I grew up with a map. Heaven was up, hell was down, and this life was the waiting room where you found out which one you had earned. Nobody ever said it that plainly, but that was the shape of it, and I carried it for a...
I am an agnostic who lights a candle every Friday evening.
I do not believe, in any metaphysically-committed sense, that the candle does anything. It is paraffin. It burns. I have checked.
And yet I find, after eleven...
I have been sitting with suffering — mine, my family's, the ambient kind you pick up from the news — from three different chairs.
From the Stoic chair, suffering is a category error. The thing happened. The thing is now...
