1. First off, a timely rejoinder to our many social-media-is-making-us-lonely posts from Paul Miller on The Verge, entitled “I’m Still Here: Back Online After A Year Without Internet”. As the title suggests, Miller unplugged for a solid year, partly as an assignment to try to discover how technology, and the Internet in particular, had affected him (and us) over time. He reports that while the experience was initially incredibly freeing, he eventually found himself right back where he started, i.e. his new habits became just as constraining as the old ones. In theological terms, you might say that Paul’s story…
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Another Week Ends: Techno-Fasting, Google Glass, Tiger Babies, Missional Burnouts, Serrano’s Backfire, Powell’s Joy, and Family Tree
The Gospel According to The Office
Many moons ago, Mockingbird put together and distributed a little teaching series called “The Gospel According to The Office.” When we made the transition to the new site a couple of years ago, it somehow fell through the cracks. The show’s finale seemed like as good a time as any to put it back into circulation. Like the show itself, we don’t vouch for how it may have dated–but it sure seemed like a good idea at the time! You can download it by clicking here.
While we’re on the subject of the show, if you’re at all like me and…
For Those Who Love Poorly: Forgiveness in The Woodsman & Around the Bend
“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.” –Henri Nouwen
“…God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver…. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator…. But when you forgive, that…
Daddy Momming: (More) Stress Cupcakes and the Extra Kid at Home
A wheelhouse piece, just in time for Mother’s Day: a litany of confessionals from the mothers of America about their partners-in-crime. It seems–as ever–that Dad could do more around the house, that his “assistance,” if it is there at all, becomes one more thing (or two, or three…) that requires surveillance and handholding and discipline. In other words, for most mothers, the father becomes another child. And for the most part, he is a more difficult child, because of what he should be.
This is not so much a repeat post on the “manchild syndrome” as it is an interesting glimpse…
Thou Art My Beloved Child: Parenthood for Prodigals
Changing things up a little, here’s one of the breakout sessions from the NYC conference, Matthew Schneider’s discussion of grace as it relates parenting and adoption in the fourth season of NBC’s Parenthood. Highly recommended, regardless of whether or not you’re a fan of the show. Just be sure to have some tissues handy. Quick note: the first three clips can be heard but not seen. All the others should be fine. You can view the missing footage in episode two of the fourth season, “Left Field” (22:51-24:40, 27:20-18:05, 34:40-36:25).
You may download the audio of this recording by clicking here.
Rooting for Affairs: The Blurry Lines of Pop Culture Romance
This one comes from our friend Liz Riggs, a writer for The Wise Guise.
Don’t most of us fundamentally agree that cheating, no matter what the circumstance, is wrong? That it’s dishonest and treacherous and infinitely disloyal? That it is the sort of indelible unfaithfulness that, simply put, changes everything?
So, if that’s how most of the world thinks, then where does all the black and white turn grey? Where do the lines blur, and how do we make sense of them?
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Infidelity has always permeated culture. From the dawn of time to modern television, “stepping out” has become a ubiquitous plot point…
I Can’t Fight This Feeling: The Problem of Emotion in Protestant Christianity – Simeon Zahl
Slightly re-titled but no less, er, plausible (or awesome):
You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here.
The Key Ingredient
It’s not a stretch to say that NBA players are deemed a bit self-absorbed. ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd has a lot to say on this subject. Cowherd notes the differences between selfish players and unselfish players, and the highlights various effects they have on their team(s). Cowherd suggests that it’s actually the unselfish players that are the key ingredient for long-lasting chemistry in locker rooms in sports, whereas the selfish types foster a hostile aura that inevitably results in teams running out of gas and giving up.
Cowherd uses LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony to illustrate his point. Suggesting that LeBron is…
Short Story Wednesdays: “Winky” by George Saunders
This week we slip into the mind of George Saunders, contemporary and friend to the late DFW, and colleague of Mary Karr at Syracuse University. “Winky,” a very short story, was published here in the New Yorker for you to read in full (if you are a subscriber), or you could just buy the collection of stories (highly recommended), Pastoralia.
“I’m lost!” You cried. “I’m wandering in a sort of wilderness!”
“Hey, You, come on over!” shouted a girl across the stage, labeled “Inner Peace.” “I bet you’ve been looking for me your whole life!”
“Boy, have I!” said You. “I’ll be right…
On the Religion of Mindful Self-Loathing
We know the old trope, either in family sitcoms or from within our own dramatic units: the inner-mirror moment when we realize we’ve just said something we always hated our parents saying. We find ourselves–or someone close finds us–doing the things we promised we’d never do when we got out of the house, when we one day had kids, when we held a steady job… The revelations in these vernaculars are generally lighthearted, but not all are, and it is nearly always painful to see that we have “accidentally” become the non-example we had striven to prove wrong.
This is what…
John Cassavetes’ Faces and the Relentless Activity of People Who Are Afraid to be Seen
It was only a matter of time til we got t0 Cassavetes. This one comes to us courtesy of Charlotte Hornsby:
“We need love like food, water and air and we don’t know how to get it. And that’s our struggle…”
-John Cassavetes, Writer/Director/Actor/Auteur
In his 1968 film Faces, John Cassavetes trains his camera on everything about ourselves that we don’t want other people to see. The film gets its name from Cassavetes’s bold aesthetic choice to use a hand-held documentary style that follows a character so intimately that his or her face fills the entire frame. This makes carefully scripted performances feel…
One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World – Tullian Tchividjian
Each morning this week we’ll be posting a different video from our recent conference in New York City. A major, major thank you goes out to David and Mark Babikow for making these clips possible. We begin at the beginning:
You may download this recording by clicking here.
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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
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…
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
“And I want love to change my friends to enemies, change My friends to enemies, and show me how its all my fault … And I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me” – Jack White in “Love Interruption”
I’ve been struggling these past months, through and past Lent and into Eastertide, with what it means to love. There’s no hiddenness on the subject in Scripture–”By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” This among multiple other passages.
At the same time, we live with…
The Tombstone of All Great Work: Achievement’s Cost and the Imagination of Misfits
This is–who knew?–Rodney Mullen’s TED talk at University of Southern California, on innovation and imagination, and its connection with belovedness and freedom. As you’ll remember, we recently covered Rodney’s ethereal wisdom in DZ’s Bones Brigade review–a Netflix streamer we couldn’t recommend more highly. Here Mullen talks, among other things, about the Nobel Prize as “the tombstone of all great work” and, conversely, about losing’s connection to creativity, and creativity’s inseparable tie to individuality and belonging (ht PB).
P.S. For more skateboarding-related wisdom, this time of a spiritual variety, Christian Hosoi is no poseur, either.
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