The Christmas Ham

Not a true story By Amber Noel I’m in the middle of telling this really funny long-form joke, and I’ve just served up my famous Christmas ham, and we’re all snacking festively and sipping hot drinks, and I’... Read More...

Jim Thompson and the Killer Inside Us All

We prefer to think that evil is something “bad people” do, and that these bad people are easily recognizable. We see a mug shot on the news and say “Oh, he looks like a child molester, like a mass shooter, like a serial killer, like a bad person. Or as often as not today we think of evil as that perpetrated only by our political opposites. We describe such people as “inhuman” or “deplorable”, descriptors that gives us the relief of distance. The guise evil wears is, of course, always that of someone else.

The Church Isn’t Fiction

Keep in contact with real things — the actual people around you, the actual place where you live, the actual God who underpins and suffuses all — and you’ll be inoculated against relativism.

The Loose Ends of Life

For Rose Macaulay in The Towers of Trebizond, a story of moral seriousness couldn’t afford to tie up everything neatly.