More on: Culture

I had a dream I got what I wanted: a baby, a silver necklace, and worldly success.

We watch as the cross is carried out of sight. The land is speaking here. It says: Be patient. You do not need this. You cannot tame me with this cross. You cannot replace me. Be still. Listen.

WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…

When I listen to the oratorio, I see the canyon in my mind. I hear the soundscape from which Robert created such a moving plea for ecological awareness and urgent action. That, I suppose, is as it should be, since the Chama has, in his own words, “flowed into nearly every piece I’ve written since 1993.

The glory of the Father…is that with him we are never out of time. He is forever welcoming our response.

If anything is worth living for, worth singing an imperfect offering to, it is the low and the small.

I look to poets not to confirm my ideas of the world and of God but to be shaken awake by their vision.

Where else but in fiction—both reading and writing it—can one try on so many different kinds of salvation?

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.