Faith, Fiction, Friends

It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said. “What job ad?” I said. “The city sc...

There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to un...

The most solitary job in corporate America is not the position of CEO. It’s the position of the CEO’s speechwriter. It can be the lonel...

I was sitting with a woman in the Human Resources Department. There had been a reorganization of our department, part of a general resh...

It was the strangest interview I’ve ever participated in – on either side of the table. A friend had talked me, or conned me, into ...

Someone forgot to tell Joseph Conrad.  When you write fiction, you’re supposed follow the rule of thirds. The first third is the in...

Five of you – friends, business colleagues, and the boss – are meandering your way down a river. It’s an early evening get-together, an...

I’m reading  Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith  by Karen Wright Marsh, and I’m struck by how ordinar...

I suppose you could call me a Les Mis fan. I’ve seen the stage version of  Les Misérables  twice. I’ve seen the movie twice. I’ve watc...

Years ago, more than 40 to be precise, I was reading  The Habit of Being , the collection of selected letters by Flannery O’Connor that...

The road ahead was not a literal road. But it felt like one. A very long one. My organization had just done what organizations are fa...

We’ve come to the end of  The Scarlet Letter , and it’s time to consider this journey we embarked upon almost three months ago. In ...

The end is near. Or getting nearer. And the suspense is mounting. Events in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s  The Scarlet Letter  are accelera...

The deeper I get into  The Scarlet Letter , the more I wonder who the novel is really about. It may be less about Hester Prynne and more ...

It’s been 50 years since I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s  The Scarlett Letter  in my high school American literature class. What I vague...

I might have retired twice from the same company. I officially retired in 2015, and I’d had given a year’s notice. I could have con...

For a long time, I had what several of colleagues called the most interesting office at work. Because I was a speechwriter, I was expec...

Think back 25 years (if you’re old enough). It sounds almost quaint today, but email was just beginning to come into its own. At the co...

Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how ma...

It happens to most of us, at one time or another in our careers. You’re called into the boss’s office and discover there’s an HR person...