"Evangelicals were no longer caricatures or abstractions. I learned to interpret their metaphors and read their body language. From personal, day-to-day experience I observed what John Green at the University of Akron has discerned from extensive research: evangelicals were not monolithic nor were they, as The Washington Post infamously characterized them, “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
"The Laughter of the Philosophers" (First Things)
"What I gleaned from these pages, in part, is that for Kierkegaard the roots of the comic lie in the inherent contradictoriness of human nature: soul and body, freedom and necessity, the angelic and the bestial, eternity and temporality, and so on. Moreover, I learned how profound a difference Kierkegaard saw between genuine humor and mere irony. That is to say, irony can certainly recognize that the incongruities that throng human experience typically frustrate the quest for truth; but, having seen as much, irony is then impotent to do anything more than unveil failure and vanquish pretense. Humor, on the other hand, is born from an altogether higher recognition: that tragic contradiction is not absolute, that finitude is not only pain and folly, and that the absurdity of our human contradictions can even be a cause for joy."
"Buyer's Remorse" (Wilson Quarterly)
"...a good deal has been written about materialism, and magazines such as Real Simple (filled with advertising) have sprung up to combat it. But few of us would argue that we’ve become any less consumed with consuming; the latest magazine sensation, after all, is Lucky, which dispenses with all the editorial folderol and devotes itself entirely to offering readers things they can buy."
"Then, too, there’s a personal price to be paid for affluence: Because we’re so busy pursuing our individual fortunes, we endure a dizzying rate of change and weakened community and family ties."
"As if to dramatize Puritan ambivalence about wealth, New England later produced a pair of influential nonconformists, Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–99) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), whose work embodies sharply contrasting visions of material wealth; for better or worse, we’ve learned from both of them."
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