LaVonne Neff > LIVELY DUST

I asked Google to find the cover of the book I'm about to praise. "Everything happens for a reason," I typed, and clicked ...

The dog is right - this is  the only Black Friday sale I was interested in. In fact, it's the only Black Friday sale I've ever gon...

Heart and blood vessels (Leonardo da Vinci) I am scheduled to have open-heart surgery next week. They will open my chest, slicing righ...

Follow the money. That could be the conclusion of an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times, "Economics Behaving Badly."...

Memo to fans of Precious Ramotswe , Alexander McCall Smith's Motswana heroine of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency series: Mm...

Fifteen years ago next week, on my mother's 85th birthday and exactly one week before Ash Wednesday, my father died. Some months later...

Liberal means favoring freedom. In 17th and early 18th-century Europe, liberals brought down the Ancien Régime—a totalitarian alliance of c...

I believe everything I wrote yesterday: torture is always wrong. No matter what. However, last night I got to thinking about how very easy t...

I am distressed by the Pew survey showing that of all religious groups, white evangelicals are most likely to approve of torture and white ...

Yesterday the FDA approved Plan B —the morning-after pill—for over-the-counter sales to 17-year-olds (though not until certain labeling chan...

I confess: I did not especially enjoy Gilead , Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel about the Ames and Boughton famili...

In 1870, just before Italian troops occupied the Vatican and just after most delegates from the Western hemisphere hurriedly left for home,...

I have not posted anything for quite a while. This is partly because I’ve been traveling ( Maryland , Cape Cod ) and partly because I’ve bee...

I grew up singing "O Worship the King," a 200-year-old hymn written by Robert Grant, a British MP and social reformer. It includes...

From Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Viking, 2007), 166: Dorothy said she believed in letting bygones be bygones and e...