The most reliable callings are born from reflecting on a situation that is more or less imposed on us. A vocation is nearly always a way of accepting a situation that was first of all considered a limitation. –Roger Mehl, Love and Society Read more

Fasting is not dieting. Fasting is not about keeping a Christian version of kosher. Fasting is about hunger and humility (which is increased as we allow ourselves to become weak). Fasting is about allowing our heart to break.–from here; via… somebody on Facebook Read more

COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE COUNTERTOPS: Last night I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, and I have exactly two points to make about this movie. 1. She is a canvas. The lead actress is all giant eyes and vulnerability, and she lets you read her, she lets you turn her into a giant projection screen for anything you really wanted to see played out with long lashes. Her entire character is “I am who you need me to be!” and she doesn’t... Read more

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL. Soulful, well-choreographed, heart-wrenching. I could watch this every day. Read more

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE STYLE OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE PAINTING. Via the Rattus. Read more

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS: …As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they... Read more

EVERY YEAR, Daniel Mitsui dedicates the month of November to memento moris (mementos mori?) and other Christian artistry of death. Every year, I forget to tell you guys until it’s been a couple weeks! But definitely check out his typically stark and sublime collection of death masks, dances of death, Outside Over There-style tombs, and even an alphabet of death. Read more

NEVER FORGET WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO LIVE IN ROOMS LIKE THESE: GetReligion excerpts the discussion of faith from an NPR interview with David Carr, former Washington City Paper editor-in-chief and the author of one of the very best books I’ve read this year, The Night of the Gun. I’ll write more about his book when I do my year-end roundup, but for now I’ll just say that I found his comments on NPR characteristically relatable and down-to-earth and humbled. Read more

NEW RULES SLASHING CRACK COCAINE SENTENCES GO INTO EFFECT. Read more

If a composition has no strangeness, there is no virtue in its stability. Stability without strangeness is the work of a commonplace hand; strangeness without stability, of an immature hand.–Gong Xian (from the wall caption to a really haunting ink painting in this terrific exhibit–there’s a hut in the foreground, all soft brushstrokes for the thatch roof and the surrounding trees and wooden bridge, but in the distance there are dark mountains–and behind the tall dark mountains, an even taller... Read more