By Paul Luikart Last Wednesday I settled down on the couch to do something I’d been meaning to do for months: Watch True Detective. My kids were asleep. My wife was asleep. I was all set to binge watch until my eyes bled. Season one, episode one cued up on my laptop. Play. Woody Harrelson in a suit. A naked dead woman tied up in a field, deer antlers stuck to her skull. Stringy-haired Matthew McConaughey lighting a cig in... Read more
Poets have no problem seeing the world evolving within God’s care. Okay, that’s too general a statement. Let’s just take some of the poets in the special issue of Image (#85) on “Evolution and the Imago Dei.” (And since Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Sì came out nearly the same time as Image, I hear the Pope conversing with the poets.) Poet Pattiann Rogers has for decades traced the minutiae of a natural world alive in unexpected ways. I reach for her collection Song of the World... Read more
The day after I let my wife know that we had enough money to pay for our son’s college education—he was a sophomore at Carolina at the time—, she let me know she had decided to retire in the fall. Our daughter was pregnant. The baby was due in November. After retiring at the end of October, my wife would head to New York to be with our daughter for the final weeks of the pregnancy and the first weeks... Read more
By Kathleen L. Housley This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation’s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos. Horseshoe crabs are not on anyone’s list of favorite animals. Looking like slow-moving tanks, they hit the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean in late spring to spawn. The only thing about them that might be perceived as warm and... Read more
Dear Patheos: I hope you guys are doing well. I’ve been meaning to drop you a line and I’ve finally gotten around to it. The last three years have gone by so quickly! Image journal’s blog “Good Letters” has flourished here, gaining many more readers than would ever have been possible if we’d remained sequestered on our own website. We’ve been amazed at your growth and all the many fascinating conversations about religions that take place here. The rise of Patheos has... Read more
The little boy moves amongst his creation in the sand: a montage drawn with a stick, with fingers, with his heel dragged before him as he hobbles backwards. Amidst its various pictures are small mosaics of driftwood and shell, all of it held together by whatever artistic vision fires the imagination of a seven-year-old. He stands slick-bellied in afternoon light streaming through gathered clouds to strike the gunmetal sea. The boy is oblivious to the light, to the sea, to... Read more
It was a night of tumors, broken relationships, lost jobs, and loneliness. A night of sharp words cutting people off at the knees. I hadn’t even read about that day’s ISIS exploits, burning churches, or anonymous children washing ashore—just the workaday grief in my messages and newsfeed. I have an eating disorder. I’m so lonely I can’t sleep. Will I ever get a paycheck again? By the grace of God, I wasn’t one of the lamenters, but I was a... Read more
God became man, so that man might become God. —St. Athanasius What you find-ah / What you feel now / What you know-a / To be real —Cheryl Lynn God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. —Meister Eckhart By Caroline Langston How do you talk about God to people who don’t believe that he even exists? The strategies of argument, of theodicy, would seem to have worn thin at this cultural juncture.... Read more
It must be a common occurrence—having certain inanimate things make periodic appearances throughout a life, much like acquaintances who keep popping up in odd places—on the bus, in a crowd, across a room. They’re noticed, but barely so; the conscious mind remarks upon them—“There’s that thing again”—then moves on until they reappear, stepping out from the flood of experience with a gentle tug at the sleeve. When I was a boy, a paperback copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day would appear... Read more
By Natalie Settles Continued from yesterday. Image: Natalie, a lot of your recent artwork is temporary—that is, it’s drawn directly onto gallery walls and when the show is over, only photos are left. Can you speak to this? Natalie Settles: Yes, these are works with lifespans. In fact, the installations are typically up for the same amount of time over which the lifecycle of a small annual plant would play out. When viewers encounter one of these temporary works, they’re... Read more
Good Letters
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