Another presidential campaign season is upon us, with all its ugly divisiveness and demonizing of politicians who don’t share one’s own views. How is a Christian to live out Jesus’ command to love one another (John 13:34) in such times? In the early 1980s, as a newly baptized Catholic, I plunged into a study of the spirituality of nonviolence. What pushed me was a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Catholic Bishops in May, 1983: The Challenge of Peace: God’s... Read more
“You OK?” Craig touches my hand, looks at me. We’re in the car, Sunday evening, driving home. Something shifts inside me, like sand. This experience of having him check in with me is new. After almost fifty years of practice, I’m so used to saying fine that I don’t always feel what I’m feeling until hours (or days) later, when I wonder why I’m cranky or weepy or anxious. Two years ago, after driving Craig past my childhood house, showing... Read more
It was a Saturday night and my wife, Becki, wanted to stream the documentary, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, on Netflix. As a new father, I protested. Our seven-month-old daughter Evie carries with her the promise that Elmo will invade our house soon enough—but this was too soon. I also protested because I lost much of my enthusiasm for puppets when Jim Henson died on May 16, 1990. When Henson’s silver cord was severed—a phrase the writer of Ecclesiastes uses... Read more
Welcome to Good Letters on Patheos. For over four years, we at Image, a literary/arts journal inhabiting the intersection between art, faith, and mystery, have published the daily Good Letters blog on our website, www.imagejournal.org. We want to give a big shout out to our readers who’ve followed Good Letters from Image—your support and enthusiasm have brought us to the vibrant public square that is Patheos. To those of you who are reading Good Letters for the first time, we... Read more
Yom Rishon (l’Shabbat): the first day toward the coming Shabbat: Sunday on the Gregorian calendar. And the psalmist asks, “Who may ascend the mountain of Y-H-V-H?” And the psalmist asks, “Who may rise in God’s sanctuary?” Yom Sheni (l’Shabbat): the second day toward the coming Shabbat: Monday on the Western calendar. And the psalmist says, “In your temple, God, we meditate upon your kindness.” Thus, we progress, from day to day, from psalm to psalm, from below to above, from... Read more
When my mother turned seventy a year and a half ago, the occasion coincided with my rotation in the Good Letters blog. My post to mark the milestone was titled “Telemachus to Penelope,” the title of a poem I had written for my mother in the wake of her divorce from my father after thirty-three years of marriage. My poem, inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s “Odysseus to Telemachus” and written soon after college, was pretty awful in hindsight, but the title... Read more
Maybe it was instinct that sent me back to relive the 1924 Olympic Games. In Part One of this reflection, you found me despairing, feeling a sudden collapse of my lifelong will to write. Slumped on the couch, I was watching, of all things, Chariots of Fire. As a child, I loved this movie. But it wasn’t until college that I saw how it stands in stark contrast to so much evangelical entertainment, how it avoids a faith will make... Read more
So, why Chariots of Fire? Why is that what I chose for tonight’s movie? Netflix is recommending all kinds of recent, highly rated titles. Why revisit this old DVD? It happened like this: Two hours earlier, I’d taken the car, planning to drive north to a waterfront park to work on my novel. I planned to walk along the beach and watch the sun’s long surrender while ideas filled my head. Then I’d veer into the nearest café or pub... Read more
Most of us are vulnerable to the solipsistic notion that our sufferings and joys are exquisite. My ex-wife once attended a seminar, a Christian women’s retreat, in which the keynote speaker opined about the peace of God. “Most of you have never truly known the peace of God,” the speaker told her audience. “You may think you’ve known the peace of God, but you haven’t.” The speaker had the peace of God in a headlock. She wrote a book about... Read more
It’s good to see the return of writer/director Whit Stillman. I missed his refreshing take on the world, peopled with earnest, decent, often forlorn characters who parody the culture by way of urbane, stylized discussions. In Damsels in Distress, Stillman again features the upper classes, those most maligned by the yawn-inducing “independent” film establishment that applauds its own supposed bravery by shooting ancient fish in an ancient barrel. When he broke onto the scene in 1990 with Metropolitan, a tribute to debutante... Read more
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