Continued from yesterday. On the first day of my class “Spiritual Autobiographies: Theirs and Ours,” a few students shared that they weren’t “spiritual people.” Why, I wondered, did they sign up for this elective class? Some of them, I would learn later in the semester, had been deeply wounded by religion. A few said that religion had been forced on them by their parents. At this moment of emerging adulthood, it was time to turn away, to turn another way.... Read more
I had used Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God once before in class, an honors freshman colloquium on the theme of metamorphosis of body, heart, mind, and spirit. On the first or second day of discussing the book, comments made by a few students surprised, stunned, and, ultimately, silenced me. “I wasn’t raised with any religion,” one student said, “so I can’t relate at all to this book.” A couple other students agreed. We had barely begun exploring the text. We... Read more
My husband and I saw a stage production of Harvey in Milwaukee last month. The Pulitzer-Prize winner, written by Mary Chase in 1944, certainly evokes a fair share of laughter and inquiry into the realms of belief, reality, and social norms. However, I left ruffled by Chase’s clear intention of presenting Elwood, the best friend of an imaginary rabbit, as a hero for chatting up the people he meets, inviting everyone from telemarketers to cab drivers to dinner. What a... Read more
Poets are rising to the cause, hands raised (“Don’t shoot!”) but hands also holding pencils and paper or at the computer keys, writing poems. The cause I refer to is clear to anyone who has lived in this country since August 9, 2014, the date of Michael Brown’s murder. It’s not a new cause, alas; racial injustice has never been absent from our land. But what’s new—and hopeful—is the depth and breadth of public outcry. It had actually begun a... Read more
Guest post by Joel Heng Hartse This is my seventh yearly playlist for Good Letters. I’ve been racking my brains to come up with a theme for this one, but to be honest, I think the theme of these playlists is almost always the same: basically, the human condition—joy and sorrow, faith and doubt, triumph and tragedy, and all that. These songs are roughly arranged in two parts, with the first half being more sad and angry, and the latter... Read more
Guest post by Kenneth R. Morefield In my post announcing the formation of the Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury, I stated that I hoped we would “enlarge or expand the perception of what is meant by either labeling a film a ‘Christian’ film or suggesting that it should be of interest to Christian audiences.” I’d say we did that. (more…) Read more
Guest post by Barry Moser The following post, continued from yesterday, is adapted from a talk given at the 2014 Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A few years after my first Glen, the drawing class convened once again. One of the members of that class was a woman from Florida named Patricia Oetting, a registered nurse. She had never drawn before, and obviously had never had the experience of drawing from live models. But she was game and... Read more
Guest post by Barry Moser The following post is adapted from a talk given at the 2014 Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ten years ago, Greg Wolfe asked me to teach drawing out here at Glen West. I was an admirer of Image journal but I nevertheless looked into the Glen West workshops before accepting the invitation. And while I found nothing remotely off-putting, I was, nevertheless, shall I say, hesitant. I spent the better part of three years... Read more
For most kids I knew, Christmas was a time of anticipation. Even if you hadn’t yet figured out what was happening, you knew it was something. The music changed. Stores overflowed. Things began to sparkle. Even once you knew what was happening, there remained a sense of delightful oddness. I think it was the lights, which cast everything in bright color or strange shadow. Or perhaps the eyes and hearts of people, likewise lit or darkened. Christmas brings out the... Read more
Long ago, when there were only three television stations, you had to wait for what you wanted. That feature had the benefit of making things exceptional, which is the perplexing irony of our times. Able to have all so quickly—with high speed downloads and internet superhighways—things don’t hold their value as long. Our taste buds are sanded clean from a glut of widely available sugar, a torrent of rainbows has blasted us colorblind, and iTunes has stunned us tone-deaf and... Read more
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