Do you remember this scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry discovers that the diary he rsquo s found ldquo writes back to him rdquo Harry sat on his four-poster and flicked through the blank pages not one of which had a trace of scarlet ink on it Then he pulled a new bottle

Grandma and Grandpa Herrman had a storm cellar The small limestone-lined space was dug-out beneath their house but one entered it through a door in the backyard just as Dorothy tried unsuccessfully to do in The Wizard of Oz My numerous cousins and I spent a lot of time in our grandparents rsquo

From Rachel Aviv rsquo s January 2nd 2012 New Yorker article ldquo No Remorse rdquo Shortly after midnight on March 6 2010 Dakotah Eliason sat in a chair in his bedroom with a 38-calibre pistol in his hands thinking about what the world would be like if he didn rsquo t exist One of his fri

In grading college essays there are certain phrases that I pen so frequently in red ink that I rsquo ve considered having them put onto a rubber stamp to save myself from writing them repeatedly For example ldquo The relative pronoun for people is lsquo who rsquo or lsquo whom rsquo lsq

Because I was doing doctoral studies at the time I able to be home when my father died even able to stay a couple of weeks afterwards with my Mother So I was with her when those initial days of funeral preparation and its frenzied aftermath of calls and visits had passed Strange how family m

His father had been a minister His grandfather as well So when he failed as an art dealer and began to reexamine his life it seemed clear to Vincent that God had a better plan for his life preaching the Gospel ldquo It is my fervent prayer and desire rdquo he told his brother ldquo that t

There rsquo s reason to believe that the primitive Church at least some congregations valued ministers who could make baptism into a near-death experience They held the head of the person being baptized under water long enough to induce loss of consciousness but not so long as to produce death i

Critics can rsquo t decide if Chad Harbach rsquo s The Art of Fielding is really a book about baseball There rsquo s a lot of ldquo other stuff rdquo going on in the novel But certainly in the character of Henry Skrimshander it offers a wonderful description of what it means to be consumed by A

It rsquo s difficult to imagine a biblical passage so well known and yet so utterly incomprehensible to modern readers as Abraham rsquo s near sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah In this age of Tiger Moms and of parents whose lives revolve around their children what are we to make of a story in wh