David McElroy

The email arrived a little after midnight while Daniel sat alone in the pale blue light of his kitchen, half watching a movie he would never finish.

Light rain moved softly through the neighborhood outside. Water shimmered beneath the streetlights, and the wet pavement reflected long ribbons of gold across the empty street. Lucy lay asleep on a rug near the back door, occasionally thumping her tail in her dreams. Oscar sat motionless on the windowsill beside the front door, his yellow eyes fixed on the rain beyond the glass.

The subject line said only:

Hello from the Past.

Daniel almost deleted it without opening it.

Probably spam. But he clicked on it anyway. Maybe it was the late hour. Maybe it was the phrasing. Or maybe middle-aged men are simply too curious about the past.

He opened the message.

I came across a recent picture of you online and wasn’t surprised to see you haven’t changed much.

The movie was still playing, but Daniel no longer cared. He clicked it off.

He read the message three times before he was sure there was no name attached.

No signature. No clue. Nothing except a final sentence that settled inside him heavily.

I will always love the man who loved me best.

For a long time he sat motionless at the kitchen table. His gaze absently shifted to the dark window, where rain traced crooked lines down the glass.

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If a 22-foot-high golden statue of a narcissistic ruler doesn’t remind you of the golden calf, you probably aren’t very familiar with a certain story about the children of Israel in the Sinai desert.

And the people who endorsed this colossal monument to ego seem to think that if they keep saying, “It’s not a golden calf,” people will believe them. Sadly, many naive victims will do anything to avoid accepting that they’ve been snookered by a narcissistic con man.

I rarely talk about Donald Trump in a serious way anymore, but the recent unveiling of a golden statue of Trump — dedicated by Christian and Jewish clergy — was so outrageous that I had to try one more time. It’s painful to realize that many of my fellow Christians still haven’t accepted that their support of Trump is very much like the Israelites’ worship of a golden calf 3,500 years ago.

So I made a two-minute video late last night about this Trumpian “golden calf.” It’s embedded below.

In the video, I accidentally said the story of the golden calf was from about 1,500 years ago, but I was off by about 2,000 years. The story is actually said to have taken place about 3,500 years ago.

Fellow Christians, stop making excuses for this lying narcissist. This isn’t about ideology or politics. It’s about decency and core moral values.

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I’ve been making book recommendations for many years, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually written out a formal list. I’ve done that now — and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Although I can strongly recommend each of the 10 books on this list, I can’t say these are the 10 books I’d most recommend over everything else. There are a few that would be on any list of my favorite books, but beyond that, there might be 40 or 50 that I feel equally strongly about.

Even worse, I feel as though I would have different lists for different kinds of people and for different circumstances.

As a result, I think I’m going to try to maintain a top 1o list, but the books on that list are going to change over time. In addition, I’m going to add some speciality lists at some point — because these first 10 do no more than scratch the surface of what I’d like you to read.

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