An Orchestra Against Ignorance

May 15, 2013 By Peggy Rosenthal

The alumni magazine of Brown University, my alma mater, begins its article on a unique orchestra like this: “We are an orchestra against ignorance.” That’s how Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim describes the West-Eastern Divan, which consists of young musicians hailing from Israel and its Arab neighbors. Picture a teenage violinist from Israel; his name is Ilya. Picture a teenage violinist from Lebanon; his name is Claude. They know nothing of one another’s lives. Or, actually, they think they do know about... Read more

A Corporal Work of Mercy

May 15, 2013 By Jessica Griffith

I was nearly two weeks late, so I already knew the answer, but I took the test anyway, in the bathroom of my dad’s house in Louisiana. We’d driven down from Virginia, two solid days in the car with our children, ages seven and two. My sister drove her two days from Kansas. The long drive isn’t the only reason our reunions have become increasingly rare. Since I left more than ten years ago, I don’t go home often. Except... Read more

Deliver Us from Evil

May 14, 2013 By Guest Contributor

Guest Post By Nancy Nordenson The day after the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, I sat myself down and considered my role in the tragedy. Now bombs have exploded in Boston and I’m asking myself the same question. Of course no bomb was built in my kitchen and no gun was loaded under my roof, but could I have done something to help stop either of those events? I’m thinking back years ago to a crisis... Read more

Two Tribes: Good Wishes and Good Works

May 13, 2013 By Tony Woodlief

One summer my family got evicted from the house we were renting in Florida. The welding jobs ended and my stepfather refused to do anything that wasn’t union work so we burned through our money while he watched television and waited for the union to call. My mother worked and did most of the cooking and put up with her husband’s liquor and drugs and abuse until one day she wasn’t there. She’d gone to the hospital for “her nerves,”... Read more

A Theology of Singleness, Part 2

May 10, 2013 By Guest Contributor

Guest Post By J. M. Samuelson Continued from yesterday. Alan Jacobs recently made a wise observation: “there are certain kinds of ‘growing up’ that don’t happen until you get married—that simply getting older doesn’t do for you.” I’d like to point to some parallel category of knowledge specific to singleness, but I don’t know if I can. Marriage seems to reconstitute one’s experience of time in a way that singleness simply cannot. Man is the doubtful creature: every avenue of... Read more

A Theology of Singleness, Part 1

May 9, 2013 By Guest Contributor

Guest Post By J. M. Samuelson Publishers today are churning out self-help literature at ever-increasing rates. Many of these tomes aim at helping selves better enjoy or endure singleness. Based on my acquaintance with this literature I can say that few areas of descriptive English fail so utterly to satisfy as the nomenclature of singleness. Virtually every term of choice sells somebody short, whether single persons themselves or the “attached” persons from whom these terms are supposed to offer useful... Read more

The Marrow of Prayer

May 8, 2013 By Shannon Huffman Polson

Early this year, Spanish researchers published a peer-reviewed paper considering the evidence of social learning in Middle Pleistocene hominids as indicated by patterns of butchery. In the study, part of the Bolomer excavation under the auspices of the Prehistory Museum of Valencia, researchers examined bones to find that breakages during butchering to extract marrow occurred at unlikely places, indicating a specific intention, knowledge and practices transmitted through the generations from parent to child, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I tuck in my... Read more

Emerging from the Tomb Intact

May 7, 2013 By Lindsey Crittenden

There’s a moment in Anna Karenina in which a frustrated Anna turns to her husband. She had been very sick, but she’s better now. During her sickness, over what they thought was her deathbed, her lover and her husband reached out and clasped hands. The urgency of her illness brought about reconciliation. Karenin, the wronged husband, let go of his moral outrage and forgave both Vronsky and Anna. Tears ensued. Grace shone forth. All felt the bliss. At the moment... Read more

Tuck In Your Artifice, It’s Showing

May 6, 2013 By Vic Sizemore

When someone shared Michael Chabon’s New York Review of Books blog post about the movies of Wes Anderson a couple months ago, I was initially drawn into his thinking about the nature of the world and of art making. I was with him as he talked about the schooling in brokenness, how we long for a lost wholeness in a world that has been shattered. But then he turned his attention to the question about what to do with the... Read more

Beautiful Loser: Poetry at the Mall

May 3, 2013 By Guest Contributor

Guest Post By Daniel Bowman Jr. Pray for one good humiliation every day. –Richard Rohr I sit by the podium as an earnest arts administrator I just met gives me a long introduction. She must’ve pulled it from my website; it’s a full bio. She works through the names of magazines where my poems have “appeared,” and I wonder what that word conveys to the uninitiated. Some of the journals are obscure, what poets call “little magazines,” while others are... Read more