There I was, reclining in the waiting room while my son met with his speech therapist, as I do every week. Computer on my lap—heaven forbid I sit there unoccupied—I was reading A.O. Scott’s new treatise for The Times on “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” I like Scott’s...
We have Connor Gwin to thank for the following reflection.
There is something happening in America. The pace of life has increased to an almost breakneck speed. New technology allows people to be working all the time – pardon me as I check my Apple Watch – while new social media...
Newly minted billionaire Markus Persson of Minecraft fame (if you don’t know what Minecraft is, ask any boy aged 8-12) is not happy. A series of tweets from early Saturday morning went as follows:
4:48am: The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction...
Been a while since we checked in on the world of addiction. Back in January The Huffington Post ran an article with the transparently baiting title of “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think” that went viral. I think we mentioned it...
A review of ‘Survival of the Sexiest’, The Nation.
Why do religions exist? One common, if slightly anti-religious, explanatory scenario runs like this: imagine you’re a prehistoric person without any understanding of gravity, meteorology, or other concepts which explain natural phenomena. You may be led to ask the question, “why does...
Check out the “Interlude” from Mockingbird’s latest resource, Law and Gospel: A Theology for Sinners (and Saints), available here!
The Law, on most every occasion, draws a line of distinction between the is of life and the ought. The Law is the demarcation of the life we should have—the life we long...
It turns out that Stephen Colbert has a sign on his computer that reads, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the existence of God.” No joke. I tell you this by way of context for what comes next. GQ ran a profile of him this month entitled “The Late,...
Wow, strap in—this is a heavy one. Last week, an article in The New York Times provided some insight into the life and times of Paula Cooper, with whom journalist Amy Linn had made personal contact last spring.
When she was fifteen, allegedly drunk and high, Paula robbed 78-year-old Ruth Pelke and stabbed her...
Welcome to the fifth installment of author Ted Scofield‘s series on everybody else’s biggest problem. If you missed one or more of the previous installments, you can find them here. New installments will be posted every two weeks, on Tuesdays.
Before you dive headlong into this latest installment on everybody else’s biggest problem, please take a moment to answer one quick question: Considering your current annual income, how much more money do you need to feel comfortable?
We’re examining nine common responses to the question, What is greed? Think of them as nine attributes of the concept or, perhaps more fittingly, nine…
You Are Invited: This coming Friday, Sept 11th, we’re throwing a party here in Charlottesville!Nothing formal, just a time to share a bit about what we’ve been doing (and why) as well as celebrate the release of Law and Gospel: A Theology for Sinners (and Saints). 6-8pm at Christ Episcopal Church. Wine and beer and light appetizers will be served. Email us at info@mbird.com for more details, or just show up. Hope you can join us.
Here’s a fresh one from long-time contributor Lauren Larkin:
The day was like any other day, especially any day I go to Walmart. In and out. As fast as possible. Determination in my step, focus in my eye; deftly weaving and wending the cart through the other customers merely browsing. Watch out; I’m on a mission! My toddler called out the names of all the things she saw, like a baby Adam on a naming urgency. Ball! Doggy! Kitty! Boon! Baby!
I swept in to gather the few things I needed for the weekend and to capitalize on the rollbacks on school supplies…
1. Nothing like an essay deflating “the curation craze” to kick off a list of curated links…! Writing for The New Republic, Miya Tokumitsu reflects on the present-day ubiquity of “a word that barely existed forty years ago” and many of her thoughts echo what we heard earlier today from Mary Karr about the triumph of the subjective. Tokumitsu sees the phenomenon as one way we as a culture have come to baptize control in the waters of prestige. A means of filtering existence that makes us feel better about ourselves. In other words, we curate to impose a sense…
September is always a great month for books and music, and this one is no exception. Among the many releases to be excited about is Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir. In celebration, I had planned to reference her 2009 interview with The Paris Review in a weekender, but then I (re-)read it, and Bam. Simply too many sections jumped out, both one-liners and extended exchanges with Amanda Fortini, the interviewer. They talk about writing, family, memory, addiction, God – what more could you ask for? Since she was working on the new book when their conversation took place (not…
Prior to this academic year, I thought that there were certain criteria for being a Room Mom. Specifically, that you needed to be blonde, not tall, have had a previous career in JV cheerleading, be “good at” Pintrest, have the organizational skills of a C.E.O, and perhaps have married someone who enjoys shopping at Michael’s Craft Store on the weekends. Retrospectively, I have to admit that I’m not sure this is a real person.
So you can imagine my surprise when an email with the subject line “Introduction to Room Mom Responsibilities” landed in my inbox. After all, I am brunette,…
Don’t stop til you get enough! Of our Spring Conference in NYC, that is. Here comes Mr. Richardson, talking about one of our heroes:
Salty Lamb: The Ludicrous Legacy of Robert Farrar Capon – Ethan Richardson from Mockingbird on Vimeo.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Wow, strap in—this is a heavy one. Last week, an article in The New York Times provided some insight into the life and times of Paula Cooper, with whom journalist Amy Linn had made personal contact last spring.
When she was fifteen, allegedly drunk and high, Paula robbed 78-year-old Ruth Pelke and stabbed her 33 times with a foot-long butcher knife before ransacking the old woman’s house and taking out her ’76 Plymouth for an afternoon joyride with schoolmates and snack cakes. That was thirty years ago, 1985.
Of the four girls present and involved in the brutal murder, Paula was the only one to receive an electric-chair…
Ever wonder what it’s like to get pummeled by power? -Pop then -ballads? Cause you’re about to find out:
From the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson in his short book entitled Story and Promise:
Jesus took away from his hearers the possibility of neutralizing God’s futurity, of mitigating its threat and challenge by cutting out a time of their autonomous own in which to plan and prepare for it, and getting it—even a little bit—into present control. He asserted God’s future as uncontrollable and free—as God’s and so as true future….
That is, Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom unconditionally; he left no time to fulfill “if…” clauses. This is what got him into trouble, for it made his message socially and religiously revolutionary. If there are no conditions to be fulfilled for participation in humanity’s fulfillment, then in the end the righteous man has no advantage over the sinner, the respected man no advantage over the proletarian, the believer no advantage over the unbeliever….
Jesus did not merely proclaim to the poor, the publicans, and the sinners that in God’s future they would be new men, he treated them then and there as the new men they would be. His message had nothing in it of ‘pie in the sky by and by.’ This is the point of one of the most pervasive recollections about Jesus’ actions: that he ‘ate with publicans and sinners.’ In all cultures, eating together is an expression of fellowship; in oriental cultures, it creates permanent brotherhood; and in Israel, because of the table prayers, it creates brotherhood before God. Jesus’ chosen brothers before God were the outsiders.
We regulate our relations with our fellows by what they have been; if a teenager is hooked on dope, we do not encourage our children to make him a friend. Jesus did the opposite: he brought his fellows into his life not in terms of what they had been, but of what they would be. And not in terms of what it could be predicted they would be, on the basis of a ‘little bit of good in everyone’ or of what he planned to reform them to, but in terms of what they could be only by God’s miracle. He enacted God’s future as his brothers’ own present.
Jesus took away from his hearers the possibility of neutralizing God’s futurity, of mitigating its threat and challenge by cutting out a time of their autonomous own in which to plan and prepare for it, and getting it—even a little bit—into present control. He asserted God’s future as uncontrollable and free—as God’s and so as true future….