Do you find yourself tempted by those self-assessments on the internet? The ones that encourage you to take inventory of your life, your strengths, what’s holding you back, and promise to provide direction? I am inevitably suckered in by these assessments. I faithfully copy them into Word, and spend hours completing them, getting more and …
For some reason when I woke up this morning, I was thinking of the King of Rohan. For those of you only familiar with the movie of The Lord of the Rings, cast your minds back to the scene where Gandalf enters a darkened hall and finds a King huddled on his throne, weighed down …
Have you ever heard that saying that people don’t change, they just become more of who they are? In many ways this is true - my mother at 75 often does things like agreeing to make sweet potatoes for the holiday only to be surprised at 2 pm on Thanksgiving that she does not actually …
One theory about the origins of vampirism is that people created vampire folklore to explain natural occurrences that they didn't understand, among them, the strange sounds they sometimes heard near recent - but not necessarily fresh - graves. [See, for example, Vampires, Burial, and Death.] We know now that these sounds are the natural sounds …
Two monks were walking along the road. They had taken a daylight vow of silence and a continuous vow of chastity that prevented them from even touching a woman. About midday, they reached a muddy river and there, gazing out across the river was a woman in her finest clothing and best shoes. The elder …
