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…

  Hope Against Despair:The Lessons of Wisdom Have you ever read the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes – also known as Qoheleth, the Hebrew title named after the book’s speaker? Warning: Don’t read it if you’re depressed. It will sink you for sure! One poem embedded in it was actually made famous by the folk singer…

COVID-19 and Hard Times: A Cry From the Heart I was going to write about something topical – like the Federal death penalty! But It’s just hard not to write about our ongoing and seemingly endless confinement and fear of contamination that accompanies all moves outside the home. And now of course, the floating sense…