• Nonfiction

    Sacred Reading

    If someone had mentioned “sacred reading” to me before this week, I would have assumed they meant a literary genre — a category of books focused on sacred topics. But since delving into…

  • Education

    What if…

    …I didn’t home school? Usually, the question occurs to me as a mark of my inadequacy. I ask it as an anxious acknowledgment of what my children are missing. “They would have more…

  • Christianity,  Nonfiction

    Prophetic Untimeliness

    In Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (2009), Os Guinness explores the fascination with relevance that permeates evangelicalism, diagnosing it as a result of our uncritical immersion in our current…

  • Essays

    Not subject

    The very first essay I read by Wendell Berry was “The Rise,” from his collection The Long-Legged House. It describes a canoe ride on the Kentucky River during one of its winter rises.…

  • Miscellany

    Those who mourn

    “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The words went through my mind as I drove through Owego for the first time since the flood last Wednesday. Everyone uses the…

  • Nature Study

    Nature Notes: Recent Birds

    Here are some new-to-us birds we’ve seen lately. I snapped this photo in the back yard. “It looks like a catbird, but brown,” I mused. My ten-year-old came to look at the picture.…

  • Nature Study

    Nature Notes: Mystery Solved

    Caractacus the mystery caterpillar has revealed his true identity at last. As a caterpillar, he puzzled us by varying the usual coloration of a monarch: But in every other respect he acted like…