Pain explains a great deal of human conduct, but the fear of pain even more.

God lives in the peaks and valleys, the jarring transitions, not in the mundane, the safe, the smooth, or the repetitive. But that means there must be at least a certain amount of dissonance. Without...

I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice,” he told me, “You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief…

I’ve seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I’ve seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of...

Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance–a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late–and the real...