We now come to the crucial issue of identity as understood and articulated by T.S. Eliot in his play “The Elder Statesman.” For previous posts in this short series click here and here.
Lord Claverton is a politician by profession. And like a politician, he has tried to play the role...
“I have a lot of beliefs… And I live by none of them. That’s just the way I am. They’re just my beliefs. I just like believing them – I like that part. They’re my little believies. They make me feel good about who I am. But if they get...
A beautiful entry to the NY Times’ Modern Love series appeared this past weekend, Mark Lukach’s brave “Out of Darkness,” which reflects on his wife’s unexpected and prolonged period of mental illness, and his default role as a caregiver during that time. For whatever reason, stories of husbandly love are...
So my friend and I recently started a book club and for our first selection, we picked The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology by Jurgen Moltmann. You know, just some light summer reading, the kind you do over a pear Florentine...
A couple of nights ago I watched the American Music Awards with my wife, and we were struck by all of the “comeback” stories in the entertainment world. Michael Jackson was up for 5 awards including Artist of the Year. He didn’t win that one, but he did win a...
Slate put up a phenomenal piece of ‘neuroskepticism’ by Ron Rosenbaum last week, posing the timely question “Is Evil Over?” We’ve been following the recent explosion of pop-neuroscience pretty closely and enthusiastically, mainly for the sympathetic conclusions it is coming to in regards to willpower and agency. However, Rosenbaum wisely...
There’s no shortage of tear-jerking moments in Buck, Cindy Meehl’s the award-winning 2011 documentary about horse trainer/whisperer Buck Brannaman. But none is more poignant than when Buck recounts his first interaction with his foster father. We find out at the beginning of the film that Buck and his older brother...
“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” -Flannery O’Connor
“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” -Bob Dylan
Honesty. Is there a scarier word in the English language? For some, it is a luxury they can’t afford, for others...
Poor Phil Collins appears to have been having a 2 Cor 3:6a moment in Rolling Stone, and it’s hard not to have compassion for (and maybe a little chuckle at) the guy, regardless of what you think of his music. He sounds like a defeated man, very much ready for...
Pastor Joel Osteen is, in the words of (fake) fashion icon Mugatu (played by Will Ferrell in Zoolander), “so hot right now.” The 46-year-old pastor heads America’s largest church, the Houston-based Lakewood Church, with 43,000 people in attendance per week. His 2004 book, Your Best Life Now, was a New...
1. In his short article “The Pitfalls of Indie Fame” on Grantland, Chuck Klosterman captures something we have been trying to say on here forever. Don’t be put off by all the music jargon; he is using the critical success of the tUnE-yArDs debut record as an opportunity to reflect on the cruelty of the Law. Which may be particularly pronounced in the indie world (or any rarified/snobby setting for that matter), but the phenomenon is universal. The human relationship to righteousness is a troubled one, love/hate at best, and it finds expression in every possible arena. And while non-religious…
A beautiful passage from Brennan Manning’s new (and final) book, the memoir All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir, ht DJ:
My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace… A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till five… A grace that hikes up the robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal reeking of sin and wraps him…
“All The Young Dudes” is both much more and much less than the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the beautiful rock monster known as Mott the Hoople. More than the tip because their career hinged on it. The single not only revived their sagging spirits (and commercial prospects) at a crucial juncture, but set them on a new course. Pre-Dudes Mott and post-Dudes Mott are not the same beast. And the song has stuck around. They had a number of other considerable hits, but “Dudes” is the only Mott recording that’s remained in the popular consciousness, rarely…
This is uncanny. If I swore to you I hadn’t heard it before, would you believe me? I probably wouldn’t. Providence schmovidence, ht JRB:
Here’s what went down when Roger Federer met Rafael Nadal in the first men’s semi-final of the Australian Open last night.
First Set
Federer wins the first three games of the first set, including a break of Nadal’s first service game, very easily. Most common Chris Fowler and Patrick McEnroe “analyis”: “Wow.” “Uh-huh.” “Yup.” Federer plays, as has been said many times, an otherwordly style. He really looks as if he’s not trying at all. Nadal, on the other hand, is a beast: a roiling ball of energy and explosion.
In the sixth game of the first set (Federer up 4-1) a bullfrog…
Are you insecure? Hate your body? Fear the sheer unknown-ness of your future? Lay awake wondering if you’ll end up alone?
Would it help if your father was a famous race-car driver? And if you’d been married to the bassist for one of the biggest bands of the 1980s and were now married to the guitarist for a big indie rock band? What if you turned a career as an actor into a career as a sought-after photographer? And you had three attractive kids. And you were rich and beautiful?
Not enough? Let’s try another route. What if you were not only…
I’ve been a rather anxious person for most of my short (thus far) life. I was anxious about grades while in middle school, I was anxious about getting into college while in high school, and I was anxious about getting a job while a senior in college. Today, I’m anxious about an ever-lengthening “to-do” list that never seems to diminish. Tonight, I’m guessing I’ll be anxious about getting up early to go the gym. That being said, an article written by Daniel Smith (author of an anxiety-focused website, The Monkey Mind Chronicles) on what some have called our “Age of…
We are currently sanding down the finishing touches of a new Mockingbird publication, due to be ready for our Spring NYC conference, called This American Gospel: A Companion to the Public Radio Series. As you might imagine, it’s based on This American Life, the radio program known for its consistently indelible human interest pieces, which span the full Mbird thematic landscape, from judgment to acceptance, from resentment to freedom, law to love. Stay tuned.
In our many conversations leading up to the project, it has become evident that this show is loved by a wide variety of Americans. The NY Times…
We’re baaaack! The fourth installment of Jeremiah Lawson’s brilliant exploration of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Batman mythology has finally arrived, and I think you’ll agree that it was worth the wait. This post works as a perfect jumping-on point, the beginning of a significant new “chapter.” Of course, if you’d prefer to bat-a-rang back to the beginning, go here.
PART FOUR: THE WOUNDS OF DISCOVERY
1. The Strength of Knowing Weakness
What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.
Ecclesiastes 1:15
If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can…
The past few years have brought us a rash of popular studies in evolutionary biology and psychology that seek to assign redemptive purposes to negative emotions such as anxiety, anger and depression. An upside, if you will, such as increased problem-solving skills. Clinicians have, by and large, expressed considerable skepticism about these findings, decrying the “pastoral” naivete of such claims. Dr. Richard Friedman is one such voice, and he offered up a refreshing perspective in The NY Times last week, “Depression Defies the Rush to Find an Evolutionary Upside.”
Dr. Friedman raises a couple of objections that we might share. Above…
It’s no great revelation that Disney is a for-profit corporation with targeted marketing strategies. In fact, of all the corporations marketing to children (or the child within us), Disney has the most targeted marketing I’ve ever seen.
From my vantage point, this is what Disney marketing does so well: it takes everything that we as individuals do in order to protect our fragile egos–the constant self-justification, the universal quest for a manageable identity, the inevitable scorekeeping a la the Birmingham Mockingbird Conference–and then aims Disney products at that place inside all of us.
We see this in the standard Disney movie formula,…
This is a bit of a throwback given that Kevin Smith’s film Dogma is about 12 years old. But I recently let my daughter begin playing with my Buddy Christ statuette since she had been pointing to it on a bookshelf and making quizzical utterances (“hunh?”)—yes, I have a Buddy Christ toy. In any event, I thought the toy would be a convenient way to begin teaching her about Jesus. One day I asked if she could kiss Buddy Christ and tell him “thank you” (for salvation, etc.). Since then she has carried Buddy Christ around saying “tank tu” and…
You may have heard this before. When Waylon Jennings was getting his start in the late 50s, touring with the “Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens, he elected to take a chartered bus on a cold, 300-mile drive to Fargo, giving up his plane seat so that another of the crew could fly, who at the time had a flu. Leaving the boys at the airport, with a note of good-natured bravado he told Holly that he hoped “your ol’ plane crashes.” This was what happened, the infamous “Day that Music Died.” The plane crashed, and three…
A particularly vivid unpacking of Christ’s lesson on dinner party etiquette in Luke 14:1-14, this time from pages 282-284 of Father Capon’s Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus:
That, I take it, is the point of Jesus’ words against reciprocation and repayment. Jesus is saying, ‘Listen, you are absolutely mired in your scorekeeping, bookkeeping lives. You are so busy trying to hold the world together by getting your accounts straight that you hardly have time to notice that it’s falling apart faster than ever. Why don’t you just let go? Thumb your nose at the…
Thanks again for your patience with us this past week. As you’ll see, while the site slept, some of us were busy!
Episode 84: Yvette Vickers (f. 4.27.11)
Newspapers and blogs seem to settle for the categorical in reporting such events as the discovery, on April 27, 2011, of the body of Yvette Vickers in her house in Benedict Canyon.
Yvette Vickers’s death becomes a “bizarre” event, and gets linked to the Gothic, even, as it applies to the kinds of movies in which she appeared. (She gave knockout performances, by the way, in her two “legacy” films: Attack of the 50…
Hawley: Really insightful, Dave! I have never heard someone so astutely descri...
WenatcheeTheHatchet: Leave it to a review of indie rock to have two footnotes that together...
Steve Martin: Sorry...'Paulson'...
Steve Martin: Paulsen's book sounds like a winner.Thanks for the heads-up....
Blair: In case we don't have enough information about anxiety.... http://www....