I’m writing a series of articles for the “Reel Spirituality” project at Fuller Seminary’s Brehm Center, and the first one was published last week. In it, I explored how and why we might develop the intellectual virtue of curiosity through watching TV and movies: That is, I believe that being good watchers— that developing good habits in watching movies and TV shows—can form us into more virtuous people in general. In particular, I’m starting to understand how we can develop... Read more
In the New York Times this past weekend was the touching story of a boy with autism whose best friend became Siri (the automated “assistant” built into Apple’s iPhone): Gus is hardly alone in his Siri love. For children like Gus who love to chatter but don’t quite understand the rules of the game, Siri is a nonjudgmental friend and teacher. Nicole Colbert, whose son, Sam, is in my son’s class at LearningSpring, a (lifesaving) school for autistic children in Manhattan,... Read more
This was an exciting week for book lovers, as Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Lila, was released to much acclaim – even from people who weren’t huge fans of her previous novels: the National Book Award-winning Housekeeping or the Pulitzer-winning Gilead and its follow-up, Home. In the New Statesman, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote about Robinson’s fiction, and how it is not just a collection of stories set in Christian America but a political and ethical project: There have been some accounts of these... Read more
At The High Calling, Marcus Goodyear reviews Called, the new book by Fuller Seminary president Mark Labberton. Your work, he proposes, is not as important as you want it to be (and that’s good): This little book calls the entire faith and work movement to task, reminding Christians to focus on the First Thing. My career, my success, and my productivity are not elements of my primary calling. A Christian’s calling is not a personal one, but a shared calling with other... Read more
At Art House America, a beautiful reflection on ordinary mornings from Allison Gaskins: The coffee pot steams and hisses at me like a surly teenager. Is this an early morning rebuke or a salute of some kind? Tentatively I suss my emotions: is the nagging fear there today? Does dread rest heavy on my shoulders yet? Shake them, shrug it off, don’t give it a resting place today. Do I feel that nameless weight and sense the clouds moving in?... Read more
At 99U, they’re asking if your ambition – contrary to intuition – could be holding you back: Most of us aren’t short on ambition. We all want more wealth, more success, more accolades, more everything. The ones that succeed in life and in business are the ones that have figured out how to deal with their ambition, harnessing it for good rather than letting it lead to jealousy or inertia. The reality is that there’s only so many hours in a... Read more
Who doesn’t love, and miss, Mr. Rogers? At The Curator, Vesper Stamper writes about the beloved show and its creator: Booking flights to Europe—does anyone have any SAS Airlines horror stories? The Waldorf educational philosophy pinpoints the end of a “fantasy worldview” right at about age six or seven, which is why, in that model, formal education in didactic subjects like reading are only hinted at until after this “awakening” has taken place. We find this line between “real” and “imagined” to... Read more
At The High Calling, Kimberlee Conway Ireton wrote about the habit of dinner-making – and the gift of that habit: I have been making dinner for my family since I was ten years old, only back then I made it for my sister and my parents, and now I make it for my husband and our kids. Thirty years of daily dinner-making is 11,000 meals. Sometimes, the dailiness of this habit feels like a burden, or even a curse—the way the... Read more
Over at Relief, I wrote about Augustine’s Confessions and Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, and small gifts: It’s beautiful, then, that two books by two men from opposite ends of history can speak to one another, and to us, so well, in so many ways. Wiman’s book, despite its subtitle, seems sometimes ancient; Augustine’s feels intriguingly modern. One way they talk to their readers is this: we spend much time delighting in “the little things” these days. Cooking and design blogs and accessible digital... Read more
I read Tamar Adler’s lovely book An Everlasting Meal in graduate school, and I still return to it, so I was delighted to discover that she’s now writing a column for the New York Times. In her first essay, she writes about elevating dinner for one: For a happy life, Montaigne wrote, we “should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop” — a refuge, mental if not physical, where our liberty is ours alone and our... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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