for the prayers of the apostles and the Theotokos at that point, asking their help to reflect on the Gospel reading, asking for strength to continue to make our slow way to the […]