The Mill and the Cross

Last updated on: August 22, 2013 at 4:32 pm By A. G. Harmon

In Breughel’s panoramic painting, “The Procession to Calvary,” the fallen Savior, collapsed under the cross beam, is mostly ignored. Although he’s right in the center of things, nobody pays him too much mind. Instead, the fantastic landscape that surrounds him churns with a thousand wheels of activity, each cog connected to the other, spinning upon its fellows like the clockwork mill that sits atop a monument of stone, high above. Breughel seems to have loved this approach, philosopher artist that he... Read more

Words for Good and Evil, Part II

Last updated on: August 20, 2013 at 1:07 pm By Tony Woodlief

Continued from yesterday. “Why is it possible,” asked Richard Feynman a year before he won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, “for people to stay so woefully ignorant and yet reasonably happy in modern society when so much knowledge is unavailable to them?” Feynman fretted that people cannot embrace wonder if they do not imbibe science. In my church there is a young man who cannot speak; he can only point and hoot. He claps his hands during the liturgy;... Read more

Words for Good and Evil, Part I

Last updated on: August 22, 2013 at 12:33 pm By Tony Woodlief

In the months to come, England’s National Health Service will sterilize a young man with a very low IQ. In Philadelphia, a three-year-old who will soon die without a new kidney is barred from entering the organ transplant waiting list because she is mentally disabled. I suspect most of us have lost the moral language necessary to talk about either. We don’t know how to discuss these facts any more than we know how to discuss God or the soul... Read more

We Have Eternity in Our Hearts

Last updated on: August 19, 2013 at 4:00 pm By Vic Sizemore

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) I watched a video on The Big Think website a few months ago about the center of the universe. According to the video there are two universes: one is the actual universe, which is infinite; the other is the observable universe, which exists in proportion to its observers.... Read more

Yeshua Ha’Mashiach

Last updated on: August 19, 2013 at 12:13 pm By Bradford Winters

In drafting my last post, “Orthodox Films Fill the Void,” I intended to end the piece with a story that would serve as a thematic button: the day after seeing Fill the Void (a remarkable film released this summer about an ultra-Orthodox family in contemporary Tel Aviv) I finally made good on a long-standing wish to visit a Messianic synagogue. For the latter experience filled an even deeper void in its own right than the former—or filled the same void... Read more

Can I See You?

Last updated on: August 18, 2013 at 9:21 pm By Shannon Huffman Polson

The vision test for the Army aviation pilot school application caused great angst among my classmates and me. One failed the requirement for depth perception by a tiny margin, and worked to have her senior-ranking father help to find a way to override it; she was unsuccessful. Vision was critical. The year I graduated college, I entered flight school with the required 20/20 uncorrected vision. In flight school, we studied all aspects of aeromedicine, including the anatomy of the eye.... Read more

Fast-Food Funeral Procession

Last updated on: August 12, 2013 at 3:48 pm By Chad Thomas Johnston

The line lurched forward one vehicle at a time, halogen halos radiating from headlights. Although it was eleven o’clock at night, I could not help but think of the funeral processions I saw as a boy, cars coursing through town in the daytime with lights aglow. As I sat in the drive-thru lane at Taco Bell that night in 2008, I began to think of that line of cars as a fast-food funeral procession. But who—or what—were all of us... Read more

Genius(es) Wanted

Last updated on: December 4, 2013 at 12:24 pm By Guest Contributor

Guest Post By Santiago Ramos Where do literary geniuses come from? Or should the question be: Where does literary genius come from? Does genius live only in certain persons or can even a mediocre writer get a humble share? These questions are agitating certain sectors of American letters. “No more appeals to the inexplicable nature of genius,” observe the editors in a recent issue of n + 1. “Poets now are music makers, not mythmakers,” laments Mark Edmundson, in a... Read more

Becoming Baroque

Last updated on: August 12, 2013 at 1:42 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Oscar Wilde’s mischievously challenging line appears across the opening frame of a film about Concerto Italiano’s recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. The film came unexpectedly into my hands. I hadn’t listened to the Brandenburgs in a while, and felt a need for their exuberating uplift. So I got the CDs from my public library, not knowing these performers but taking a chance on them. I was wowed by the crisp liveliness... Read more

Sorting Through the Past

Last updated on: August 12, 2013 at 12:20 pm By A. G. Harmon

I’ve been cleaning out an attic—not my own—along with drawers, closets, shelves, storehouses, and barns —also, not my own, or at least not primarily. I don’t live here anymore, though I’ve always called this place home. I’m doing these things in preparation for the sale of a farm that has been lived in continuously, and happily, for forty years. During that time, the house accumulated the contents of others’ houses, boxed up and moved in when the people who owned... Read more