I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.
But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.
Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.
Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.
Don't forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.
The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.
I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.
We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
Moses became Americas true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.
Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.
Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.
Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.
Even Superman's name reflects his creators' biblical knowledge.
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
When you hit the unimaginable, the only answer is imaginativeness. You have to heal with the person that you're suffering with. You have to write a new chapter in your story. A relationship can be a sacred thing, but it's going to be difficult. There are going to be challenges. You are going to have pain. But working it through and being resilient is as sacred and meaningful as having a "Hollywood" romance.
Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn't mean simply 'talking through problems,' as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.
If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.
May your first word be adventure and last word love.
You may be frustrated with religion, but don't take that out on God.
The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.
One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.
After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.
When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
