As the days shorten and the dark hours stretch, every impulse in me is to slow down, get under a blanket and stay there till spring. In a 2020 piece for The Atlantic exploring the possibility of human hibernation, James Hamblin wrote that as the winter months come upon us, “Maybe our minds and…

It rained one morning this week. I moved back to Texas last year, in part for the rainstorms. Here, it rains decisively, gloriously, like it really means it. It explodes, pounds, roars, thunders and then, suddenly, moves on. I stepped on my back porch, not wanting to miss the show. I sat, silent…

The past two years blur in my mind into a reel of fuzzy memories, stresses and changes, Covid alert levels, protests, violence, political animosity, Twitter fights, masks and yard signs. And that’s just what happened in the wider world. In my own life, there was a cross-country move, the birth of a…

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. I went to a fairly conservative evangelical seminary (founded by Billy Graham himself),…

This summer, on a lark, I took a course on poetry geared toward Christian leaders. Twelve of us met over Zoom to read poems and discuss the intersection of our faith, vocations and poetry. We compared George Herbert’s “Prayer” to Christian Wiman’s “Prayer.” We discussed Langston Hughes’s “Island…