A writer and lawyer living in the metro Detroit area
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“There Is No Possibility of a Smooth Evolution Here”: An Atheist’s Good Friday Sermon
From Terry Eagleton’s lecture series, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, in which Eagleton criticizes the approach of new atheists Richard Dawkins and Hitch (God rest his soul), or “Ditchkins,” as Eagleton calls them. Raised a Catholic and currently finding it “hard to say” what his current stand is on matters of faith, Eagleton’s primary interest lies in mining Christian theology for insights valuable to the Marxist. But along the way he demonstrates an understanding of the Christian Gospel better than many of those coming from a pulpit:
“Raising of Lazarus,” Guercino
[F]or Christian teaching, God’s love and forgiveness…
God, Help Us Be Like the Nuns: Drunk Driving, Scapegoats and Gulag Wisdom
Alejandro and Maria Martinelly of Prince William County, Virginia, knew their son’s affliction all too well, and so they hid the car keys from him. The ruse was effective in keeping him from his third conviction – until one night in August 2010. Fresh into his latest bender, young Carlos A. Martinelly-Montano dug the keys out of his parents’ closet, fired up their Subaru Outback, and went on a joyride. Anyone who has been in debt to, or had a loved one in debt to the rapacious creditor that hounded 23-year-old Carlos knows all too well that no amount of…
Annie’s Regression and the Rhetoric of Progress (in Church and Elsewhere)
My dog is a lithe, energetic, twenty-five pound beagle that walks with a graceful trot, chases squirrels, and loves belly rubs. But she was not always so fearless. She is a pack dog, mistreated by some heartless Virginia hunter, housed in a pen with a concrete floor for her first three years, tossed meager scraps of food for which she had to compete with the bigger dogs. And she comes from an anxious breed. So she breathes and eats apprehension. The first time I tried to pet her, she recoiled. When I began walking her, she pulled back to the…
Reflections on a Midwestern Church
It meets in a old, charming church building, not an office park or a bar or a towering arena in the suburbs. Red bricks overshadowing gothic archways suggest a Methodist or Baptist past. From the lunch hall opposite the sanctuary one can almost smell the aroma of a thousand pots of coffee brewed and numerous potluck dishes served through the decades.
Don Shall
Updating has occurred. It is odd to see an espresso bar and metallic trimmings fill the foyer alongside the almond staircase and the understated clover windows of the narthex. Nonetheless, the combination puts everyone at ease, the young…
A Tale of Two Darts: Review of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
The Buddha said the unlearned disciple is stabbed by “two darts.” The first dart is a painful experience. The second dart is the suffering that results from his poor reaction to the first dart. The learned disciple, by contrast, is stabbed by only one dart, having learned to absorb the first dart with equanimity. I shudder to think of the existence of second darts when the run of first darts in this world—cancer, depression, heartbreak, family estrangement, Jews stuffed in ovens, children mowed down by an anti-Muslim gunman, and all the rest of it—being so full, and so…
Human Being and the Limits of Language: Reflections on “The Tree of Life”
It is no surprise that a film so fixated on conveying the experience of human being so strongly subordinates language. I suspect The Tree of Life’s script of looks much different from any other. The film succeeds because it is committed in its belief that language can only obscure its purpose. Language is not absent from The Tree of Life, but it is radically deemphasized, which is unlikely to surprise anyone who has seen director Terrence Malick’s previous efforts.
Laramie Eppler, Jessica Chastain, and Hunter McCracken in "The Tree of Life"
In the film, words are spoken in two realms. The…
The Verbal Dynamics of Spiritual Cousins, or, The Trouble with Talking Theologically
Nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation / And every bit of us is lost in it.
–James Merrill, “Lost in Translation”
A Simple Conversation
It may be more strenuous to discuss theology with my theological cousin than with another with whom I have only a passing ideological kinship. Language simultaneously hides, reveals, and obscures differences in theological priority or emphasis that, though logically subtle, yield immense differences in the style, tone, and attitude of daily living. Recently, I spoke with a minister about the difficulty I have had with committing to a church, or engaging with a Christian…
Searching for Meaning in Western Lit: Exhaustion, Freedom and Cosmic Playacting
This terrific review of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrence Kelly’s new All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age comes to us from new Mbird contributor Zach Williams:
One must always bear in mind when reading a book like All Things Shining that unbelieving friends have surrendered all conscious hope of waking up after dying. The empiricist in me greeted the authors’ proposal formula for a meaningful life in a post-Christian era—consisting of kind of purposeful superficiality, wonder at the incidental goods delivered by the world, and gratitude for the acts of the nonexistent…
Rebecca Todd: Well, I am sure both of you would win a debate so I'm not going there....
Jim McNeely: Rebecca, I agree, great comment! Yummy. Here are my thoughts.I thi...
Sam: Isn't the empty tomb proof? I remember a debate that involved Christo...
Zach: Wonderful jewel of honesty amidst the dregs of mealy pap spewed from l...
Rutger-Jan Heijmen: *Conan's...