My dear friend Katie is wise, and wrote a great little blog post about choosing to live in obscurity: Even if you have a modicum of success you’ll be just one of many. That is good. You should want it that way because notoriety is fickle. When you write you expose a bit of your soul and sometimes you don’t want all those eyes trained on you. Sometimes you want to take your words and hoard them. You want them... Read more
My friend Kate Harris wrote a wonderful article about “Constraint and Consent, Career and Motherhood” over at QIdeas. Don’t be fooled: though Kate is writing from her own experience and thus exploring motherhood, her article is widely applicable and challenging to everyone, not only those who are women or mothers. In her essay “Paying Attention To The Sky,” the late French philosopher Simone Weil writes, “the effective part of [our] will is not effort, which is directed toward the future.... Read more
It now appears likely that The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a forgery. (See what I have written here, along with links.) Professor Karen King and her Harvard colleagues have some mud on their faces, which may be useful to cover up their blushing. It seems that Professor King was fooled by a clever forger, though she had not yet admitted this to be true. Perhaps she’ll mount an argument for the defense of the authenticity of The Gospel of... Read more
A good question: does being selfless mean we can’t be successful? Here’s J.B. Wood over at The High Calling: For me, as I grappled with how does my faith and my spiritual life play out against this drive to succeed and do well and deliver results and performance and all of that . . . I came to another paradoxical type of conclusion, which is that it can’t be. Watch the clip here. Read more
Ever since Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code raised the intriguing possibility that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene, pop culture has been fascinated by this question. And, even though historical evidence for the actual marriage of Jesus was extremely slim at best, and the evidence to the contrary was weighty, millions of people have been convinced that Jesus was, indeed, married. I know this because lots of them have emailed me about things I have written on... Read more
Psalm 102:1-28 I lie awake, lonely as a solitary bird on the roof. Psalm 102:7 The heading of Psalm 102 identifies this psalm as “A prayer of one overwhelmed with trouble, pouring out problems before the LORD”. The text of this psalm is, indeed, the outpouring of a desperate heart. The unnamed psalmist begins by asking the Lord to hear his prayer (102:1-2). Then he explains that his heart is “sick, withered like grass” (102:4). He has been “reduced to... Read more
In weird news for today, it turns out some folks are trying to brighten . . . the moon. Oh, and they’re connected to a cosmetics company: Somewhere between tongue-in-cheek pranksterism and an elaborate design fiction proposal, the so-called FOREO Institute—connected to FOREO, the beauty products firm—has a plan for “transforming the surface of the moon.” Just make that thing brighter! Think of the effect this might have on the cosmetics industry, what with all the weird new ways light will... Read more
Why should Christians care about culture? It’s a good question – and a complicated one, not least because we often define “culture” too narrowly. In this interview over at QIdeas, author Andy Crouch thinks aloud about what culture actually is, and why it should matter to Christians: I think the best way to think about cultures is not just one set of things like the arts, or like all the things in the world that bother us. Sometimes people talk... Read more
Simplicity: it’s not easy to find. Over at The High Calling, Ann Kroeker explores finding simplicity at work. Is it even possible? In a high-tech, high-speed world that feels complicated, distracting, and overwhelming, is it any wonder that people are seeking to simplify? Even the president of the United States realizes the wisdom in simplicity. In “Obama’s Way,” a 2012 Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis, the president is quoted as saying, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits…I’m trying to pare... Read more
The news business is struggling, no matter whether in print or online. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a couple of recent articles in USA Today. “College papers cut back on print” Thus reads the headline of a USA Today story by Roger Yu. Here’s some background: In 2011, the University of Georgia’s Red & Black became one of the first U.S. college papers to cut back on print publication from daily to weekly. It was followed by other... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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