“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. Even all the hairs on your head are numbered.”

That’s the gospel of Matthew, verses 29-30, positing a benevolent and merciful God who cares for and directs the lives of his creatures and creation down to the very last detail.

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And in this corner, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” his famous poetic line denoting the unblinking savagery with which creatures stalk, tear into and consume other creatures for their own sustenance.

Which vision reflects reality, once we set down our books and toys, cast off our fanciful cloaks, and head out from our cloistered drawing rooms to confront the challenges of day-to-day survival?

This question is perhaps particularly relevant to the carnivores among us, who rely on slaughterhouses to go about the business that lesser animals must tend...

At one point in the current documentary (Amy) of the gifted and tortured singer Amy Winehouse, she was so deeply submerged in her partly guttural/feral, partly ravishing/seductive treatment of a song, digging into it with such resonant and startling ferocity, that I exclaimed to myself there in the dark of the theater, “My God, that voice is from the depths of creation!”

True enough, but the surpassingly sad part of that voice is all the pain and self-torture that it was built upon, quite aside from the God-given gifts of raw vocal power it had been bequeathed.

For truly, Amy Winehouse’s voice and career and downward spiral of a life stand as an unanswered cry against the multiple and relentless outrages of existence, all the forces that seem to line up with special anticipation and glee when a soul at once so sensitive, talented, raw and ultimately, fragile, presents itself to us.

There are plenty of ...

New York Times columnist and PBS pundit David Brooks has written an extraordinary book (The Road to Character) that I will discuss in some depth in a near-future post, but there is one section of it that I think deserves its own highlighting, with only enough discussion from me to move some generous excerpts along. The book itself addresses the grand topic of human character—its qualities, importance, and exemplification—in a cast of 10 historic “characters” whose biographies Brooks has scoured and synthesized on our behalf.

The subjects are mostly giants of history, albeit flawed and so very human, as Brooks reveals in brief chapters devoted to their lives and works.

One of them, the 19th century Victorian era novelist George Eliot, serves as the jumping-off point for a remarkable five-page reflection/digression that is not really about Eliot at all, but instead allows Brooks to offer what amounts...

The brilliant and challenging writer David Foster Wallace, gone from the world since his suicide in 2008 at age 46, left behind a critically acclaimed body of work that included short stories, essays, magazine journalism, and three novels. Two of those novels, Infinite Jest (1996) and the posthumously published The Pale King (2012), figure prominently on university reading lists and remain in wide circulation.

But in this digital age, Wallace is likely far better known and more widely seen and heard in his 2005 commencement address at liberal artsy Kenyon College in Ohio, the speech now having been watched hundreds of thousands of times in a variety of iterations on You Tube, and made into a rather remarkable short film (available here).

The speech runs barely over 20 minutes, with its essence boiled down to 10 minutes in the film mentioned above...

I was really worried about that Abby Wambach! Thirty-five years old now, holder of two Olympic gold medals, the all-time leading goal scorer in the history of professional soccer, the international women’s soccer player of the year in 2012.

But she’d never won a World Cup championship, and the titanic match against Japan last Sunday was her final shot!

Talk about high stakes!! Millions of people around the world were, as her mother told an L.A. Times reporter, “praying for her.” I wasn’t quite going that far, there being a few more pressing causes on my prayer list. If I had such a prayer list, that is, since I tend not to pray for specific causes or outcomes in this world but rather focus my prayerful attention simply on attending to the people and scenes in front of me in all appropriate concern, awe and gratitude.

In any case, of all the narrative threads weaving their way through the World Cu...