Enthralled and Falling in Love; Disenthralled: What’s That?¹ I imagine that most of us, at one time or another – be it a first puppy love, maybe a crush on that teenage heartthrob, possibly your spouse and longtime lover – most of us have been enthralled with someone. Fascinated, maybe writing their name over and…

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.…

Art from Kate Murphy’s op-ed in The New York Times 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…

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.…

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…

  Ecclesiastes 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…

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…

  It’s a Wonderful Life: Shaping Each Other for Good, and Be Grateful Home alone Christmas week, David and I again observed the annual ritual of watching both “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart and Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” So there we were, sitting in our chairs by the fire watching these two venerable…

Stress-Testing the System: Democracy and Our Human Lives Well, it looks like the 2020 presidential election season is limping to a close. And so far, I guess we are the winners! On Nov. 25, Alexander Burns makes the following observation on page one of The New York Times: “As President Trump’s efforts to overturn the…