If you have read my film review section on my website, you would have seen that I wrote movie reviews for the Plaquemine Post newspaper in 1991 while in college at LSU. I still love movies, but I have not written a film review since then. So why not start with director Christopher Nolan’s ambitious big screen adaptation of the epic Greek poem attributed to Homer – The Odyssey. If you’re unfamiliar with Homer’s epic or haven’t followed the film’s development, here’s a brief ov

Over the past several months, I've been quietly working on something that has become deeply meaningful to me. My next book, Still Searching: Essays on Finding Meaning in an Age of Uncertainty, continues to grow as I write, revise, and refine what I believe is my most personal work yet. Rather than offering easy answers, these essays explore the questions many of us carry through life - faith and doubt, grief and hope, leadership and curiosity, friendship and forgiveness, and

I’m excited to share that I’ll soon be joining Mark MI Words for a conversation about some of the questions that have shaped my life and my writing. We’ll be talking about mental health, grief, resilience, leadership, faith, doubt, and the search for meaning - the same themes that run through Resurrection Fern and my upcoming book, Still Searching. One of the reasons I said yes to this conversation is because Mark creates space for honest conversations about mental health and

There are few places left where more than one hundred thousand strangers can stand shoulder to shoulder and, for three hours, forget almost everything that divides them. I've watched it happen inside LSU's Tiger Stadium. I've seen it during the World Cup. I've seen it in small-town high school gyms and Little League ballparks. Republicans hug Democrats after a touchdown. People who would never agree on politics high-five after a walk-off home run. For a little while, we becom

We spend enormous amounts of time celebrating the exceptional. The billionaire. The celebrity. The superstar athlete. The politician. But civilization isn't held together by exceptional people. It's held together by ordinary people who quietly decide to show up again tomorrow. Teachers. Nurses. Parents. Caregivers. Police officers. Firefighters. Paramedics. Members of the military. Truck drivers. Construction workers. Mail carriers. Electricians. Utility workers restoring pow

“We are stardust, contemplating the stars, trying to make sense of the gift of being alive.” – Carl Sagan Here we are, where the improbable meets the inevitable. Somewhere in the quiet architecture of biology, a single cell won a race against roughly two hundred million others - on a specific night, in a specific place, between two people who first had to find each other across the unlikely surface of the earth. Move any one piece - a delayed train, a canceled flight, a war t

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection." - Brené Brown There are conversations almost every human being will eventually face - about death, faith, regret, mental illness, politics, forgiveness, money, purpose. Oddly enough, they are the conversations we avoid most. Why do we spend so much time talking to each other, yet so little time talking about what matters most? I have always preferred conversations face to face - looking someone in the eye, noticing the pauses,