Mark D. Roberts
Purely for fun: if each state got only one sport, what would it be? Here’s a map to show us. (Mine gets streetball.) Read more
Purely for fun: if each state got only one sport, what would it be? Here’s a map to show us. (Mine gets streetball.) Read more
At The High Calling, Sam Van Eman looks at one of the barriers to the integration of faith and work: money. As a young professional working in a law firm, one of the older partners said, “Carl, you didn’t buy a big enough house.” “What do you mean?” he asked. “Well,” the partner replied, “I want you to have a nice big mortgage so that you’ll have to work hard for us.” Notice where the visionary businessman unites with the... Read more
An interesting piece by Joy Katz at the Poetry Foundation website: can poetry comfort the grieving? Poetry felt drained of its possibilities by the time I stood graveside. My disorientation with language was complete as my mother’s coffin was being lowered into the ground and the rabbi read out her name: Elaine. Elaine. Something seemed off to me about this. A mistake. Maybe even a lie. I don’t know why, but I was absolutely certain of one thing: That is not... Read more
With the holidays just around the corner, a lot of us are getting ready to make the trek to see far-flung friends and family. But road trip food can be kind of, well, awful. Never fear: the lovely magazine Kinfolk is publishing some road trip recipes, designed to make your travel a little less greasy and a bit more beautiful. Here’s their easy (and easily adaptable) recipe for Sicilian empanadas: A traveler’s snack not only needs to be easily packable,... Read more
As I mentioned last week, The High Calling is taking a look at Todd Henry’s book Die Empty. This week, Glynn Young wrote about finding your “productive passion”: Once you know or understand what your passion is—what Todd Henry in Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day calls your “productive passion”—much becomes clear. Choices become easier; priorities more obvious. This isn’t the passion people refer to when they say “follow your passion;” that tends to be a self-focused passion. Instead, productive passion not... Read more
A timely article, if you’ve had a week like mine, from the always-lovely Kinfolk: This kind of rejuvenation demands the whole self—pouring oneself in till there’s no room for worried thoughts, fear of missing out on anything else or even that nagging desire to somehow share how well you’re relaxing with others. Finding rest is not just a matter of being idle (though needed at times), but rather seeking out those activities that feed the self, the soul and the mind. Read the whole... Read more
The prayer journals of Flannery O’Connor are being published next week and were recently excerpted in the New Yorker, and over at Slate, Marian Ryan is writing about them, and her own struggle: I’m jealous of Flannery O’Connor, though she’s been dead nearly 50 years. I envy her not only because she was brilliant, the maker of astoundingly original and subversive works of art, but because she believed in God. She believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. She... Read more
I really liked Todd Henry’s book The Accidental Creative and have been using it with my senior thesis students this semester. I liked it so much that I interviewed Todd for Fieldnotes a little over a year ago. The book helped me tremendously – I need to revisit it! – with thinking about creative disciplines to help me do good work. So I was pleased to see that over at The High Calling, they’re going through Todd’s newest book, Die Empty. I’d been... Read more
Ed Cyzewski has an interesting piece up at The High Calling asking if Christians ought to be paid less because their work is “ministry”: It makes me wonder if Christians unintentionally undervalue each other’s work when asking for the family discount. In some cases we have confused freebies with ministry, as if adding money to a transaction devalues the holiness of someone’s work . . . Most churches have no trouble paying a pastor and calling that type of work... Read more
This seems like an appropriate day to post this: Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary and prominent evangelical philosopher and theologian, thinks about Halloween and the power of evil (in his typically nuanced way) in First Things: My parents were Evangelicals, but they always enjoyed Halloween. My father was a pastor, and he and my mother would put on a yearly Halloween party for the young people’s group at our church. They would decorate our house with witches on... Read more
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