My wife and I were in Chicago over the summer, and as part of our tourist rounds, we of course visited the Art Institute, which is far too large to take in in a single day. As happens every time I go to a large museum, by the time we walked out I was in a state of melancholy existential astonishment. One installation was a meticulous recreation of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, some of them estimated to be... Read more
By Gregory Wolfe Last week we posted a list of The Top 25 Contemporary Writers of Faith. We did so for several reasons, perhaps the most important being that there continue to be articles and essays proclaiming a dearth of contemporary literature that grapples with the age-old religious questions of our Western tradition. We begged to differ, and we put out what we believed to be a pretty outstanding group of writers to furnish irrefutable evidence. The response was electric.... Read more
Continued from yesterday. A tempest of Winters temper—mine—had blown through the Highlands of Scotland on our harried, hurried itinerary, and I pondered that now in Ireland. My working notion of a “roots” trip up until that point pertained only in the genealogical sense: Scotland and Ireland being, respectively, my maternal and paternal ancestral stomping grounds. But in my review of the course on spiritual hearing I’d begun the month prior, a most delicious linguistic epiphany was about to present... Read more
If you grew up in the Seventies as I did, you might recall a popular children’s T-shirt of the era—one at least popular among the reputedly disaffected youth of Cocopah Elementary in Scottsdale, Arizona. The caption (no graphics) went something like this: My Parents Went On Vacation To Las Vegas and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt. Not just Las Vegas, of course; but Seattle, Chicago, New York, and so forth. Yet all we kids got—for the message was... Read more
On August 26, 1883, the people of Perth, Western Australia, paused to register what historians have referred to as “the loudest sound ever heard.” Almost 2,000 miles away, a volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa rocked the world, obliterating two-thirds of the island, and causing tsunamis that killed over 36,000 people. In 2012, atmospheric alternative rockers The Choir titled their fourteenth record The Loudest Sound Ever Heard, too—a decidedly ironic move for the Nashville, Tennessee-based outfit. The band has... Read more
Guest Post Brian Volck “Somewhere is better than anywhere.” —Flannery O’Connor Early in the film, Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles, a man poking about in the Texas borderlands says, “You live in a place, you should learn something about it.” Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler have lived in and learned about Ohio most of their lives: rural childhoods, Malone College where they met, and music-making in the historic Cincinnati neighborhood from which their band, Over... Read more
I rise with the congregation. I form a fist. They form a fist. We form a fist. The fist is personal. The fist is communal. We have sinned. The fist knocks on my chest. We have sinned. The fist knocks on their chests. We have sinned. The fist knocks on our chests. The fist knocks. I chant, they chant, we chant: We have sinned, betrayed, robbed, and deceived. We have acted basely and caused evil; We have acted maliciously, violently,... Read more
Guest Post Jen Hinst-White Continued from yesterday. Rob goes to bed; I go to my desk and light white candles. Someone I know makes a yearly Lenten project of holding a poetry contest, soliciting translations of psalms from friends. The timing is good; I need a quiet task. Which psalm, then? Years ago I memorized Psalm 25, and it’s become my favorite ground to walk in the book of Psalms. It’s the one I return to, a beggar’s song... Read more
Guest Post Jen Hinst-White How did I never notice before? An ultrasound room has all the markings of a ceremonial space—a theater of mystery. The lighting is dim. You enter via ritual: undress, sit in this chair, clothe yourself in paper. The monitor is mounted so high on the wall that your eyes naturally go upward, as they would to a comet or reddening eclipse. You wait. And then you see things invisible to the human eye. Throw in an... Read more
As I wrote yesterday, my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, had said early in our twenty-five years together, “It’s good that you see spiritual direction in terms of a barking dog instead of only as a matter of prayer methods.” But before long he was asking me about my prayer life at nearly every one of our monthly sessions. “There’s no need to go to Mass every day,” he said (he who, as a priest, presided at daily Mass). “Sunday... Read more
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