Do you read poetry? I haven’t been very good at reading poetry for most of my life, even though I teach English for a living and am about to finish a master of fine arts in creative writing. I didn’t grow up reading much poetry, except to tear it apart (like we all did in grade school) and “unlock” the hidden symbols. But to just read a poem and enjoy it? To let it percolate in my soul? To let it become... Read more
School is nearly out for the year, and so most teachers, like myself, are thinking ahead to the summer and to the distant days of fall. One of the things we’re always doing is fiddling with how we teach. What’s the best way to teach someone? How can we “do” learning effectively? And what’s the goal of education, anyhow? So it was with interest that I read Brett Beasley’s article in The Curator about what the nineteenth-century Christian existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would... Read more
On this Memorial Day, we pause to reflect upon our blessings as a nation and the high cost of those blessings. We offer our prayers of thanks and intercession. Read more
Come, everyone! Clap your hands! Shout to God with joyful praise! For the LORD Most High is awesome. He is the great King of all the earth. Psalm 47:1-2 Every now and then, I need to be reminded of why I worship. Perhaps you do too. On most Sundays, I gather with God’s people to offer songs, hymns, prayers, gifts, and other expressions of worship. If I’m in town, I join my congregation at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Boerne.... Read more
Christianity Today has published an interview with my friend James K.A. Smith, the philosopher, editor of Comment, and writer of many books, including two that I use in my classes: Desiring the Kingdom and Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?. The title — and Jamie’s argument — is that you can’t think your way to God. The embodied liturgies and rituals of the Christian life “teach” us in ways that are different from, say, a sermon or lecture. I understand that evangelicals tend to see... Read more
File this one under “Weird But Possibly Amazing”: Relevant magazine reports that 3-D printed food might be at hand (yes, you read that right), and some people think this might be a step toward ending, or at least alleviating, world hunger. You can already print all kinds of things — including prosthetic and maybe even organs — cheaply. Imagine ordering something online, then just printing it right there at your desk. The possibilities seem endless. The potential upsides are clear. Are there downsides? Read more
My friend Tyler has a post over at Image Journal’s Good Letters blog, in which he talks about bringing his camera into Robben Island prison in South Africa. His reflections are wise, and worth reading: And I wonder what is really going on when we point a camera at a home that is not ours, or a church, or a gravesite. I wonder what it means to photograph a foreigner, hang pictures of their children in our coffee shops, to... Read more
There was a great little piece on the NY Times Opinionator blog about “the art of repetition,” and about how someone becomes a better writer – by learning to write thank-you notes: Having opened my share of thank-you notes over the years and having watched my kids write their own, I knew that nonwriters treat the process as an exercise in efficiency. Find a nice way to say something, and then copy and paste. The shorter, the better. Get it... Read more
This week I co-wrote and published a piece over at Christianity Today on Jay Gatsby and Don Draper, the protagonists (not quite “heroes”) of The Great Gatsby and Mad Men, two hot commodities in pop culture right now. There are some striking similarities between these men, despite the fact that Gatsby “lived” forty years before Draper. After seeing Gatsby at a press screening last week, my co-writer and I felt there was some intuitive link between them, and we pushed it back and forth till... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In
The New Legalism?
My colleague Anthony Bradley and I have offices a few doors down from each other. One of the courses he teaches is a first-year worldview course in which students spend a lot of time talking about the world around us and examining their own assumptions about what it is we’re doing here. One of mine is a sophomore-level course called Principles of Cultural Interpretation, in which we go through three books carefully (James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, Andy Crouch’s Culture Making,... Read more