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Why We Should Continue Treating the Pandemic as a Crisis (and an Opportunity)
With the reappearance of so many familiar faces following the Great Unmasking of the vaccinated, there’s a great temptation for people in the church to breathe a sigh of relief and try to pick up where we left off in March 2020. Kay Kotan has other ideas. “Reality check: Life will never be the same,” →
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Meaning of Life Thankfully Still Not Answered
What does it mean to be alive? Think about the question for more than a minute and you find a definition nearly impossible. We know it when we see it, we believe, but perhaps the best we can say about life is what the eighteen century French doctor Xavier Bichat said about it: “Life consists →
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Touching Snakes in Stanley Kunitz’s Garden
Stanley Kunitz was well into his nineties when Genine Lentine collaborated with him on a luminous book about poetry and gardening. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden came out in 2005 and it includes interviews Lentine did with Kunitz, mostly about his long-tended garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s a →
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Putting Colossians in the Mix
Reading Colossians Remixed:Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, published in 2004, is a reminder of a time when postmodernity was in its ascendency. It’s not clear where we live now, but less than two decades later you feel that we are somewhere very different than the environment Walsh and Keesmaat →
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Joy Harjo Reclaims America
Joy Harjo wants to reclaim America. That’s what I imagine as I read through the wide variety of poems in her most recent book. An American Sunrise plays with form and time, pulling together strands to weave a picture of the land, particularly the land traced by the journey of Harjo’s ancestors, the Muscogee (Mvskoke), →
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Standing at the Threshold of a Post-Pandemic Church
Here’s a bit of trivia for you: In ancient Roman construction, there was often a stone placed at the threshold of a door that one would have to traverse in order to enter or exit a building. That stone was called a limen. I tell you that because the word lies behind this year’s trendiest →
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For the Love of Dolly Parton
When I took a part-time job as a disc jockey for a country music station in 1984, there were some hard and fast rules. You always time your hour to get in the ads and mark them in the log. Songs in heavy rotation had to cycle through at least once during your shift. And →
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Carson McCullers at 104
“Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book.” Carson McCullers is describing a central character in her remarkable debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and →
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Why Trees Make Terrible Writers
Trees are beautiful things, but they are terrible writers. The problem is they have no sense of timing that a human can relate to. 500 years is nothing to a great tree. But try pacing a potboiler to that timescale. The problems of arboreal authorship become apparent halfway in to Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 →
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Heartlands 