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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 2

By David GriffithSeptember 2, 2011

Continued from yesterday. 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…

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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 1

By David GriffithSeptember 1, 2011

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…

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Lady Gaga: Realist of Distances?

By David GriffithJuly 28, 2011

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…

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What’s Your Process?

By David GriffithJuly 6, 2011

It was in grad school that I first heard mention of artistic “process.” “What’s your process?” was a favorite question posed by zealous grad students to famous writers paid thousands of dollars to read from their work for forty-five minutes in a musty auditorium. I always rolled my eyes when someone asked these kinds of…

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Violence…Transferred

By David GriffithMay 25, 2011

One thing that we know about ourselves as a race is that we do not deal well with uncertainty, open endings, fades to black. We want the orchestra to swell, the curtain to be run down, and the actors to come to the apron and receive their applause. We require a child-like reassurance that everything…

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Hunger Was Good Discipline

By David GriffithApril 18, 2011

Even though I’m terrible with numbers, I can understand and appreciate multi-variable algebra, because I feel it’s a lot like reading: you are trying to solve for X based on its relationship to other known variables. Reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast I was struck by the algebraic nature of his writing, especially in his chapter…

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Homemaker

By David GriffithMarch 25, 2011

This is the first post that I’ve written—the first real writing I’ve done, actually—since my mother passed away at the beginning of February. She had been sick with cancer for over a decade. I will never forget where I was when I found out she had cancer. I was in the Hillman Library at the…

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The Tablet and the Field

By David GriffithNovember 23, 2010

One of my earliest memories is of the bookcase in the second floor hallway of my grandparent’s house falling on top of me. I had been climbing it trying to reach a book on the top shelf when it toppled. I remember lying there, stunned, the weight of the books and their cold, sharp corners…

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Our Lady’s Football Team

By David GriffithNovember 1, 2010

Every Saturday morning in fall I wake up and feel a tinge of disappointment that I have not woken up in a dorm room in South Bend, Indiana; that my Notre Dame marching band uniform does not hang in the closet at the foot of my bed. I’m disappointed because I’m not eighteen, nineteen, twenty,…

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The Monstrosity of Christ

By David GriffithOctober 12, 2010

This morning, with my wife at work, my four-year-old daughter at pre-school and my infant son asleep in the next room, I watched the 1955 Danish film Ordet directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, recently voted the #1 film religious or “spiritual” film in a poll facilitated by Image and voted on by forty critics and…

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