Ash Wednesday’s marked foreheads represent far more than personal piety.

‘There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” These famous words of Thomas Merton convey the vision he experienced standing on a street corner in Louisville, Ky., on March 18, 1958. It was 10 years and nine months before his untimely death, bu

I remember the first time I heard Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues,” a song about winning and losing in life. I was 10 years old, attempting to explain the lyrics to my father. Sitting across from me in the kitchen of our old apartment, his acoustic guitar across his lap, my father respo

As the self-proclaimed “pope of basic cable,” Colbert performed a brilliant high-wire act.

Richard Ford has never written a frivolous word. So the title of his latest four related novellas, Let Me Be Frank With You (Harper Collins), should not be dismissed. It is the fourth of the Frank Bascombe series, about a sportswriter turned real estate agent. Beginning with The Sportswriter (1986),

It has been mocked by David Letterman and Steven Colbert. On Twitter, the comedian Louis C. K. complains that his kids used to love math, but now “it makes them cry.” Tea Party conservatives have pummeled it as another menacing tentacle of a vast left-wing conspiracy to “big-brothe