The Dissonant Note

Last updated on: July 20, 2015 at 12:35 pm By Guest Contributor

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. I have a heart arrhythmia that, though benign, is frustrating and feels like death despite its clinical insignificance. It has no cause and no effect; cardiologists call it capricious. It’s meaningless and unreasonable and irregular, and I hate it. After a night of... Read more

Learning to Pray

Last updated on: July 13, 2015 at 11:49 am By Caroline Langston

Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. —Abba Moses The way up and the way down are one and the same. —Heraclitus It is six o’clock in the morning. I am on an overnight business trip to New York, alone in my hotel room. Weak streams of dawn light leak around the edges of the blackout shades on the window of my room in the Club Quarters Midtown. For the moment, I have silenced... Read more

Divine Drudgery

Last updated on: July 13, 2015 at 11:50 am By Guest Contributor

Two weeks after we moved to the Mennonite community in rural Illinois, a baby was born in a teepee in my backyard. My neighbor Angela was a doula and had agreed to let a friend give birth in her own home. I’m not sure even Angela had expected the full-sized teepee to be erected fifty feet from the double sliding glass doors that looked out onto the backyard we shared. Really, though, we share more than a backyard. Along with... Read more

Smoke Break

Last updated on: June 24, 2015 at 1:23 pm By Dyana Herron

After I’ve peeled the plastic protective layer off the nicotine patch and am holding the flesh-colored circle above the actual, paler flesh of David’s forearm, careful not to touch the sticky medicated part with my fingers, I pause. He looks at me in the bathroom mirror, lips parted, dark eyes glinting. I think he’s panicking a little, wants to back out, but I’m wrong. “Let’s put it on the other arm, my left arm,” he says. “Just in case I... Read more

Franz Wright: Solving the Problems of Poetry

Last updated on: July 13, 2015 at 11:52 am By Morgan Meis

Maybe all poets are unhinged. There is historical evidence for this going back to ancient days. The Roman poet Catullus opened one infamous poem (known as “Catullus16”) with the line, “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.” It’s among the more, shall we say, forthright responses to critics a poet has ever penned (“I will sodomize you and face-fuck you”). Such behavior among the poets continues to this day. Franz Wright—who died in May—was known to take a Catullan stance where critics... Read more

Ray Bradbury Lives Forever

Last updated on: June 22, 2015 at 4:51 pm By Gregory Wolfe

On Labor Day weekend in 1932, a twelve year-old boy from Waukegan, Illinois, having just emerged from a family funeral, noticed a carnival tent by the shore of Lake Michigan and went to investigate. He had heard of a magician there named Mr. Electrico, who sat with a sword in hand on an electric chair with current passing through him, making his hair stand on end. When Mr. Electrico stood up to knight the boy, making the current pass to... Read more

The Art of the Authentic: Bill Baer’s Times Square

Last updated on: June 21, 2015 at 3:18 pm By A. G. Harmon

In 1973, Orson Welles made a documentary, F for Fake, in which he followed the story of Elmyr de Hory, a famous forger whose work was indistinguishable from the great masters he mimicked. One of the participants in the film was writer Clifford Irving, Elmyr’s biographer, who was holding forth on the forger while at the very same time perpetrating a literary fraud by penning a false autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles, the narrator, delighted in reminding the audience that... Read more

Is the Gospel Good News or Bad?

Last updated on: June 19, 2015 at 3:56 pm By Sara Zarr

Continuing a little bit what I started with my essay “What Is a Christian?,” I’ve been thinking about how I might articulate the good news of the gospel to myself and perhaps begin to comprehend it. Theologically, I know basically what the gospel is. And if you ask Google, it returns a Wikipedia page that describes the Christian gospel as “the news of the coming of the Kingdom of God…, and of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection to... Read more

A Holy Habitation for Life’s Story

Last updated on: June 17, 2015 at 7:32 am By Guest Contributor

By Allison Backous Troy May the Lord bless thee out of Zion; and so shalt thou behold the good things of Jerusalem all the days of thy life. —St. Gregory of Palamas Last night, I dreamed that I was in Montana. My neighborhood looked like the one I live in—same Tudor house, same cul-de-sac, same wooded corner where I take my dog for morning walks. But there were mountains to the south, gray and wide, and the grass was a... Read more

Wanted: God—Dead or Alive?

Last updated on: June 17, 2015 at 7:31 am By Peggy Rosenthal

If you practice a religion faithfully—faith-fully—, why do you do this? And why is it this particular religion that you practice? “The embarrassing fact is that most religious people seem to believe in a religion for no better reason than that their parents believed in it.” So states poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch in his review-essay “Is Reason Enough?” in The New York Review of Books (April 23, 2015). (more…) Read more