My son has just left home. He is eight and reads now. Only his eyes move, shuttling across the pages, left to right, left to right, like footsteps into another world. We are no longer his primary information source. We no longer directly control the narrative or sift the flow

“All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him,

I carry a black semiautomatic rifle in my pickup these days, tucked between the center console and the driver’s side seat, the muzzle resting on the floor near the gas pedal. A powerful flashlight and a green laser sight are clamped on a picatinny rail under the barrel. A

I have been up nights about what this Jesus the son of God said, and what we’ve gotten ourselves into. There are people who would put Him away by having Him be another itinerant revolutionary, one of many other Jewish preachers, only another nice man with a message of

A disturbing number of people fall for strange radicalisms that derail them from a normal productive life. Weird health fads that are actually money schemes preying on gullible individuals. Illogical conspiracies so complex that the possibility of them is off the charts. Religious dogmas that obscure the simple truth and

The house we live in was probably old already when Grandfather was young. Five-foot-tall field stone basement walls support thirty-foot hand-hewn beams which in turn support the rest of the house. The studs in the wall indicate a time when a two by four actually measured two inches by four

The box with two tiny Jetpacks that arrived from Verizon was supposed to be just what I needed to upgrade my office system to unlimited data. As humans are so prone to do, I had bitten for the offer before I had digested it, instead of digesting first and biting

One man’s opinion of the use of devices and the devices that use us. It was a hot day in July, and the heat was shimmering off the asphalt when we drove by the steakhouse. Eight citizens stood outside, staring at their hands as though wondering what had gone

by Mahlon Zehr As I write, Thanksgiving Day remains more memory than anticipation. We haven’t started planning for this year’s Thanksgiving yet, but gratitude is on my mind, because I was reading to the children last night about the Israelites and their perpetual grumbling. People died because they

Every avid reader is guilty at times of reading without digesting, but every addicted reader will also at times come across a sentence or paragraph which causes him to backtrack and contemplate deeply what he just read. The latter scenario played itself out for me when I read John Krakauer’