One of the more illuminating incidents of my life was to be asked to share a freshly baked cake from a wood-burning oven in a house with cardboard walls, cellophane windows, and a tarpaper roof.

My wife’s early experience of life was a good deal broader than mine.  We were visiting one of her childhood friends.

A few years ago, one of my daughters thanked me just because I had never broken up with her mother, as so many of her friends’ dads did.  She said that when she was growing up, she always knew she never had to worry about that happening, because we had said so.

It was a sweet moment, but also a strange one, as though she had warmly thanked me for never starving her to death.

Protesting the classical understanding of marriage, a young man said to me, “What two guys have with each other is the same as what I have with my wife.”

I take him at his word.  If he insists that what he and the young woman “have with each other” has nothing to do with the polarity and complementarity of the sexes, who am I to insist that it does?


It was not in your power not to be born of Adam: it is in your power to believe in Christ.

-- St. Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 71, Section 2