‘Dinner Party Timeout’ by S.H. Carlyle
Looking for a brief, satirical piece about trying too hard at dinner parties? We’ve got you covered…
‘Do you remember how it feels to absolutely crush every other couple in the room?’
Fathers and Sons
My third anniversary as a father is fast approaching and I find myself asking, like David Byrne, ‘How did I get here?’ I’m 40 now. I’ve got a toddler. I’ve got a proper job. I’ve got a little gray hair. I eat vegetables and watch my fiber intake. I quit going to clubs years ago; pubs, perhaps, but only if it isn’t too crowded, or noisy. My parents have already had one minor surgery each…well, just ‘a procedure‘ really. I saw the new Bourne movie last week with my wife, and I’m not that guy…I imagine that I am, but…
From Martin Yee: Preaching The Gospel To Ourselves
Shortly after moving to Singapore *come visit!* I stumbled upon a blog by Martin Yee, which is entirely in-tune with Mockingbird. One of his recent posts had a quote that was too good not to share with all y’all:
The White Horse Inn Blog has noted that unlike the Law the Gospel is not in us by nature but must be preached into us from the outside. This is why the proclamation of “Christ and him crucified” is the primary task of the Great Commission. But if the gospel is really to be understood as a foreign announcement, is it…
God Is Not Your Mother-In-Law
A marvelous little quote from the good Reverend Capon’s 1996 book, The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology, p 11:
‘Grace is wildly irreligious stuff. It’s more than enough to get God kicked out of the God union that the theologians have formed to keep him on his divine toes so he won’t let the riffraff off scot-free. Sensible people, of course, should need only about thirty seconds of careful thought to realize that getting off scot-free is the only way any of us is going to get off at all. But if all we can think…
White Trash, Freaks, Lunatics, God and Mrs. Turpin
The following excerpt comes from Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled ‘Revelation’, which is found in her collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. I stumbled upon it by way of a sermon by Tim Keller, and my, what a gem! Toward the end of the tale the main character, Mrs. Turpin, a religious person in the Pharisaical sense, is caught up in the whirlwind of emotion that is her own abreaction. Turpin has been cut to the quick by the unsettling realization that, quite unlike herself, God cherishes the weak and foolish things of the world. O’Connor welcomes the…
Acts 9:18
Death, Loneliness and Beauty – According to Charlie Chaplin (Simul Justus…)
‘Will Durant, author and philosopher, was also in Hollywood lecturing at UCLA. He was an old friend and occasionally dined at our house. They were amusing evenings. Will, an enthusiast who needed no stimulant to intoxicate himself but life itself, once asked me: “What is your conception of beauty?” I said I thought it was an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels–an expression of it can be a dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in…
Jesus and the Myth of the Super-Christian
From Craig Barnes’ must-read The Pastor As Minor Poet:
We do not peddle images of the super-Christian and tell our parishioners to try harder to attain this goal. That’s just another false image. And it will also leave us only with more judgment by tossing the not-good-enough Christian onto our heap of failures….So, with poetic irony, pastors help people to change not by talking about them, but by talking about the God revealed in Christ. As an irritated woman once said to me at the door following worship, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Is that all you know?’ Had I been thinking…
Mama said there’d be days like this…
(From ‘Unhappy Hipsters‘)
brandon: This needs to be the onion article: Man who burns Down Neighbors Yard ...
Zach: "Amen" 27 times to that Bradley post. All that stuff about being "mis...
John Zahl: The British version blows the American version out of the water! One ...
Scot: To this psychiatric-clinic veteran, Amy clearly has the entire range o...
michael cooper: The Office at its best was full of grace-infused irony, and concrete p...