gskohler

About a mile from our home in Dún Laoghaire is a swimming area called the Forty‑Foot. No one really knows why it’s called that. Theories abound—depth of the water, height of the rocks, width of the old road—but the name remains a mystery. What isn’t mysterious is the practice: a cold plunge straight into the Irish Sea. I’ve made a habit of doing it three mornings a week, usually around six. It wakes me in a way nothing else does. The walk there has become its own kind of liturgy for me. I...

Who do you think loses when someone focuses on enemies rather than solutions? Aaron Burr didn’t begin life as a villain. He began with ambition, talent, intelligence, and a genuine desire to shape the young nation. But somewhere along the way, Alexander Hamilton became the gravitational center of his imagination. Slowly, Hamilton became the center of his emotional universe. Burr stopped pursuing his own purpose and started pursuing a rival. And when our enemy becomes our focus, our world...

What if the point was fun? It sounds almost irresponsible to ask it. There’s so much damage in the world, so much scrambling for control, so much effort spent trying to make things work the way I want them to work. People push and maneuver and exhaust themselves just to get their way—or to get others out of their way. In a world like that, “fun” feels like the wrong idea. Almost inappropriate. But still… what if the point was fun? What if God’s impulse in creation was something like, “Isn’t...