The Fourth Wall

Baby Names Book There would seem to be a basic logic about the way relationships work that suggests the more opposite you are, the better it works.  Nothing about the human condition can be reduced to an axiom, but the wisdom in this case does seem to be conventional.  Yin and Yang.  North and South…

Lottery Ticket We open our Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  That was a holiday shakeup for me when I got married.  My family of origin opened presents on Christmas eve.   The compromise that has elbowed its way into our tradition is a larger extended family gathering that includes a White Elephant gift exchange on…

Headstones Three days before Thanksgiving our family gathered for an occasion of mild emotional stress.  Crouton the hamster died of complications due to something mysterious.  The girls, who were the hamster’s legal guardian in the sovereign nation of the Carney family household, reported that Crouton displayed cold-like symptoms the day before.  I’m suspicious of this…

There’s a pumpkin sitting next to my yard waste bin that’s been there since late fall. It greets me every evening when I arrive home.  It’s Roy’s.  That is, it was the pumpkin that we purchased for him that he failed to carve.  On the evening that we carved pumpkins, an evening of cherished family…

This article first appeared on Good Faith Media. I’m working on paying attention to what I pay attention to.  Lately, I’ve wondered why we often find the most visceral versions of ourselves appear in the social media comments section. Why, in the anonymity offered through these platforms, do we permit instincts to govern our behaviors…

This article first appeared on Good Faith Media on February 4th, 2025. The long unredacted article can be found below. My father pastored a small town non-denominational church in northern Wisconsin.  In the 1990s, Tomahawk’s economic existence consisted of two paper mills and a Harley-Davidson plant.  I’ve frequently described my father’s parishioners as Flannery O’Conner…

This post originally appeared on Good Faith Media on 1/24/25. This the full version before it was edited. Stewarding Pathos: Mariann Edgard Budde’s Rhetoric Lesson  As I settled into my couch on Tuesday evening (1/21/25) I opened Facebook to discover what the cultural zeitgeist might hurl at me on President Trump’s first full day in…

This story originally appeared on Good Faith Media. This version is the full version that was not redacted for editorial/length purposes. Giséle Pelicot  A few weeks ago, the harrowing trial of Giséle Pelicot’s abusers concluded.  There are two ways to describe it.  Giséle was the object of unimaginable abuse.  Giséle is a feminist icon who…

First published with Good Faith Media Ostensibly, Duke Divinity theology professor emeritus Stanley Hauerwas once said, “A Christian could only ever run for public office one time. If their platform reflected the teachings of Jesus, they’d never get elected again.”  “Ostensibly” is a shaky way to begin an article. But as a Waco, Texas resident…

I once described Christian Wiman’s work as a reach for the ineffable. I sometimes wonder if he’d be annoyed by that description, but if there’s one thing that works about it, it is that ineffable implies that the object in question can’t be described and also that if one were to attempt, language, and more…