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Acedia, Philip Marlowe, and Me
In IT terms, I am an asynchronous reader. I frequently read two or three books simultaneously, and that can sometimes lead to strange juxtapositions. I'm currently reading Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's the monastic tradition and seedy L.A. detective grit. And it's creating some fairly bizarre cognitive dissonance in my mind, although it's pretty much an unbeatable combination: "Hand over the nun, abbot," I shouted. "And the copy of St. Benedict's Rule while you're at it. Come on, I don't have all day."....
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Letting It Rip
There is no more divisive topic in Christendom than the music we employ to worship the creator of the universe. We may co-exist in uneasy unity in the midst of our differing views of the Eucharist, or baptism, or Rob Bell, but nothing predicts a surefire church schism more accurately than a preening church organist during a Buxtehude prelude or an overly earnest guitarist with rockstar moves in the sanctuary. Someone is sure to be offended....
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Poems, Never Read
My mother was born in late April and died in early May. I will always associate those times with the impossible brightness of new spring, of neon green grass and daffodils in riotous bloom. Those were almost the only hopeful signs in an otherwise desperate life. My mother grew up in grinding poverty on a hardscrabble farm on the Missouri/Tennessee border, was sexually abused by her father, moved away from home as soon as she could, and was spirited off to a new and theoretically better life in Ohio by my father, who cheated on her and ignored her....
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Peace Like a River
The story of Chicago lawyer and modern-day Job Horatio Spafford is legendary in evangelical circles. His is the inspirational tale that is held up as a model of Christian faith by earnest Sunday School teachers when their restless charges kvetch and moan about the unfairness of life. You think you’ve got it tough, kid? Listen to this: Horatio Spafford was one of the richest men in the Midwest. He was also a godly man, influential in his church and beyond, and a close friend and confidant of the famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody....
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Josh T. Pearson, Last of the Country Gentlemen
Photographs of Texas troubadour Josh T. Pearson reveal a man out of time. His rail-thin body, long hair, audacious, disheveled beard, and hollow eyes call to mind a shell-shocked survivor of Gettysburg or Cold Harbor, not the victim/protagonist of the petty internecine warfare of a failed twenty-first century marriage. Listening to his solo debut album Last of the Country Gentlemen, it’s equally apparent that the wounds are no less devastating simply because they weren’t physically inflicted. It’s there to see in those vacant eyes....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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