Did you ever think about coffee as something that can slow us down? David [Blanchard], when he looks at a cup of coffee, when he smells the dried coffee berries roasting, when he rolls the beans between his fingers, sees something different. He sees the result of hours of careful labor, the work of sun, rain, and a farmer’s hands, and of his own—and maybe, when the coffee’s poured, the chance of a few minutes of peace in the middle of a hectic... Read more
My friend Dyana Herron is a poet, and poets make the best prose writers, or so I’ve always argued. But she’s also wise and tells heartbreaking stories. Her latest essay, about her brother going to prison, is difficult and beautiful: I wondered if this was what my brother was going to do — binge on his favorite treats before he had no control over what he ate anymore. I even bought some snacks that I don’t like but he does,... Read more
Last week at Christianity Today Movies, we published a piece on the controversial Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ, which turns twenty-five this year. Critic Ken Morefield went back to the film, wondering if it was any good, and if it was worthy of the controversy. What he found was surprising: It’s fascinating to listen to the commentary track on the film’s Criterion Collection DVD, released in 2000. Made with a $7 million budget for Universal Studios after Paramount gave... Read more
At The Curator, Win Bassett thinks about stories about death can help us overcome the fear of death: Embracing our infected existence, even while we teeter on the brink of nonexistence, serves as the sole saving grace to quell these fears. Sadly (or happily, depending on our framing), this acceptance of our curious, awkward and mangled journey to a stop often happens only when we see the last signpost—whether up close, a few clicks ahead, or as it barely becomes... Read more
Gideon Strauss is the executive director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Seminary, and has been my boss twice (first when I worked at Comment, and later when I launched Fieldnotes). More importantly, he’s been a friend and mentor for a long time, and his family is very dear to my husband and me. So it is with some deep gratitude and understanding of how well he knows this territory that I recommend his piece at... Read more
Two links today: first to a piece about silence by my friend Shannon Huffman Polson over at Good Letters. In 1 Kings, God instructs Elijah to go out and watch as God passes by. Elijah sees great winds, an earthquake, a fire, distractions and shows, the inflammation of our daily lives, but that was not where the Lord could be found. But “after the fire came a gentle whisper,” or, in the King James Bible “a still, small voice.” It... Read more
I first met Erica Crotts and her husband five or six years ago, I think, back when they were still undergraduates who were attending International Arts Movement conferences in New York. So I was delighted by Erica’s lovely article about revising her to-do list after the birth of their first child: I’m learning that life is not a matter of to-do’s to be mastered, and it’s a lesson I didn’t really have to learn until I became a mother. So... Read more
I love seeing abandoned buildings and architectural features turned into new, productive ones. This is pretty cool – in McAllen, Texas, an abandoned WalMart has been turned into the nation’s largest single-floor public library: There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest... Read more
File this under the “terrifying” heading: the New York Times reports that scientists are “edging closer to manipulating memory and downloading instructions from a computer right into a brain.” This has implications that seem straight out of both The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: erasing memories, downloading languages, and the like. Just one little plug and a button, and you, too, can know kung fu. As interesting as all this is (and as welcome as it initially sounds), I... Read more
We don’t think about this all too much, but our work is not shaped just by who we are and what we believe about our work, but also by the place in which we actually work – our workspace. So I thought this article from 99U, which explores ways to optimize our workspaces based on recent psychology and neuroscience findings, was interesting. For instance: In a 2011 study, hundreds of undergrads looked at computer-generated pictures of room interiors and rated those... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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