Newsletter Archive

I hope you had a chance to listen to the song Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden. The song is in the public domain, so we can look at all the lyrics. The version I am most familiar with is Tim O’Brien’s from 2005. And so, I hope you enjoy my words – but it…

I hope you enjoyed our extended discussion of the movie The Matrix. It is a great example of the fact that the details of a story can be one thing, but the themes and symbols, if you just take the time and think more deeply, can be something else altogether. (If you haven’t, please consider…

Last time I attached a link to a longer piece on the movie The Matrix. The link did not work properly at first, but has now been fixed and takes you right to this piece with one click. You can find the corrected link at the bottom of the last newsletter, but I have also…

We have been talking about the movie The Matrix for the last several times, it is a well of many treasures. It is time to speak more specifically about the climax, about what everything in this story is leading up to, about the fact that things can truly be different, that finally, humanity can break…

We have been talking about the movie The Matrix over the last several newsletters. If you could only say one thing about The Matrix, about what it teaches, what it is really about — it would be there have always been two completely different worlds in our lives. We have been lost in one world…

I love the movie The Matrix. It is one of the better examples of what I discovered about stories after God used them so powerfully in my life. On the surface, stories can be about anything. But underneath, sometimes very clear and easy to see, and other times far more imbedded in the more general…

Last time we began with mentioning the movie The Matrix. Our prior discussion of the wonders and complexity of this physical world, of nature and especially biology, and that all of this points to something greater, to Someone greater – left us once again with the unsettling reality that on most days we don’t think…

Over the last several newsletters we have delved into the physical aspects of this life, how complex all of life is, how it points to a designer, not to anything less. But on most days, we are consumed with the details of our lives and forget about the larger questions. On most days, we are…

Last time I started with the statement that concealed within most stories is a single message, stated over and over again. How could that be? How would storytellers, millions of them over the centuries, at the base of it, be telling the same basic story, over and over again, without any awareness they are doing…

Last time we spoke of starting our discussion of stories over again. We had begun in August of 2023, when I asked: Why do so many of us love stories? Why are we so drawn to them? If you think about it, it’s not something we spend much time talking about. Are stories just an…