Books
A New Pentecost, or Maybe Just a Rhetorical Revival, According to Peanuts
Art / Books / Church / Comics / Religion / Theology

A New Pentecost, or Maybe Just a Rhetorical Revival, According to Peanuts

by Matt Schneider on May 17, 2013 • No Comments

We have written several pieces on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts here before, and in particular on Robert L. Short’s prophetic interpretation in his The Gospel According to Peanuts (1965) here, here, and here. Both Peanuts in general and Short’s book in particular have played meaningful roles in my life ever since my conversion to Christian faith. In fact, I recently reread Short’s very important (and Mockingbird-esque) first chapter, “The Church and the Arts.” I found that he gives us—as Thornton Wilder called it—some “new persuasive words  for defaced or degraded ones” about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit’s work in the arts and…

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Kierkegaard, Honesty, and Grace (200 Years Later)
Books / Philosophy / Psychology / Religion / Theology

Kierkegaard, Honesty, and Grace (200 Years Later)

by WB on May 8, 2013 • 3 Comments

Three days past Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, some great articles have cropped up examining his legacy. The New York Times, for instance, featured a great mini-summary of his legacy; more interestingly, at aeon, atheist Julian Baggini writes a fantastic essay about his personal relationship with Kierkegaard’s thought:

He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined…

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Dad Is Fat: Jim Gaffigan’s Refreshingly Honest New Book on Parenting
Books / Celebrity / Children / Humor

Dad Is Fat: Jim Gaffigan’s Refreshingly Honest New Book on Parenting

by Matt Schneider on May 6, 2013 • 2 Comments

Comedian Jim Gaffigan just wrote a book: Dad Is Fat. It’s a not-so-serious (but therefore very serious) book on parenting, and the publisher actually sent me an advanced copy to review here on Mockingbird—hence this post. (Can I just take second to revel in the fact that this is the first advanced copy I have received to review. Thanks.) The book will be released for sale tomorrow, May 7th. You can read my previous ruminations and some helpful background on Gaffigan and his comedic talents here, but you might already know him as “the Hot Pockets guy.”

My overall response is that…

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Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology
America / Books / Film / Humor / Identity / Interviews / Poetry / Psychology / Suffering / Theology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology

by WB on May 3, 2013 • 2 Comments

1. How confident are you? Over at The New York Times, David Brooks surveyed his readers to get a sense for self-confidence, lack thereof, and the ways males and females experience confidence differently. While the word itself is a bit vague and murky, and Brooks found few trends in the survey data, the individual responses are definitely worth a look:

But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points…

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Another Week Ends: Fairness, The Life of Wiman, Motherly Love, Malick Sacraments, Karr Talks Saunders, Anderson Shoots Prada, and the Ke$ha Trump Card
Art / Books / Children / Death / Everyday / Film / Forgiveness / Music / Relationships / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Fairness, The Life of Wiman, Motherly Love, Malick Sacraments, Karr Talks Saunders, Anderson Shoots Prada, and the Ke$ha Trump Card

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 26, 2013 • 1 Comment

1) The Chronicle released a preview last month to Wiman’s newest piece of work, My Bright Abyss, which we’ve already pulled from a couple of times, here and here, and the life and the illness that spurred it. Jay Parini writes that poetry criticism and commentary began by pulling the fabric of a piece of work as closely as possible upon the tables of lived experience, but Parini also notes that contemporary criticism has become so po-mo-phobic of plainspeak that it winds up saying nothing at all. But Wiman, on the other hand, with sickness, has been voided of this…

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2013 NYC Conference Book Table
Books / Conferences

2013 NYC Conference Book Table

by Mockingbird on Apr 23, 2013 • 3 Comments

A major thank you goes out to all who helped put on this past weekend’s conference in New York! We honestly could not be more pleased with how it all went. Recordings and video should be available soon — hopefully by the end of the week. Until then, here’s this year’s book table, with a couple of embarrassing omissions and logistical impossibilities rectified. Every year it’s a little different, depending on speaker and theme, but overall, it’s safe to say that it doubles as something of a “Mockingbird Reading List.”

NON-FICTION

Alcoholics Anonymous – Big Book (little version)
Aronson, Elliot, and Tavris, Carol…

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Ambition’s Invisible Walls and the “Good Life” Ruthie Lived
America / Books / Identity / Interviews / Relationships / Reviews

Ambition’s Invisible Walls and the “Good Life” Ruthie Lived

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 23, 2013 • 5 Comments

Over at the The Atlantic, Emily Esfahani Smith released a book review-slash-sociological study last week on the relationship between ambition and community. She sets up her article on the recently released memoir of Rod Dreher, whom we’ve mentioned on here before, entitled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of the Good Life. Ruthie Leming is Rod’s sister, the sister who stayed home in small-town Louisiana, who embedded herself in her childhood community, who embraced the ordinariness of her present and who, in her time of great and unexpected weakness (cancer), found…

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Francis Spufford’s Good Friday: Communication, Emotion, and Atonement
Books / Suffering / Theology

Francis Spufford’s Good Friday: Communication, Emotion, and Atonement

by WB on Apr 18, 2013 • No Comments

Continuing our recent flurry of (irresistible) Francis Spufford posts, his writing on Jesus in Unapologetic [spoiler alert!] is some of the most fresh I’ve ever read. Thornton Wilder called for “new persuasive words“, and Spufford’s imaginative, playful (non-)apology for Christianity gives the kind of new angle on old news that any writer or theologian could envy. Here we turn to Christ’s death and resurrection, and Spufford’s attempt to circumvent loaded, often-difficult intellectual language to address the emotions:

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much…And yet he goes on taking in. It…

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Can You Recover an Irrecoverable Faith?
Books / Identity / Religion / Testimony

Can You Recover an Irrecoverable Faith?

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 17, 2013 • 2 Comments

Here, in the title essay for Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, he talks about the perennial nostalgia “seasoned” Christians tend to feel about the faith of younger years. Often selectively remembered (and often unhelpfully untrue), selves of the past are conjured up as a judgment upon the faith that is lacking here and now. We think about the devotion we used to have, the fervor. We used to journal, we say, we used to pray, really pray, as we walked to work–bible studies used to feel like something. Now it doesn’t so much–so what does that say about where the…

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I Know This Moment To Be True: Some Thoughts on DT Max’s Reading of His Biography of David Foster Wallace
Art / Books / Celebrity / Identity / Literature / Philosophy / Religion

I Know This Moment To Be True: Some Thoughts on DT Max’s Reading of His Biography of David Foster Wallace

by Mockingbird on Apr 16, 2013 • 6 Comments

We could not possibly be happier to bring you the following essay from Daniel Matthew Varley on one of our absolute favorite subjects. Please note: If you don’t feel like wading through the whole thing but would like to garner some nuggets about David Foster Wallace not found in the biography or elsewhere on the Internet nor probably anywhere else other than in DT Max’s head, skip to section three.

 

1. There were a handful of “David Foster Wallace moments” (DFWm) at the discussion of DT Max’s biography of said deceased author held on January 23rd at the 92Y Tribeca, which…

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Another Week Ends: Schismogenesis, Megachurch Funerals, Accidental Theology, Smartphone Shrinks, Mean Professors, Nocebos, Zooropa and Elysium
Books / Church / Death / Humor / Identity / Law / Music / Psychology / Religion / Social Science / Technology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Schismogenesis, Megachurch Funerals, Accidental Theology, Smartphone Shrinks, Mean Professors, Nocebos, Zooropa and Elysium

by David Zahl on Apr 12, 2013 • 2 Comments

1. The NY Times published a wise op-ed from sociologist Tanya Luhrmann this past week on the the subject of “How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect”. She begins the column by recounting a disconcerting experience she had promoting her terrific book, When God Talks Back, on a Christian radio station. Luhrmann does not self-identify as a Christian, which the host of the show apparently took as a cue to berate her into converting on air (rather than dig into a book that has quite a bit of sympathetic material to relate). Now, God only knows what exactly the motivation/justification at…

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Christian Wiman on the Anxiety of Interpretation and the Sanity of a Strange, Ancient Thing
Art / Books / Literature / Religion / Theology

Christian Wiman on the Anxiety of Interpretation and the Sanity of a Strange, Ancient Thing

by David Zahl on Apr 4, 2013 • 5 Comments

Earlier this week, Christian Wiman’s much-anticipated My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer shipped, and although I’m only half way through the essays contained therein, I can’t get them out of my mind. I can already tell it’s going to be a volume I return to over and over again, if for no other reason than that, when it comes to people writing about such things in our context, his gift for words is simply unparalleled–or at least limited to the small cadre of folks who provided blurbs on the back cover (Marilynne Robinson and–you guessed it–Mary Karr). It…

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Murder Your Spouse and Other Practical Tips for a Happy Marriage
Books / Death / Film / Forgiveness / Grace in Practice / Relationships

Murder Your Spouse and Other Practical Tips for a Happy Marriage

by Michael Sansbury on Mar 28, 2013 • 2 Comments

“The word of the cross for marriage is the word of perpetual absolution. It is the word that forgives the existence of the other.”

Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice

In the next two weeks, I will be attending two weddings. Because I will merely be a guest at both weddings, I have no legitimate basis for insinuating myself into the toasting. There is thus no captive audience for my unsolicited advice, nor (unfortunately) is my advice ever solicited.

But marriage advice is readily available; it depends only on your attention span. A quick Google search will give you anywhere from “6 Scientific Tips…

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Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)
Books / Grace in Practice / Identity / Law / Psychology

Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)

by WB on Mar 27, 2013 • 3 Comments

Reading Mary Karr’s fantastic memoir Lit, one quote in particular stuck out to me as beautifully describing a tendency we humans have to fall into more limited emotional ranges:

…anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement.

I don’t want to read into Karr’s emotional experiences, but for me this passage elucidates the emotional life lived in times when the Law, or demand to achieve, is…

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Another Week Ends: Jackrabbit Madness, FOMO, Faith Like a Mumford, Radical Rhetoric, Alan Partridge and the Sitcom Smackdown
America / Books / Church / Everyday / Film / Humor / Music / Psychology / Religion / Reviews / Social Science / Sports / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Jackrabbit Madness, FOMO, Faith Like a Mumford, Radical Rhetoric, Alan Partridge and the Sitcom Smackdown

by Ethan Richardson on Mar 22, 2013 • No Comments

1)   If you are a sports fan, today is (arguably, I know) day two of the best four days in college sports every year. March Madness has begun, and Grantland is the place to be for the most hare-brained predictions and analyses—including a Charles Barkley shark jump and a Marshall Henderson moment only Marshall Henderson could think up. It’s not all fun and games, though—this story on the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits is one of the best team profiles I’ve read in a while. I defy you not to root for this team in the tournament, even it means…

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