This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.