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On the Knicks, the Canyon of Heroes, and the rare grace of being happy together. Last week, I wrote about the Knicks winning the championship before I knew they had actually won. I admit, it was a strange thing to do. But I post every Sunday morning at 4:44, and I wanted to be ready. Just in case. Just in case the impossible happened. Just in case fifty-three years of waiting finally ended. Just in case the boy I had been in 1973 was allowed, for one more moment, to come runn

On boyhood, basketball, grief, and the spiritual weight of a championship. I have yet to write about sports. Not because sports haven’t mattered to me. Quite the opposite. Professional sports in New York have been woven through my life in ways I probably understand more now than I did when I was younger. The teams, the voices on the radio, the heartbreak, the rituals, the arguments, the hope that returns every season, even after it has been humiliated the season before — all

The Lemurians: A New Testament for the Soul Laurence O’Bryan: Neil, I finished The Lemurians last night, and I’ll be honest—I closed the book and thought, I’m not sure if I just read a novel, a spiritual warning, or the beginning of a new religion. Neil Perry Gordon: That’s probably the most dangerous compliment you could give me. Laurence: Dangerous how? Neil: Because I don’t want the book to feel like a religion. That’s actually one of the tensions inside the story. Nathan

No machine can duplicate the breath of the Creator Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical is titled Magnifica Humanitas. The title “Magnificent Humanity” gives us the heart of his warning. This is not merely a Church document about technology. It is a defense of humanity in an age when machines are beginning to imitate thought, language, judgment, creativity, companionship, and perhaps one day, even consciousness. That is why Pope Leo’s warning matters so deeply. The embodied soul i

How false accusations become sacred truth inside a trusted community Antisemitism rarely introduces itself honestly. It does not always arrive with torches. Or broken glass. Or slogans shouted in the street. Sometimes it arrives softly. With a flyer. A respected room. A trusted institution. And words that sound noble. Justice. Liberation. Healing. Growth. Truth. Because the words are beautiful, people often fail to notice what has entered beneath them. But spiritual language

Project Hail Mary, extraterrestrial life, and a new way of thinking about our origin story. What happens to our idea of God if we discover that we are not alone? For centuries, our origin stories have placed humanity at the center. We were the chosen ones. The final form. The creature made in the image of the Creator. Even when modern science challenged the timeline, the deeper assumption remained:Earth was the stage, humanity was the drama, and the rest of the cosmos was sce

A Mother’s Day Meditation on Strength, Loss, and the Abundance That Remains Some people move through life with such quiet devotion that the world almost misses the miracle. They do not arrive with thunder. They do not stand before crowds. They do not ask to be seen as prophets, warriors, or visionaries. They remain. And sometimes, remaining is the greatest spiritual act of all. This Mother’s Day, I find myself thinking about my mother not only as my mother but as the matriarc

Hamnet, Hamlet, and the loss of my son After watching Hamnet, I found myself thinking about Shakespeare, my son Sam, and the unbearable work of turning loss into art. Not the romantic version of that idea. Not the comforting notion that suffering somehow becomes beautiful if one is gifted enough to transform it. I do not believe that. The death of a child is not redeemed by art. It is not balanced by art. It is not justified because something meaningful may later come from it

The Brutal Reality Behind America’s Most Overlooked WWII Conflict There are places in the world that don’t feel like they belong to us. Not because they’re distant. Because they resist memory. Attu is one of those places. Far out in the Aleutian chain—past where most maps stop being useful—there is an island of black rock, wind, and silence. In 1943, American soldiers stepped into freezing surf there and climbed into something far more dangerous than an enemy. They climbed in