People in my generation and older generally frown on tattoos. Oh, there are exceptions. I even have some friends in their seventies who are proud of their body art. But, in the past decade, as tattoos have become commonplace among folk younger than I am, I have heard dozens of complaints from critics in their fifties, sixties, and up. Now, let me say that tattoos are not my cup of tea. I don’t have any and don’t imagine getting any.... Read more
This is the time of year when the bugs are hungry and your body is an available source of food. The result can be lots of bug bites. Most of these won’t hurt you. But they can drive you crazy from itching. This is especially true if, like me, you’re allergic to bug bites. A few nights ago, I was outside at dusk doing a few chores. A couple of hungry mosquitoes bit me on the ankles. In a few... Read more
In light of the recent financial meltdown, the banking industry has become suspect in the eyes of many people. Yet, John Gage believes that God has called him to be a banker. In a recent interview published by the Washington Institute, Cage explains: My sense of calling has evolved since I began working in the banking industry almost a decade ago. I underwent a major spiritual transformation early on in my career and starting taking seminary classes, thinking that God... Read more
Today, one of my favorites, by the great Donald Hall. What I love about this tiny poem is how it can capture, in images, a universal experience, and make us see it in a new way – something poetry, like all art, can do. Love Poem When you fall in love, you jockey your horse into the flaming barn. You hire a cabin on the shiny Titanic. You tease the black bear. Reading the Monitor, you scan the obituaries looking for your... Read more
My friend Katie Noah Gibson wrote a lovely piece in Art House America about the small prayer that she grew up saying before mealtimes with her family. It’s a beautiful little reflection on the words we use to talk to God, and our complicated feelings towards them. We used many of the same phrases over and over, of course: Thank you, God, for this day. Please bless our family. Please heal ______ (inserting the name of whichever family member or friend was... Read more
Ask any New Yorker what their least favorite activity is – ask nearly anyone – and “moving” will come up pretty high on the list. All that packing and hunting and handing over money and resettling is rough. It’s not just the work, though: it’s the feeling of rootlessness that comes from not having a home, from feeling dislocated and disconnected from reality. Something about having a place (a “room of one’s own,” as Virginia Woolf might have put it) makes you... Read more
 Before Midnight, the third film in the “Before” trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (which also includes Before Sunrise and Before Sunset), came out recently. I got to publish a great review of it over at Christianity Today, an article by Ken Morefield that reflected on marriage as much as the movie. Here’s a piece of it: Before Midnight accurately shows the seemingly inescapable frailties of a relationship that is built on modern notions of romanticized love. Those are myriad. Celine resents Jesse’s family.... Read more
The thing I love most about this time of year, when the days are approaching their longest here in the northern hemisphere, is that it’s bright and sunny in the mornings, sometimes before I wake up. And we’re about to move out of the apartment we’ve been in for the past several months, where we’ve lived with some cats, into an apartment where there won’t be cats around. So I like this poem a lot – it reminds me of... Read more
Here’s an interesting piece on how people read online – and what that might mean for how we write online: I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you. For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you—38 percent—are already gone. You “bounced” in Web traffic jargon, meaning you spent no time “engaging” with this page at all. So now there are 100 of... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
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Being Formed By Your Commute?
There’s an interesting piece by Dan King over at The High Calling about how “going on autopilot” can be both a good and a bad thing. He mentions studies that support the idea that breaking out of our “autopilot” routines – the 95% of the things we do throughout our day without thinking about them – can boost our creativity and help us see our lives, our relationships, and our families in new ways. One thing he gestures at but... Read more