It appears to be Friday again, which is such a blessing. One My first child, halfway through the afternoon, removed one earbud and told me she was in the middle of her last class…as in, of her last year of high school. This shocked me very much. I had not been expecting such a thing to ever happen to me. Is this the end of an era? Or the beginning of a new and great life? Or something. The nice... Read more
“She cleaned other people’s houses, her own she could not clean.” That was my thought as I staggered through my own front door yesterday after scrubbing the daylights out of my mother’s adorable bungalow all morning. Her house was perfect–at least as far as being clean–and mine was like some kind of something. I’m searching around in my mind for a metaphor–Sheol? Wherever the furies rage so furiously together? The Wilderness of Sin? I’m not sure. The resettling dust, the... Read more
Besides finishing Phineas Redux and immediately downloading and hitting play on The Prime Minister, at night I’ve been wandering slowly through Cynical Theories (one sentence at a time so it will take me a year), Unoffendable (which is for such a time as this), and now Digital Minimalism. I know all these books have all been around long enough for everyone else to have read them, but part of my rebellion against Modern Life is to do everything three or... Read more
Well, it seems like there is a lot going on this morning. Mr. Cuomo is “lifting the mask mandate” for New Yorkers as of tomorrow–advisedly. The long list of conditions made me–just to live into the modern world–tired. Of course, if you wander around Twitter, you will see that the big news is how much the governor made on his self-fluffing book, and how scandalous that amount is given how many people died, especially in nursing homes. But really, the... Read more
It is a bright, sunny day here in the Northeast–a strange and shocking occurrence. To celebrate we’ve done a reasonably lengthed podcast about how we think people should argue online, and why talking about important theological and political matters without taking anything personally or getting your feelings hurt is the call of the Christian. We are super respectful and try really hard not to make anyone feel bad. Hope it makes your Monday something or other! Let’s see, do I... Read more
I’m over at Stand Firm today. I have never really loved the word “flourish.” I keep thinking that it will go out of fashion among Christians, but so far it hasn’t. It appears in all kinds of places online. In fact, certain assumptions about what it means to flourish seem to me to be a sort of grid, or paradigm through which the Bible is very often read—like “love” was for Episcopalians back in the early 2000s. The chief assumption... Read more
It’s Friday, so let’s see, are there any takes? One This is a wonderful and important thing that I think everyone should read. It’s called The Efficiency Destroying Magic of Tidying Up. It’s full of clever observations like this: Again, this insight applies to any complex system. For example, a city can look as messy as an anthill. But really, it’s a beautiful equilibrium that evolved to satisfy a thousand competing constraints: topology, weather, people’s traditions, skills, wealth, preferences… Planners... Read more
It’s the Feast of the Ascension–that surprising day when Jesus rose up into heaven and left all his disciples craning their disappointed necks and wondering when life would ever settle down and stop sending them one shock after another–and yet unaccountably, I spent five whole minutes reading this: Identifying one’s self as “the Abby” or “the Glennon” became a kind of relationship shorthand. Stating you are “looking for the Glennon to my Abby” is a line at least one of... Read more
The world seems such a wretched mess this morning I think I had better turn to Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi, which is the best book I’ve ever read (at least this morning). Here is a taste of what she says about pruning: None of this might be important to Americans, if it weren’t that the English mistrust of formality and artifice, with all its religious and political implications, had been transferred to Puritan New... Read more
This is an interesting article about a coming church “split.” I don’t quite think that’s the word, and there is a lot of theological vagueness in the piece, but I agree that all these things should be thought about more, not less. Here is a taste: Essentially, the split is between churches that will be effective in accomplishing their mission and churches that won’t be. We’ve seen a similar split over the last five decades between churches that drifted from... Read more
Preventing Grace
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