Words

I have always thought that making something was largely a matter of choices. Some years ago, I started painting on canvas, with acrylics as the medium. Each time I started a piece, I began with an idea of what I wanted the painting to become. But it never quite worked that way. Each painting wound up different from what I envisioned when I started, some of them a lot different. Somewhere along the way, the painting would begin to tell me something I hadn’t anticipated, and I

When my mother died, I felt for the first time that I was truly alone. For seventeen years after my father’s passing, my life had been anchored by her presence — her routines, her needs, and the nightly phone calls that kept us connected even when there wasn’t much to say. She was the last link to the world I grew up in. I began to think about my father in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to do so when he had died; my focus was always on my mother. When she was gone, the sadness

I’ve spent enough time with Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau that they feel less like historical figures and more like friends that you can really talk to. I am separated from these men by centuries, cultures, and landscapes, yet both of them speak to things I have come to recognize in myself. When I was younger, I moved through the world the way Montaigne did on his travels— curious, restless, eager to see what lay beyond the next bend in the road, and how far I c

Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (1964) and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) are two of the most daring acts of autobiographical exposure in American art. Each blurs confession and performance, turning private pain into public creation. Their honesty—uncomfortable, unvarnished, and morally searching—remains rare, and revisiting it today reveals how courage in art has changed. My connection to Miller began at the Alley Theatre in Houston, where I served as Managing Director. Fac

I have been noticing how differently people respond to artificial intelligence. For some, AI is a threat to human knowledge, to education, or even to our humanity itself. For others, it is a philosophical puzzle or a moral hazard. I think that these might be legitimate concerns, and they deserve thoughtful discussion. But my own experience with AI has been far more ordinary, far more personal, and (ironically, I would say) far more human. I do not approach AI as a theologian,