Glory, Grace, and Mercy, a free e-book in ibooks and pdf format by Lee van Laer

On the night of Thanksgiving 2015, our family got into a conversation about the nature of Grace and Mercy. Having written about these subjects recently, it occurred to me that it might be worth collecting the essays into a small booklet.

There Must Be More

There must be more to me than this. Have you ever thought this? It’s a little moment of awakening rather than an ordinary thought—a clearing in the clouds, a a distant memory, a knowing that there is more. More to life. More to me. This realization can feel like hitting bottom.

Intelligence and Service

Like the rest of the Parabola readership, I’ve been watching the developments on the borders of Europe — the influx of desperate refugees, the corpses of children — in a mixture of astonishment and horror. We live in what we believe to be an intelligent society. A society that is properly educated, one that has…

A Formal Feeling Comes

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson.  “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” After a great shock or loss or change, a stillness comes. We sit still and receive life without leaning forward to grasp at it or commenting on it—think of the way a king or queen receives visitors. We have…

The Iron Maiden

I think we tend to create inward forms of our own — adopted, that is, from things we encounter outwardly — and then stalk each other with them. This process is writ large on the social and political landscape; but it begins inside us. We love nothing better than to outsource the blame for this…

The Inner Forms the Outer

Human  beings are peculiar creatures. We can think; and it sets us apart from other creatures, who can think some (consider the honeybee) but not much. Thinking, over the last 10,000 or so years (a rough estimate,) mankind has occupied himself, in the disciplines of science and philosophy, with the question of what, exactly, we…