Pastoral Resources

Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children's bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.

Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed.

Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time.

Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married. I'm not interested in being hip.

I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.