Prayer
We All Love Grace…Now Shape Up!
Prayer / Sports / Theology

We All Love Grace…Now Shape Up!

by Nick Lannon on May 15, 2013 • 5 Comments

I’ve written about my travails in community softball before, and here’s another dispatch from the front lines.

This year, I’ve been playing on church-league softball team (not my church…I’m a scab, a ringer, brought in for my ability to ensure that they have enough people to field a team), which is a different experience than the “town” league I played in last year. This league has prayers before and after the games and its players keep our anger and competitiveness jailed beneath our surfaces. So, you know, Christian.

The other day, as we all gathered at home plate…

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Bible / Children / Conferences / Everyday / Grace in Practice / Prayer

Hopelessly Devoted: One Thing Needful, I Can Stay All Night, Baby Beluga, and How I Ended Up At The Bottom Of A Dumpster On Christmas Eve

by Mockingbird on May 13, 2013 • No Comments

The hits just keep on coming! In lieu of our usual bi-weekly Monday devotion, here’s four for the price of one, all of Drew Rollins’ wise, funny, and deeply pastoral words from the NYC Conference in one video. They are far less conference-specific than they may initially appear–each one is about 10 minutes long:

Addiction / Church / Literature / Poetry / Prayer / Religion / Suffering

The Unlikely Believer: How a Smart-Assed Intellectual Crossed the Secular/Religious Divide – Mary Karr

by Mockingbird on Apr 30, 2013 • 4 Comments

What an absolute delight and honor it was to meet and listen to the one and only Mary Karr at last week’s conference in NYC. Buckle your seat-belts indeed – just don’t leave the cake out in the rain:

You may download this recording by clicking here.

Children / Prayer / Suffering

Good Friday: Getting The Answer You Didn’t Want

by David Zahl on Mar 29, 2013 • 2 Comments

As powerful as it possibly gets from the new Archbishop of Canterbury. I defy you not to feel:

Lord, How Does The Thin White Duke Fit With Your Scheme?
Music / Prayer

Lord, How Does The Thin White Duke Fit With Your Scheme?

by David Zahl on Mar 15, 2013 • 4 Comments

The world is a more interesting place when David Bowie is in the news. Anything could happen. A pope could be appointed, the Veronica Mars movie could finally get a Kickstarter campaign, you name it. Reading about the Zigster last night, I came across the Wikipedia entry on his 1976 record Station to Station. I’d always enjoyed its icy euro-funk vibe but never counted it among my favorites. I certainly never listened to the words very closely; I figured they were nothing but the cocaine-fueled nightmares that critics seemed obliged to mention when talking about the album and its tour.…

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PZ’s Podcast: Brandy Station, Pillar of Salt, Elevator, Peaches La Verne, Hero of the War
Death / Film / Grace in Practice / Literature / Music / Prayer / Religion

PZ’s Podcast: Brandy Station, Pillar of Salt, Elevator, Peaches La Verne, Hero of the War

by Mockingbird on Feb 4, 2013 • No Comments

Episode 133: Brandy Station

This one is about the creative process, the listening to God, as I would put it; and also about the Peace of God, to bring about the reconciling of opposites in the healing of the world.

I was thinking about “Peace Train” by Cat Stevens, which put me in touch with Looking Glass, “Brandy”, not to mention “Brandy’s” follow-up (It’s wonderful, as you will hear.); not to mention the memorable garment worn by the lead singer of Looking Glass and that comfort-food voice which calmed all fear.

Why is it the music for PZ’s podcast that’s almost the most…

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Comics / Prayer

A Quick Calvin and Hobbes

by David Zahl on Jan 29, 2013 • No Comments

CHserenity

Donuts and Engine Coolant By the Side of the Road
Addiction / Books / Literature / Music / Prayer

Donuts and Engine Coolant By the Side of the Road

by David Zahl on Jan 29, 2013 • 1 Comment

Another incredible and seasonally appropriate section from Mary Karr’s Lit, her memoir about getting sober (and many other things). Dev, it should be noted, is her son. Talk about broken vessels. We are beyond excited and honored that Mary will be joining us at our upcoming conference in NYC (4/18-20):

Prayer isn’t patching up the marriage yet, though applied to small problems from time to time, it sometimes yields up a feasible idea.

Stranded without child care once, I figure out after a prayer — it comes to me — that I could slip Chris, an ex-hooker from the [halfway] house, a…

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Poetry / Prayer / Suffering

This Mind of Dying – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Jan 23, 2013 • No Comments

God let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud:

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

 

From the collection Every Riven Thing. Mbird is sponsoring an evening with Christian on Weds, March 6th in Charlottesville, VA. More details coming soon.

Grace in Addiction: Getting Worse Is Getting Better?
Addiction / Prayer / Psychology / Religion

Grace in Addiction: Getting Worse Is Getting Better?

by Mockingbird on Jan 16, 2013 • 4 Comments

Continuing with our series of previews of our recent publication Grace in Addiction: The Good News of Alcoholics Anonymous for Everybody, we move to a section from the chapter having to do with Step 7, i.e. “Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.”

“Although people do sometimes have a sense of peace with God… nevertheless, in a given situation it is not so much peace with God that is the true mark of the Holy Spirit at work, but birth pangs.” -Christoph Blumhardt

Another image of God’s work in a person’s life comes from John’s Gospel: “The wind blows wherever it…

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“And Death’s Dark Shadow Put to Flight…” A Post for Newtown, Connecticut
America / Bible / Children / News / Prayer / Religion / Sermons / Suffering / Theology

“And Death’s Dark Shadow Put to Flight…” A Post for Newtown, Connecticut

by Bryan J. on Dec 17, 2012 • 5 Comments

It goes without saying that our prayers and hearts have been with Sandy Hook Elementary and the Newtown community since last week. On this side of our Sunday services, “Lord have mercy” is pretty much all I have left to say in my spiritually and emotionally exhausted state, and I don’t think I’m alone when I say that.

For those of us who are still struggling to maintain composure in light of tragedy, or for those exhausted from the 24 hour media coverage, or for those wrestling with the relationship between a good God and an evil…

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Anne Lamott’s Secret Cry for Help
Books / Death / Prayer

Anne Lamott’s Secret Cry for Help

by Ethan Richardson on Nov 19, 2012 • 3 Comments

In light of her new book, Help Thanks Wow, cherished rock-bottom mystic Anne Lamott wrote in Salon last week about the nature of prayer. Coming from someone with an unconventional family and a checkered past, she delves simply and no-less-powerfully into ways we pray to God. Playfully, she is really talking plain-and-simple about prayer book orthodoxy: supplication, adoration, and, well, thanksgiving. Lamott, who also wrote Traveling Mercies and Grace (Eventually), touches here predominantly on “Help,” the prayer that comes by being “sick to death of death,” while God tends to operate mainly by it and through it:

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Everything Is Not OK (on Parenthood)… the Bad Thing Is Already Happening
Prayer / Relationships / Suffering / TV

Everything Is Not OK (on Parenthood)… the Bad Thing Is Already Happening

by Matt Schneider on Oct 4, 2012 • 10 Comments

Have you been watching the new season of Parenthood? This show continues to deliver the goods, which mostly come in the form of true-to-life suffering, chaos, loss, and grace, love, and peace amidst it all—very much in line with the Mockingbird conference last week in Charlottesville.

Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you are a Parenthood fan but aren’t up to speed.

The most recent episode’s title says so much: “Everything Is Not OK.” It refers to the startling news that Kristina Braverman has received (I used to find Kristina’s character fairly annoying, but she has been endearing…

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Humor / Prayer

From The Onion: Prayer to God Loaded with Reverse Psychology

by David Zahl on Oct 3, 2012 • No Comments

This one’s right up there with the very best the site/publication has ever produced–I’d love to meet whatever ex-youth group mind came up with it:

We Are Bold to Say… The Lord’s Prayer, Pt 7: For Thine Is the Kingdom, The Power and the Glory, For Ever and Ever. . . Amen.
Prayer / Theology

We Are Bold to Say… The Lord’s Prayer, Pt 7: For Thine Is the Kingdom, The Power and the Glory, For Ever and Ever. . . Amen.

by JDK on Sep 13, 2012 • No Comments

We’ve come to the end of our 7 part series on the Lord’s Prayer. Over the past few weeks we have seen how the liturgical invitation to this prayer “we are bold to say,”—one familiar to Christians all over the world—truly is a profound and radical confession of how we understand God and ourselves.

The relationship between these two—human self-awareness and confession of God—is one that has been recognized as the beating heart of Christian theology in the theologies of both Martin Luther and John Calvin (to name just a few). For the former, it was this relationship that constitutes the…

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