First-person accounts of near-death experiences have been all over the bestseller lists in recent years. Think of Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, Anita Moorjani’s Dying to Be Me, and Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real. It’s hard to read these narratives without having one’s perspective on death–whatever it is–profoundly challenged. And yet individual stories of near-death experiences leave something…
Baby Katie learned to speak very early, and as soon as she could string sentences together, she began repeatedly asking her mother, “Remember when I was your mummy?” It was all fun and games–after all, kids say the darnedest things!–until one day her mother, Deb, decided to play along and asked her, “What was your name…
Less than four years after their wedding, Janis Heaphy Durham’s husband Max passed away from cancer. Durham was a spiritual person, raised in the Presbyterian church and blessed with a strong faith in God, but even if she suspected that death was not the end, she was entirely unprepared for what happened next. In fact, I doubt…
Choosing happiness and choosing circumstances of ease and comfort are two very different things. Challenge is essential to human happiness. It is, in large part, why we chose this life to begin with. Photo by Jörg Peter
A few years ago, philosopher Stephen E. Braude wrote an excellent book analyzing the evidence for life after death. His book, Immortal Remains, stands out from most other works in this field by virtue of its rigorous attention to detail and its careful consideration of alternative hypotheses for the evidence: notably, the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes apparent contact with the deceased…
My last post talked about longings that we can’t quite explain and thus often disregard as irrational and unimportant. This post is about an excellent tool to help us recover those crucial, disregarded desires: a 30-day guided journal called Chasing Your Dream. It so happens that one of the dreams that runs in my family is the dream…
Julius Lester writes in his book Lovesong: Becoming a Jew that as a young black boy growing up in the American South his favorite piece to play on the piano was Kol Nidre, the song that opens the observance of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. “When I stop playing,” he writes, “there is a painful yearning in my stomach,…
At 21, Mary Helen Hensley had a near-death experience in which she not only saw a play-by-play review of her current life, but she suddenly remembered all the lives she’d lived before. As the daughter of a Baptist minister, she didn’t even have reincarnation on her radar. But there it was, portrayed in heaven as a reality. There are…
This month Helen Hunt is guest editor over at Felicity Huffman’s What The Flicka? She’s chosen the theme “Letting Go,” which also happens to be the subject of her new film Ride. My contribution is called “Letting Go of Success,” and you can read it here!
When I picked up Sukey Forbes’ new memoir, The Angel in My Pocket, my first thought was, “Oh, another memoir about grief.” It’s not that I don’t appreciate grief-focused memoirs. In fact, they’ve been a lifeline for me in the four years since losing my ex-fiancé. Even though my own loss was due to separation, not death, I’ve found comfort and…
Originally posted on Wood Lake Publishing's blog:
Photo courtesy of Donna Sinclair by Donna Sinclair A long long time ago I was a mystic. I remember it well. I was about five years old. We lived on an island in Lake Temagami. My father had placed me in the bow of the rowboat, and…
We’ve all had one or two of those dreams that turn out to be eerily similar to an event we later experience. Or those times when we start thinking about someone right before they call. Some of these episodes are easy to dismiss as coincidences, but other times the correlation is so striking that it…
There are not many books I’ve read more than once. While my appetite for the written word is pretty much insatiable, I’m generally hungry for something new. Fortunately, this is not as much of a vice in reading as it would be in other spheres of life. But every now and then, a book comes along that inspires in me a…
Whether you’re an aspiring or accomplished writer, you’ve likely had moments (or years at a time) when you’ve worried that you just didn’t have what it takes. I certainly have. I’m a very methodical and analytic person, and for a long time, I thought that these personality traits might prevent me from ever producing a compelling piece of…
The Summer 2014 issue of The Baltimore Review is now available online. On its site, you can read not only one of my recent flash nonfiction pieces, “Cop Cars,” but also some excellent poetry and fiction from writers around the country. My favorite pieces from this issue include: Vincent Poturica’s short story “Habte,” about an Eritrean immigrant at a child’s…
