In weather-appropriate links, forget comfort eating: try comfort reading. Why do some books seem comforting? It may be because they take you back to a particular time or place, or perhaps they have that magic carpet capacity, found in the best children’s books, to fly you out of yourself. Sometimes it’s even consoling to read [Read More...]
My friend Bethany runs the Park Forum, which is dedicated to helping city-dwellers (particularly New Yorkers) read and listen to the Bible more. And she gave an interview to Christianity Today recently: There’s something about listening to Scripture in community. These letters weren’t meant to be read only in part. People in the time of their [Read More...]
I (like many of you, I’m sure) love Handel’s Messiah, ever since I spent years as a teenager participating in a choir that performed the oratorio every Christmas and Easter. But I thought this piece on the recent performance at Trinity Wall Street (which, incidentally, is two blocks from my office) was interesting: But before the [Read More...]
Here’s Bradford Winters on his family’s recent trip to Ireland, and “this great hunger”: For when I came to Ireland entirely well-fed and altogether famished, I came planning that our family sabbatical would double in ways as an individual semi-retreat. I would be working, yes, but far away from the hectic elements of life back [Read More...]
Yesterday was the second Sunday of Advent, and, as promised, I’m posting another round of Advent reflections that I wrote a few years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the one on “peace”: Peace, as St. Augustine says, is more than simply the absence of war. It is the tranquility of order—when all of the spheres [Read More...]
Over at Comment, James K.A. Smith talks about patronage – the kind we all engage in, whether or not we’re wealthy: At the heart of this sense of “patronage” is a vision of cultural life—not just the arts, but even the mundane aspects of commercial exchange—that is rooted inrelationship. When the hardware store thanked me for my patronage, [Read More...]
Every so often (probably more than you’d expect), people say to me, “I just don’t get poetry.” Maybe that’s you. If it is – or even if it isn’t – here’s a helpful piece from The Atlantic. It’s a friendly, non-jargony, slightly cheeky intro to poetry. How many of us believe poetry is useless? How many of us [Read More...]
It’s that time of year: time to send Christmas packages to loved ones who are far away. That’s not quite as fun as being there to see them open the packages, but Kinfolk has some suggestions. Tips and tricks, homemade goods, spices/teas, and other ideas – take a quick look. You might find something good! [Read more...]
Over at The High Calling, Charity Craig looks at the high calling of abundance: “You’re always so positive,” people often used to say to me. One of my doctors likes to tell me how shocked he was when shortly after he met me, paralyzed and lying in a hospital bed, I told him that the [Read More...]
Welcome to Advent! Some of my friends who work at the Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts at Biola sent me a link to their very cool new online Advent calendar, which you can access here. They described it this way: Transforming the familiar Advent calendar — a cardboard home waiting to reveal prized [Read More...]
It’s Black Friday, but that also means that the new year starts this weekend! No, not by the Gregorian calendar – by the church calendar, which celebrates the four Sundays leading up to Christmas as the season of Advent. The first Sunday of Advent is this Sunday, December 1. And that means the new year [Read More...]
It’s Thanksgiving here in the States today. Here’s a poem to celebrate. Thanksgiving by Linda McCarriston Every year we call it down upon ourselves, the chaos of the day before the occasion, the morning before the meal. Outdoors, the men cut wood, fueling appetite in the gray air, as Nana, Arlene, Mary, Robin—whatever women we [Read More...]
The fiftieth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death was last week, and Cambridge University Press published a new collection of his reviews and criticism to commemorate the occasion, including a new essay called “Image and Imagination” that hasn’t been published before. The Guardian has an excerpt: Does anyone suppose that the imaginative value of such fantasies can be [Read More...]
I’ve really been enjoying the work of my friends over at In Earnest, a lovely new web magazine about living intentionally. And while economics has never been my favorite subject, I thought this little piece on capitalism by Laura Herrod (a former student of mine!) was excellent: Words like “capitalism” and terms like “the middle class” [Read More...]
Last Friday, I published a piece on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at Christianity Today that garnered a ton of response. In it, I talk about not just the movies, but the merchandising: I’m not just frustrated, I’m appalled: all this tie-in merchandise declaws the story of The Hunger Games, in much the same way that the actual affluent [Read More...]
The composer John Tavener died last weekend – a man whose conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy meant a great deal for his composing. Over at The Curator, Brian Gillikin briefly considered the composer’s legacy: Tavener’s Orthodoxy was almost too Orthodox, as he flung himself fully into its mysticism and the Eastern liturgy, both of which became the [Read More...]
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