I want to help, but I don’t want to be taken, and my life doesn’t operate on such wide margins that I can risk being taken very often. I call myself a Christian, and maybe I’m just a terrible one, but that’s how I feel: stuck.

An essay adapted from my forthcoming memoir, This Littler Light: Some Thoughts on NOT Changing the World. It’s on what Contemporary Christian Music taught me about how to be a journalist. Eeeek! I know. But it’s true.

“I’m hoping to get a dance crowd out, people that want to dance under the stars.” — Tess Mangum Ocaña

“One of the main functions of religion,” writes Fr. Alexander Schmemann, was “to help people to die.”

“The significant fact about the life in the Garden is that man is to name things … To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God. To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it.” — Alexander Schmemann

We do it because we’ve created something, and we want to share it with the world. We do it for the joy and the love and because whether we’re playing or listening to someone else, nothing feels closer to the heart of what it means to be human than music. But it doesn’t make much sense from the cold calculations of an accounting office.

“On Ash Wednesday Mexican-Americans renew their cultic communion with mother earth. For them the earth has always been sacred and they retain a fundamental identity with it. The earth supports and regenerates life; it is life.” — Virgilio Elizondo

In a culture where people know about the Crusades, the Inquisition and Manifest Destiny and where the cross looks a little bit too much like the Nazi swastika, you can understand why we might prefer the nice little fish.

As I studied Marx’s championing of the working class alongside Jesus’ words to the rich young ruler: “Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,” I had a revival. I got saved.

I mean, the ponds don’t even freeze down here. How the heck do you become a hockey fan? And what the heck do Rick Flair and that hottie Storm Squad have to do with hockey? I don’t know: I guess when it comes to sports, I’ll always be a New England kid.