While I’m certainly no professional critic, I read dozens of books—both fiction and nonfiction—each year, so I’ve piled up plenty of reading experience. This week let’s take a break from some of the more spiritual themes and have some bookworm fun. What are your favorite first lines of fiction, any genre? After a quick perusal…
While there may be nothing new under the sun, everything changes “under the sea.” (Cue the theme song from The Little Mermaid…) I grew up near the rocky coast of Maine, on the amazing Bay of Fundy which boasts the world’s highest tides. And while it’s not especially appealing for sunbathing, surfing, or swimming (unless…
Our lives add up to threescore and ten—seventy years to invest—plus yapa, with good health and strength (Psalm 90:10). The extra decade of life that some are blessed with beyond the average is like the few extra grams of produce they occasionally give you at the Chilean open-air markets. When weighing out potatoes, it’s hard…
“Developing a thinking culture”—that’s what the sign outside the school said, a couple of years ago when we were house-hunting in the port city where we now live. Wow, that’s kind of a novelty, I reflected. A definite novelty in a culture that frequently doesn’t read beyond the local newspapers—and even that’s rare now, replaced…
My days are numbered. No, I haven’t been diagnosed with a terminal illness, given so many months to put my affairs in order. But reading in Psalm 90, verse 10, I learn that my life expectancy is somewhere around threescore and ten [(3 x 20) + 10 = 70] or seventy years. I never was…