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Art from the Inside
A lighthouse. Numerous out-stretched hands. A kite soaring above a beach. Many prodigal embraces. Cages. Crabs. Serpents. Masks. Faithful reproductions of The Last Supper. And, of course, numerous depictions of Jesus trudging toward Golgotha, and the iconic end result, bloody crucifixions. This is a rough inventory of the prison art exhibit “Art From the Inside” sponsored by Prison Fellowship International and held at Campbell House....
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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 2
In the postmodern era, which some see as coincident with the post-Christian era, an era in which the tethers connecting ethics and morals to Christianity have loosened, there is no such thing as truth—even Christians speak in terms of cultural norms and choice. Those who see recent history in this way understand the rash, mercurial nature of youth as evidence of being unsettled, of erratically searching for completeness or grounded-ness, connection, or authenticity....
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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 1
I've been listing to Arcade Fire's 2010 album The Suburbs on a continuous loop over the last few days while I read and re-read passages of Reza Aslan's Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. The book was chosen from a field of others to be the Common Reading text for the college where I work, which means that all of the students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to read it and attend events where the book is discussed, including a lecture by the author himself. It's an important book insofar as it describes....
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Visualizing the Unspeakable
In addition to teaching creative writing courses in nonfiction at Sweet Briar College (personal essay and memoir), I teach journalism. As I’m sure you’re well aware, a lot has changed in journalistic practice and the dissemination of news over the last twenty years. Forget about print, forget about “Web journalism,” we’re now talking multi-media, multi-platform journalism, an intricate matrix of interlocking and overlapping digitally-powered attempts to reach....
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Lady Gaga: Realist of Distances?
Until about a month ago, I had never knowingly listened to a song by Lady Gaga. I don’t listen to Top 40 radio, and I haven’t watched MTV in at least a decade, but one evening, fast-forwarding through an episode of Saturday Night Live we had recorded on the DVR—the only way that Jess and I get to watch any television together—I finally came face-to-face with the outrageous pop star. She was wearing a black, plastic dominatrix suit, sporting a vaguely ancient Egyptian piece of headgear and singing about ....
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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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