“INTO THE DESERT: LENT AND FILM”: Lent is a penitential season, but also an invitation to a closer intimacy with God. The Pentateuch presents the forty years of wilderness wandering as a punishment for unbelief, but the prophets offer a startling complementary vision of the desert as a privileged time of intimacy between God and Israel, a romantic season in which God wooed Israel as his bride (Jeremiah 2:2, Hosea 2:16). The two aspects are inseparable; the time of privileged... Read more

“FORGET YOUR PAST.” Via Ratty. Read more

One night in his study with brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, [my father] asked quietly, “Do you honestly think, my daughter, that dancing has progressed since the time of the Greeks?” “No,” I replied snappily. “Do you think you write any better than Euripides?” That ought to hold him, I figured. He looked at me long and slow. “No, my dear,” he said, “but we have Euripides’ plays. They have lasted. A dancer ceases to... Read more

PASTORS, CONGREGATION FIND A WAY TO RECONCILE AT GERMANTOWN BAPTIST: …On Sunday evening, Jan. 29, in Germantown, Fowler called his flock together to confess, forgive and repent corporately in a special service he called “Grace Applied.” “We have prayed so long for this service,” Fowler began as hundreds of past, present and future church members and leaders filled the seats of the worship center. “Your Holy Spirit has prepared the hearts of many, many people who have a desire to... Read more

“MARK TWAIN’S RAPTUROUS LIST OF HIS FAVORITE AMERICAN FOODS.“ Read more

The memory of the martyrs has historically played an important role in the Christian imagination. It is extremely important that the martyrs not be sentimentalized. They are not always especially good, virtuous, or innocent folk. Ironically, to idealize the martyrs, or victims generally, is to rob them of their common humanity. What makes murder so terrible is not that the victims are virtuous, but that it is murder, the taking of human life in contravention of the law of God.... Read more

TALLIS SCHOLARS, “MISERERE.” Read more

THE FINE MISMATING OF A HIM AND HER…: Something I’ve been thinking about without much coherence or resolution. I have a couple footnotes which I may post later, but for now I figured I’d let my readers whack at this pinata for a while! As you know, Bob, I got a lot out of Christopher C. Roberts’s Creation and Covenant. Nestled among its more central claims and arguments, it makes a very strong theological case for something I’ve already thought... Read more

CHILDREN’S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I’d add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids’ longing for gender in some ways… while resisting kids’ tendency toward really rigid and sometimes destructive ideas about gender (for example, the tendency to mark out some activities which are generally fruitful for both sexes, like crying or art, as the territory of only one sex). As I indicated here, a unisex world would lack... Read more

“Two abysses, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate two abysses, and both at the same time. We searched the house and found nothing.”–I really like this sardonic juxtaposition, from the prosecutor’s final speech in TBK Read more