The White Witch’s Hot Cocoa & Other Extras

This fall, while doing book events for Advent in Narnia, I’ve developed a few more activities for families, individuals, or churches that I want to share here since I’m too late to include them in the book (at least until the next – ?! – printing). Amazingly, the book has sold almost 2500 copies since it was released […]

Advent in Narnia Open House

First, we filled the narthex (or lobby) of St. Benedict with artificial Christmas trees! We had lots of help – people loaned us their trees, and a few volunteers helped us set them all up and “fluff” the branches! When guests came, the first thing they saw was a “forest” … and Mr. Tumnus and […]

Mother Heidi

It’s a strange thing not to have children, as a young couple. It’s even stranger when you have a house in the suburbs, flexible work schedules, a dog, and you generally like people and children. But Adam and I have decided not to become parents. We discovered we weren’t able to conceive a few years […]

My Conversation with “Jacob”

Why Congregations Shouldn’t Work So Hard to Keep Their Young People This is an article I wrote for the Collegeville Institute about “Jacob,” a Jewish kid who composes music on an old Game Boy and plans to stop being “religious” when he goes to college, and impressed me in a conversation we had last week. […]

A Suburban Curmudgeon

The city cannot claim a monopoly on eccentric, grumpy people. This is the second year in a row that one of my neighbors across the greenway has caution-taped his or her lawn off for the big soccer tournament this weekend. I mean, this is kind of ridiculous. And hilarious. And somewhat impressive. I mean, this […]

Memorial tire swing

The park near our house is full of memorial trees, and now, we also have a memorial tire swing. An 11-year old girl, Jordan Oliver, drowned in a retention pond behind her school last week. She was playing along a bridge with a bunch of other kids, slipped into deep water, and didn’t come back up. […]