Spare the rod and spoil the Memorial Day rotisserie.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches–living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses–are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

My children are monsters, Kiro thought. And I am responsible. Perhaps if I had read them the haikus of Basho when they were little instead of that American manifesto of high-pressure sales, Green Eggs and...

Alice is fictional. This isn’t.

…After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise...

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

Home is what we know we ought to want but can’t really take. America is not so much a home for anyone as a universal dream of home, a wish whose attraction depends upon its...

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why...

Thank God for immigrants. They’re the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are “evolving” past. I don’t know what they’re saying, but...

Christianity now is in crisis, and a large part because people have marketed it as a religion of good people getting better, when in fact it is religion a bad people coping with their failure...

[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that...

The races are like America’s children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad’s favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught...

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the...

American dream,a spouse,a brace of children,cuddly pets,coffee-table books,rusted skeleton keys,plastic cauliflower bags,business cards of business-card printers,a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day,all echoes and loneliness.

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our...

There’s no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed — and pretty dramatically — is the growing...

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people...

American culture at large has failed working mothers.

America isn’t breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn’t dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn’t triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren’t at each other’s throats. They’re living more interdependently...

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose,...

When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther’s man country’s hero a tyrant, a dictator...

The only crime is pride.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

I love Las Vegas because it’s the one city less classy than Los Angeles.

A nation forgetting its own laughter is in a sad state of affairs

Los Angeles is a city made up of refugees from better cities.

But show business has always been like that – any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be...

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, “the ‘weightlessness’ of contemporary belief in God is a reality…for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege...

Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That’s just geography and politics. We’re a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and...