Religion
Another Week Ends: Internet Morality and Self-Help Gatsby, Mary Karr’s Finger-Wagging, Springs of Life, The Rage of Self-Control, and Finding Potterland
Addiction / Children / Film / Gender / Grace in Practice / Identity / Interviews / Relationships / Religion / Theology / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Internet Morality and Self-Help Gatsby, Mary Karr’s Finger-Wagging, Springs of Life, The Rage of Self-Control, and Finding Potterland

by WB on May 24, 2013 • No Comments

1. Over at the New York Times, A.O. Scott laments the rife materialism of recent films, focusing on Gatsby, Spring Breakers, and The Bling Ring. Fitzgerald’s message is potent given the flourishing of America’s economy right now amid anxieties from the last few years, but money really didn’t seem to be the main issue. In the movie, on the other hand:

The movie has been faulted, not entirely without justice, for its headlong embrace of the materialism that the novel views with ambivalence. Mr. Luhrmann, though following the book’s plot more or less faithfully, does not offer a stable moral perspective from which the world of its…

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And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman
Art / Death / Literature / Poetry / Religion / Suffering / Theology

And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on May 21, 2013 • 1 Comment

What a rare and inspiring privilege it was to be with poet and author Christian Wiman last week. I for one am still reeling–don’t know how it could have possibly been any richer. Thankfully, like his poetry in Every Riven Thing and his prose in My Bright Abyss, the talks he gave here in Charlottesville defy distillation. They require real attention–and while one might expect as much from an artist of his caliber and quality, still, the anticipation of poetic brilliance doesn’t make it any less arresting when you actually experience it.

Which is not to imply that a portion of…

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PZ’s Podcast: Girl Can’t Help It and Old Man River
Film / Music / Religion

PZ’s Podcast: Girl Can’t Help It and Old Man River

by Mockingbird on May 20, 2013 • No Comments

Episode 142: Girl Can’t Help It

I’d like this one to be considered avant-garde. Like Journey.

It’s a pastoral meditation on realism and hope, geared a little from Eric Rohmer’s “political” movie of 1993, “The Tree, The Mayor, and The Mediatheque”.

This cast also gives me a chance to introduce ‘George’ to my listeners. He’s been with me since the 2nd of April. I christened him ‘George’ on the basis of a “Way Out” episode from long ago, entitled “Dissolve to Black”. My friend George, however, is nicer than the original ‘George’.

Anyway, I hope you like the music, hope you like the movie,…

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Another Week Ends: Techno-Fasting, Google Glass, Tiger Babies, Missional Burnouts, Serrano’s Backfire, Powell’s Joy, and Family Tree
Art / Children / Humor / Identity / Law / Literature / Relationships / Religion / Sports / Suffering / Technology / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Techno-Fasting, Google Glass, Tiger Babies, Missional Burnouts, Serrano’s Backfire, Powell’s Joy, and Family Tree

by David Zahl on May 17, 2013 • 2 Comments

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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Art / Death / Religion

Death and Life in the Artist’s Studio – Dan Siedell

by Mockingbird on May 17, 2013 • No Comments

Nearing the finish line, we are thrilled to present Dan Siedell’s session from our recent NYC conference, complete with an integrated slideshow. Do yourself a favor:

You may download the audio recording by clicking here. Interested parties should also be sure to check out Dan’s “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?” lecture.

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 • 2 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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The Element In Man For Which Moralism Cannot Account
Law / Literature / Religion

The Element In Man For Which Moralism Cannot Account

by David Zahl on May 14, 2013 • No Comments

Some germane thoughts from the late Jaroslav Pelikan, taken from the “Dostoevsky: The Holy and the Good” chapter of Fools for Christ, ht CB:

Wherever Christianity is viewed as a quiet submission to traditional patterns of conduct and an acceptance of social convention, there will be no appreciation of the atheism of Ivan Karamazov. His atheism begins to mean something when it becomes clear that the Christian gospel is a religious denunciation of religion–religion being understood as man’s attempt to relate himself constructively to the Holy. Traditional moralism and conventional piety have often put the objects of their search alongside God…

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Another Week Ends: Abercrombie’s Hot People, The Neverending “Me Me Me” Era, George Jones’ “Choices,” Katharine Welby, New TV, and New Vampire Weekend
America / Celebrity / Children / Church / Everyday / Film / Identity / Money / Music / Religion / Suffering / TV

Another Week Ends: Abercrombie’s Hot People, The Neverending “Me Me Me” Era, George Jones’ “Choices,” Katharine Welby, New TV, and New Vampire Weekend

by Ethan Richardson on May 10, 2013 • No Comments

1) The Atlantic provided an insightful zinger to the finger-waggers of today’s adultescent. Looking at today’s young people, of whom I am one—blogging away, shoes off—the piece is a response to the recent cover article of Time magazine, “The Me Me Me Generation.” The Time piece is a backhanded spotlight on the millennials, a heat-ray at their unique and insipid self-absorption, their phones, their extended stays at home. Contrary to this, Elspeth Reeve writes that the Me, Me, Me Generation is every generation—that we’ve been locating (and writing about) the narcissism of youth since we’ve written. She then delineates a…

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Beck Brings Paper to Life (and Life to Paper)
Bible / Music / Religion

Beck Brings Paper to Life (and Life to Paper)

by Mockingbird on May 10, 2013 • No Comments

This one comes to us from Win Bassett:

Beck Hansen, better known as “Beck,” will forever be linked to the decade when MTV actually played music videos, kids lived for TGIF programming, and pogs were worth their weight in gold. Who in Generation Y doesn’t count Beck’s “Loser” as one of the first pieces of art to leave a permanent watermark on our young minds? Who isn’t brought back to afternoons of rollerblading and feeding our Tamagotchis every time we hear the low, throaty rumblings of what may have been our first introduction to the Spanish language? (“Soy un perdedor. I’m…

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Grace in Practice / Religion / Suffering / Theology

Ministering to Winners: The Blind, Poor, Broken, Oppressed (and Other People Like You and Me)

by Mockingbird on May 10, 2013 • No Comments

In which our hero falls into a pile of excrement and discovers the theology of the cross… Must watch for ministers–and human beings–of all persuasions:

You may download the recording of this session by clicking here.

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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Psychology / Relationships / Religion / Theology

I Can’t Fight This Feeling: The Problem of Emotion in Protestant Christianity – Simeon Zahl

by Mockingbird on May 7, 2013 • No Comments

Slightly re-titled but no less, er, plausible (or awesome):

You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here.

Mine Eyes Have (and Have Not) Seen the Glory: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder
Film / Religion / Reviews / Suffering

Mine Eyes Have (and Have Not) Seen the Glory: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder

by Zach Williams on May 1, 2013 • 4 Comments

Terrence Malick

There are reasons not to perform well at your work. If you give a fine sermon that alters the thinking of your parishioner, your parishioner will have that sermon in mind when he listens to your next one. If you complete your projects at work and impress your superiors, you will be given more work. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, if you host an award show and bring the house down, your only reward is the opportunities to host more award shows.

The quandary faces Terence Malick in the crafting of his new film, To the Wonder. Coming…

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The Flying Dutchman, Schadenfreude, and Tim Tebow
Religion / Science / Social Science / Sports / Suffering

The Flying Dutchman, Schadenfreude, and Tim Tebow

by Michael Sansbury on Apr 30, 2013 • No Comments

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

–H. L. Mencken

Saturday was my birthday, and I was showered with a heap of my favorite kind of gift: Stories about triumphant people whose lives have been ruined. I’d like to say that it is theological conviction that makes me read these stories end to end, but it is probably some sort of dopamine-stimulating Schadenfreude. Either way, it is an embarrassment of riches.

First, the…

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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.