My survey results: You’re unique! Recently I conducted a faith survey of my readers. I asked four questions about your faith. I had fun compiling all the answers I received. How were you brought up? While the whole world’s population is 32% Christian and 0.2% Jewish, most of you — 79% — were brought up in some sort of Christian…

A Spirited send-up of A Christmas Carol. I had the pleasure yesterday of seeing the new musical comedy Spirited, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, which takes the familiar Dickens classic and twists it upside-down and backward into a surprising concoction of joyful hilarity and pathos. Reynolds plays the “unredeemable” Clint Briggs whom Ferrell — as the…

I didn’t have a clue. When I first found out I was pregnant, I felt utterly unprepared. I was a grown woman at 37, but I still didn’t think I had what it takes to be a parent. …

An upgrade for Michelangelo. I laugh out loud every single time I see this Adam-and-God meme. I grew up with the idea that we’re born separate from God. Whenever I contemplated that, I would picture Michelangelo’s painting, because the connection between God and man is clearly just barely out of reach. But what if…

“Everything will not be okay.” That’s actually what the sign says — plastered prominently in the window of the downtown Republican Party Headquarters in the city I live in. I don’t know if this contemptuous slogan is being spread just in my location, or across the country — but it certainly does reveal the disturbing…

An angelic visit. Crying bitterly, I was missing the boyfriend who’d left me and moved 2000 miles away. It was very late but I couldn’t sleep. I was utterly forsaken, wondering if anyone would ever love me again. Amidst this despair, suddenly a glow appeared at the window, which was open a crack…

Harmony comes from our diversity. One evening years ago when my husband and I sat down to supper, we sang the blessing as we often do. Our daughter, four years old at the time, asked why we changed notes. …

Write your dream life. When Marjorie Neff was a teenager, somewhere around 1950, she wrote a story about the Hunt family: Mr. and Mrs. Hunt, and children Eddie, Lucy, Mike, and the twins Janice — yes, spelled with ice — and Jimmy. On a lazy summer day, Mother cooks supper and Daddy reads from…

Soul as hologram. Traditionally, the word soul refers to each individual’s essential unique quality. The dictionary calls the soul “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life,” or “a person’s total self.” What can Soul — with a capital S — this mysterious “immaterial essence” or “total self” we…