James D. Hogan

In the Cleft

On October 18, 2026

Annie ran a fever last night. She woke up feeling cool and much better, but we’re at home this Sunday morning. It was a cold start–the coldest all of this early autumn season–and a light frost fell. Even so, the sun was up over the mountain by the time I had my second cup of coffee, and I bundled up and sat outside on the deck, the sun full on my face, and shut my eyes, and marveled at the orange glow of my eyelids.

The lectionary reading this morning led me to Exodus. In the thirty-third chapter, Moses is up on the mountain, again, meeting with God. From far away, the Israelites simply see Moses go to his meeting place with God, a place where a thick cloud surrounds.

This is long after Moses led his people out of Egypt, after the plagues, after Moses threw his staff to the ground and watched it turn into a serpent. After God held back the waters of the sea for the Israelites, only to let them cascade back inward to drown their persecutors.

This is a real human being writing to you.

By James D. Hogan

On September 30, 2026

In writing

Granted, I’m typing on a computer, beaming these words from the kitchen bar where I’m drinking coffee, over the wifi, across the great beyond to my website, which dutifully records and posts them somewhere, and presumably you are out there somewhere, reading this on a device of your choosing, a laptop or phone, reading line after line against the glare of an LED screen.

But I am a human, and so are you.

At least, dear readers, that’s true for most of you, or hopefully much of you. There’s an analytics plugin installed on my website that suggests at least a handful of you are bots. Not actual robots, of course, just a thing that scrapes my site, which I think means makes a copy, tucking it away somewhere. It conjures up a funny idea that out in the electron cloud that is this website and all the websites in existence, I have a little devoted following of robot readers. A robot fan club, perhaps. And that they occasionally stop by to see what I’ve been up to.

After

By James D. Hogan

On September 11, 2026

In writing

I was a junior in college on September 11. Coming back to work at the university where I completed my undergraduate degree has brought plenty of déjà vu moments—not to mention the surreal feeling of seeing my children walk the sidewalks I once walked as a student—but today, twenty-five years after the attacks, I became aware that there was a lot of time and space between then and now.

All of it can be classified as after.

Just as there were on the fifth and tenth and twentieth anniversaries of that clear-blue Tuesday, today’s news has featured a parade of recollections, photos and videos just as fresh in my mind as they were a quarter century ago. There have been a few stories I hadn’t heard, new chapters to consider.

For the first time, there is a focus on the generation that was born and has come of age in the span of days since our national frame was shattered.