I am thinking these days I simply can’t control the world. “Duh,” you might say, “you’re just getting that figured out?” Well, yes, maybe, but I am convinced we all live with the illusion that we are in control. Or we think we need to be. We’ve got to make those we love into something more suitable to our ideal. We’ve got to shape the troubled world, surely, into something better than it is. We’ve got to reconfigure the thinking those who disagree with us. Of course we never measure up ourselves—we’ve got to get more fit and healthier, kinder, more knowledgeable, better at what we do, more everything. It’s all a heavy burden. We carry this burden with us every minute of the day. At least I do.

Big publishing news going on today. A long-awaited and much-anticipated book—Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation—burst on the scene today. My preordered copy arrived from Amazon just now. This book calls on Christians, struggling to live as Christians in our Post-Christian world, to follow the model of the sixth-century founder of monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia.

François Mauriac begins one of the chapters in his intriguing 1962 book What I Believe with a haunting scene of a Russian boy, now grown older, visiting the church of his childhood. “At times I try to imagine,” Mauriac begins…

I was thinking the other day how each human being is unique. So is each animal, of course, each leaf, each drop of water. There is a lot of sameness among people too, but when we focus on sameness, we tend to get lost in abstraction, something like the sea of humanity. I’ve been choosing these days to place my bets on uniqueness. Each of us is exquisitely our own person.

In my ongoing efforts to step aside from the madness in which we seem engulfed, I came across an incredible article by the novelist Mark Helprin in the most recent issue of First Things

I don’t think my mind is big enough, broad or bright enough, to be an effective apologist for the Christian faith. I turn often to the great apologists of the centuries, to Augustine, for example, to the best of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, most recently to N. T. Wright, Tim Keller, and so many others.

There is lots of talk these days about the Benedict Option. What in the world is this all about? While the centuries-in-the-making secularization project has come to completion with breathtaking speed, the question for Christians is what now? Surely not withdrawal. Maybe another form of engagement.

Apparently we live in a world of alternative truths. We float around in our individualized bubbles, barely bumping into one another. We read and watch things that reinforce our own strongly-held beliefs. We spend time gathering various facts to reinforce our corner on the truth. While it’s almost impossible to admit, each of us lives in a bubble.

Is it ever possible to be satisfied, to be fully self-accepting, to be content? Don’t we carry around some notion of perfection rumbling in our heads—to which we never quite measure up? Always another thing to do before we can rest, another rung to climb before we are accepted. Why are we such restless people? Isn’t there some deep longing to find a resting place? Or is it just me?

As I begin this new year, I am trying to reshape my posture toward our tumultuous, chaotic, divided world. How can I possibly be more positive, more forgiving, more joyful, more content? With renewed energy, I have turned for help to my years-long practice of reading from the Psalms every morning. A good cup of coffee and the Psalms—this is part of my morning ritual. Does this ancient spiritual discipline, practiced by Jesus and Paul and our ancestors of faith, have something to offer our crazy world today?

At this time of year, I have always been an inveterate goal setter. I love the feeling of leaving the year behind, the whole bundle of joys and hardships, successes and failures, good memories and things you’d like to forget. It feels good to turn the page to the next chapter. It feels clean. What can I do better? How can I love more, see more, learn more, contribute more? How can I understand the world better, so that, perhaps, I can make some small dent in the problems we all face. I love opening a new chapter.

This book is getting a lot of attention these days. Though it was not written with the presidential election in mind, J. D. Vance reminds us of that forgotten population out there that rose up to elect a crass-talking, offensive, scary candidate who promised change for them. Vance is a proud Hillbilly from the Appalachian byways of our country, people from families and communities and regions devastated by dramatic, bewildering change. These are the ones left behind.

This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in a long time. Truly remarkable. Perhaps life-changing. We learn from biblical writers, poets throughout the ages, mystics, and so many others that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to use Gerard Manley Hopkins familiar words. Such a world is God’s gift to us. This is exactly the kind of world Ann Voskamp opens up for us from each page of this book.

Our world is saturated with the human ego these days. We are swamped. It can feel hard to breathe at times. The constant display of ego makes us feel cheap, degraded, diminished. After the circus of purported public discourse—the presidential debates, for example—we wince. It’s more about the ego than it is about ideas or dreams or solutions. The ego has always been that monster under our beds waiting to pounce at any moment. Once loose it damages leaders. It corrodes our world. It messes things up, destroys things that are  good and decent. Our nation is paying a price for letting the ego out of its cage.

I am looking for good news these days. Of course we need look no further than the dinner table of our own homes, the small gestures of goodness among our children and grandchildren, from a spouse or friend, within our churches or places of work. David Brooks tells one such story last week that is truly good news.

Somehow I am in the mode of rereading. I pulled this lovely book from my shelf and read it again, meditatively and reflectively as the title suggests. Walter Hooper has made delightful selections from Lewis’s broad range of writings. This is a great introduction to Lewis. It is also a way to sound his depths.

The bad news is relentless these days. I find myself skipping through the papers, turning off the news, avoiding Twitter. What more do I need to know about the last insult hurled across the public landscape? What more do I need to know about another distortion of the truth, another betrayed loyalty, another crass remark. What more do I need to know about the latest sensational, scandalous mistake someone made either yesterday or decades ago?

This book touched me deeply. I read it many years ago, close to its date of publication in 1992. Because we were traveling to Amsterdam this summer, to study and reflect on the works of Rembrandt, I pulled this book off my shelf to get closer at Rembrandt. This book is published with a magnificent print of Rembrandt’s great painting The Return Of The Prodigal Son on its cover. What Nouwen does is simply stunning. He reports the journey of how this painting changed his life. Of course it is not only the painting. Rembrandt drew Nouwen more deeply into the extraordinary story told by Jesus.

Maybe it’s time for some good news. On the morning when 100 million of us are likely to watch the presidential debates tonight—in this most bizarre of political seasons, in this most fractured nation of ours—here’s the kind of good news we long to hear. Yesterday, one humble, gracious man, Vin Scully, who after 67 years as the announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, at the age of 89, occupied the broadcast booth for the last time. “I will miss you,” he said, characteristically shifting the focus from himself.

Vincent Van Gogh painted his remarkable Wheatfields With Crows in the summer of 1890. This was his last painting before his untimely death in July of that year. At the time of the painting, life seemed to spiral further downward for him. He felt abandoned by his beloved brother Theo. He felt profoundly alone, sick, disturbed, surviving bursts of fresh expectations, only to sink once again into despondency. He turned to his familiar brushes to provide a semblance of balance for which he yearned.