Author: John Jalsevac

Note: Will Pemberton was one of the three writers who founded Utopian Idiots. Will himself came up with the name, which was intended to lampoon and chasten our self-confessed idealism. He died this past Aug. 20. He leaves behind a wife, …

Just over a decade ago I started keeping track of most of the books that I read for fun. Though I’ve always been an avid reader, I’m also a relatively slow reader. A few days ago, a friend of mine …

In the years since, that little church has assumed typological proportions in my mind. The rough brick, the heavy beams, and the simplicity of the sermon have become for me symbolic, a representation of all ordinariness, and the richness of …

There's this really weird thing about travel. Anyone who has travelled knows that there comes a moment - usually way sooner than you would have expected - when you suddenly get tired of seeing new sights.

“Don’t just do something, stand there!” This amusing inversion of every exasperated parent’s command to a child staring dazedly at  ____ [a heap of still-unfolded laundry, a half-erected tent about to collapse, a bleeding sibling] has been variously attributed to …

G.K. Chesterton once wrote of his friend Bernard Shaw, the playwright, that he was possibly “the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.” This quip strikes us, living in an age where scarcely anyone reads poetry, let …

The Imitation of Christ is, by some accounts, the second most popular book in history, next to the Bible. This slim volume, written by Thomas à Kempis, an obscure medieval monk, is packed with timeless wisdom. My own favourite version …

Ten thousand times a day we are presented with choices for what to do. And nine times out of ten, we choose wrongly. This is hardly surprising, for, as Aristotle once sagely said, there are an infinite number of ways …

    Editor’s Note: In keeping with the theme of this week’s essay – found here – we’re publishing this sonnet that I wrote a number of years ago. Oddly, the form I followed is a combination of the Petrarchan …

Over the past four years, I have read and re-read 'Deep Work' as many as seven or eight times. I've lost count. In reality, I'm always reading it.