So apparently the Wall Street Journal has caught on: Gen Y’s idea of fun is running marathons. But against the entire sprint-distance field, I finished in the top 11%. That’s right: Team Geriatric outperformed the field. I’d love to report that this reflects the age-defying effects of triathlon. But my hair is gray, my hearing is dull and my per-mile pace is slower than it used to be, even at shorter distances. Rather, this old-timer triumph is attributable to something... Read more
It’s not a pleasant thing to consider, but it is an important one, and Peggy Rosenthal is considering it: how do we cope when a friend dies? Death is the great mystery. A cliché, that sentence. And yet…what a mystery that death is a mystery. It happens to everyone; so shouldn’t the human race by now have figured it out? For me, one of the most helpful meditations on the mystery of mortality is Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Of course, this... Read more
Well, I’ve got to say – I’m usually not someone who complains about Mondays, but I woke up this morning and thought, here we go again. In case you did, too, I’ve got something for you. It’s not about Mondays or about work. It’s purely for fun. The New York Times ran an article that recounts the history of movie popcorn, and here it is. And as the infographic points out, Americans eat more popcorn than anyone else in the world.... Read more
Are you planning to see Gravity this weekend? I saw it a few nights ago and reviewed it for Christianity Today, and part of what made it significant for me was that it left me feeling a bit disquieted. Sitting there, wearing silly-looking 3D glasses, I felt awe—and not at mankind or its “indomitable spirit.” It is admittedly cool that we figured out how to make suits that let us float above the surface of the planet, and that we can talk to... Read more
Did you see this commercial for Chipotle restaurants that went viral? Well, over at Christianity Today Movies, critic Jeffrey Overstreet saw the commercial as a metaphor for how hungry we – as audiences and consumers – are for something real. So he took that opportunity to write about two overlooked films, This is Martin Bonner and Museum Hours: I’m finding a growing audience of moviegoers for films that are artful but modest, films designed to inspire conversation rather than award-season hype. Films that provoke... Read more
By now, school is in full swing all over the country – but it’s not just teachers and college professors who are teaching. Charity Singleton Craig writes at The High Calling about learning from her mother. I possibly could have discovered canned cherries on the Internet. In fact, when I decide on a recipe, it says right there in the instructions, “can use 4 cups sweet or tart canned or bottled cherries” as a substitute for fresh. But learning about cherry... Read more
It’s T.S. Eliot’s birthday today, and if you’re like me, you haven’t read nearly as much Eliot as you think you should. The early twentieth-century poet and essayist became a Christian in his thirties, and though he always (and reasonably, given he lived through World War I) saw the world as a difficult, bleak place, his poetry chronicles his shift from a sort of terrified fragmented view of reality to something with a little more hope. I was lucky enough... Read more
There’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of re-learning to work by hand, to make things, and to experience the kind of learning that we only experience through our bodies (instead of, say, through our computer screens). On this topic, I highly recommend Matthew Crawford’s wonderful, readable little book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Over at the Art House America blog, Anna Broadway is lamenting the loss of this, too – and linking it to our senses: Noses cause inconvenience,... Read more
The New Yorker has been republishing bits and pieces of Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journals, which will be published in a book later this year. They’re locked down to subscribers, but even the small excerpts are wonderful to read. And my pastor put an excerpt in the church bulletin as a meditation this Sunday: All my requests seem to melt down to one for grace — that supernatural grace that does whatever it does. Read more
Over at The High Calling, Skye Jethani has written a probing, provocative reflection on the danger of evangelical austerity and the dangers of demanding that beauty submit to practicality. Likewise, I don’t know any church leader who would utterly deny the value of art. Most churches put astronomical amounts of their budgets into buildings, worship services, and theatrical sound and lighting. But like the Soviets, they only enthusiastically supported the arts that explicitly advanced their narrow agenda. To the Soviets... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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