It worked like this:       At the end of each weekly lesson Mr. Roberts would assign me half a dozen or so pieces I was to practice daily – perhaps a Bach fugue or a Haydn sonata. I was obliged by my parents to practice at least one hour every day, seven days a...

    Mr. Roberts was my one and only piano teacher. Instruction began when I was age 7 and continued weekly until I went off to college. I've since come to understand why he had a waiting list and why so many considered him the architect of their pianistic careers....

      .....And Jehovah was just getting started. Remember, He’d given Lot, Lot’s wife, and a few other pious townspeople safe passage out of the two heretical, decadent party towns he was apparently planning to nuke. God’s mercy towards these faithful few was their...

     The Catholics’ Jesus seemed far more flexible. Simply confess to, say, the violence thou had inflicted in self-defense last Friday on thy neighbor after he caught thou in a hotel room engaged in unmentionables with his wife during a champagne lunch catered by...

Stillborn       A Unitarian friend once observed that the only occasion he could recall hearing “Jesus Christ” aloud in his church was the time the custodian tripped and fell down the stairs. Yet set alongside my family, even the least pious of Unitarians would come...