When my son first discovered Johanna Spyri’s Heidi nonchalantly tucked into our stack of daily reading books, he revolted. The book jacket, with the story’s namesake cartwheeling across a meadow high in the Alps, violated his 9-year-old principles — specifically, his tightly held adage, “thou shalt not read books featuring protagonists in pigtails.” “No way,” […]

I remember a decade or more ago while helping my friend Beth reorganize her homeschooling room, seeing her table spread with children’s picture books and chapter books, and saying, “You are allowed to get rid of books you don’t like.” Responding to her quizzical look, I said, “If reading a book out loud to one […]

When I wake up each morning, the first thing I see as my eyes start to clear is a giant calendar. It represents the first 18 years of my son’s life, and more days are crossed off than not. I rub my eyes and try to focus and remember that the calendar is not really […]

Note: This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition in February 2021. When the cures ran out during my worst days of doctoring, I would pace a patient’s room, loathe the insufficiency of my own hands, and yearn for Lucy Pevensie’s cordial. A heart tracing on a monitor would fatally spasm, my own heart would […]

If you’ve read Glenn McCarty’s The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson, you’ve heard about US Marshall Dead-Eye Dan. And if you’ve read McCarty’s Junction Tales, you’ve met Dan face-to-face. (For the record, I highly recommend that you do both of those things.) But Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid dives deeper into the world of Tumbleweed and tells the […]