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Arcade Fire and Suburban Camping
Friday August 20, 2010
It is a phenomenon that still startles me. On weekend evenings from May through October, as dusk settles down upon my suburban home, small fires appear all around me. The suburban men I call my neighbors spend their weekend days doing what suburban men in the Midwest have done for decades: playing golf, mowing lawns, wielding power tools. But at night they build bonfires in their fire pits, and my neighborhood is transformed into Tract Home National Park, a primitive campground where the big-screen, hi-def TV is only a few steps away. It is unclear how many of them will remain my neighbors a year from now. The For Sale signs in my neighborhood are suddenly more prevalent than the Chemlawn signs that used to dominate the idyllic cul-de-sacs. Rumors of foreclosures abound....
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What is Christian Music Criticism For?
Thursday August 19, 2010
I have to admit it: I’m stumped. Having spent the better part of a year in a holding pattern at the crossroads between vocation and avocation (to borrow from Robert Frost), I am confronting a number of choices that would seem to need answers if I am to get on with the work I am here to do. To write for an academic or a popular audience? To keep writing music reviews and features or to focus wholly on sociolinguistic research? and commentary? To write for a particular religious audience or a general one? Sooner or later, the answers will come....
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A Week (of Movies) Can Change a Life
Wednesday August 18, 2010
All week, I’ve been buzzing with unusual electricity. I feel a little smug, like I’m carrying around a winning lottery ticket, and nobody knows why I’m smiling. It’s not a secret. I’ve just been to The Glen Workshop. For years, I’d heard about this week-long gathering of artists and art-lovers in August, at St. John’s College, in Santa Fe. I’d told myself it was too expensive, and that it would take too much of my vacation time. My first visit changed that. There were no more questions—I was sold. I’ve been there six years in a row, and counting. Something special happens at the Glen....
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In the Flesh
Tuesday August 17, 2010
The baby—Alexander Day—is three months old. Life is groaning forward again after a summer lived in 20-minute intervals at the breast pump, the awkwardness of a new baby in the house a little like coming home with a third arm. What do I do with this? I’m looking now at a little black box that contains souvenirs of the end of my pregnancy and his first days in our home. I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but I’m sentimental, so I save everything and throw it in shoeboxes marked with our names. Little time capsules, like Andy Warhol used to make in the Factory....
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Julian and Me
Monday August 16, 2010
My life keeps cycling though the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Or perhaps she keeps cycling through my life. I don’t remember what first called her to my attention in the 1980s. But my copy of the Paulist Press version of Julian’s writings, published in 1978 as Showings (in The Classics of Western Spirituality series) is heavily annotated with my penciled marginalia. Newly baptized at the time, I needed Julian’s vision of God’s overwhelming love for us, a love so powerful that it utterly redeems our human sinfulness....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
