He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light.