Our Town: Everyone’s Life, the Glory of Now I expect that almost everyone reading this blog has, at one time or another, actually seen Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. It’s been revived a number of times on Broadway, staged locally in high school gymnasiums across the country, and presented in local venues around the world.…

Life’s Priorities: How the Pandemic and Life Itself Changes Them When I was a graduate student in psychology at Indiana University-Bloomington, there was a sociologist on the faculty named Frank Westie. He carried out a questionnaire study, and to this day I might be able to find the manuscript somewhere in my files. (And my…

The Making of Meaning in Our Lives:Listening for the Rumor of Angels When I was a graduate student in psychology, each year we were required to design an original experiment and test its hypothesis by signing up undergraduates as subjects and “running” them in our laboratories as one would run rats in a cage. But…

The Magic of Music: A Powerful Brain Stimulant Dan Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician, was my go-to guy for all things musical when I was writing my latest book, The Fiction of Our Lives: Creating Our Stories Over a Lifetime. In his book The World in Six Songs (see lead photo), he writes the following…

The Bible: The Book that Reads Us* The title of this little piece is a quote from someone … I don’t remember whom; some scripture scholar or other I ran across while in seminary. And since I write this while it is still Lent, I thought it might be worthwhile to think a little deeper…