One of the more interesting resources on the Internet is the collected interviews at Paris Review. It is a sixty-year archive of hundreds of long form conversations with poets and writers, like Mary Karr, R Crumb, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, and Czeslaw Milosz, among many, many others. One of the more provocative interviews is with the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose critical prose has a significant impact on me, opening up to me the work of Robert Frost,... Read more
Over 300 people have died in the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. There are 50 people buried under the rubble. The factory was built on a swampland. This raises, once again, really tough questions for us–for which there are no simple answers. Anna McMullen has a helpful, balanced, reasonable article, called “Who Really Pays for Our Cheap Clothes?” in which she suggests the responsibility is not ultimately or primarily the consumer’s. The consumer “shops” for a reasonable deal. Furthermore, to... Read more
As a longtime Boston resident, and one who still deeply loves that city, I so appreciated George Packer’s piece in a recent New Yorker. I think it says a lot of what I felt about all the difficult yet inspiring happenings there this week. To watch a week ago Monday as scores of Bostonians, with little concern for themselves, ran toward the explosions, assisting the bloodied and injured in humble ways that were nothing short of heroic. The same with... Read more
The artist exists in an awkward relationship to her audience. She labors for many months, perhaps several years, to produce an exhibition of paintings to present to the public. She sacrifices time with her family and friends, isolating herself emotionally, intellectually, and physically. She reads, thinks, writes, reflects on her work, often questioning, doubting, and, on more than one occasion, vowing to cancel the show altogether. In other words, our artist experiences death—she dies to others, perhaps, but it is... Read more
I lived in Boston 25 years and walked in the path of Monday’s blasts many times. The first bomb went off in front of my optician. The explosion blew out all the windows. I want to be shocked by the inhumanity of it all, but I’ve seen too much of it of late to be shocked anymore. I am desperately saddened, especially now that the identity of the victims is public. For a large city, Boston isn’t a very big... Read more
What do looking at paintings have to do with what most evangelicals understand by “engaging,” “transforming,” and “redeeming” culture? Not much. It is no secret that North American evangelicals regard politics to be the primary means by which God is active in the world. And many evangelicals have recently become convinced that “culture” (i.e., films, television—media with large audience constituencies like YouTube) is an important means by which electoral politics can be affected and public policy shaped. This view, that... Read more
Does the ordinary work have eternal significance? Do the products and achievements of industry, art, music, education, medicine and (pretty much everything else we could think of) carry on into the new creation (Eschaton)? This is the question Darrell Cosden addresses in The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work (Hendrickson, 2006) and, in a more detailed, deeper way, in A Theology of Work: Work and the New Creation (Wipf and Stock / Paternoster, 2004). In these works, Cosden tackles a problem common to contemporary Christian... Read more
Philosopher extraordinaire Alvin Plantinga offers a trenchant review of new atheist Sam Harris’ latest book, Free Will. Harris argues that any notion of willfulness in human behavior is illusory. “Either our wills [i.e. decisions and choices] are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.” Plantinga recognizes the argument as one with a long history, but asserts that having a long history of argument does... Read more
In February I offered a reflection on Jonah 4: 1-4 at a chapel at Knox Seminary. I explored our anger at God’s grace and our refusal to allow God to be the subject of our existential sentences. Watch it here. Video Platform Video Management Video Solutions Video Player Read more
David Brooks’ New York Times column this week on same-sex marriage, entitled Freedom Loses One, could just as well been titled In Praise of Limits. His basic thrust was how the marriage severely limits freedom (if you define freedom as doing whatever you please). In America we have more at liberty than ever, as social mores and religious constraints have lost their cohesion and power. It is this liberty that has allowed homosexuality to grow in acceptance with society at large. It is ironic,... Read more
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