Posts Tagged ‘society and culture’
Poetry Friday: “The Grackles”
April 15, 2016
Here is a poem that silently enacts a conversion. The poem starts off with a string of scornful terms for the speaker’s new neighbors, culminating in the almost mean pun on their child’s “grin” as “grim.” But right after this, the speaker begins to soften her terms: she notices a “warmth” in this noisy, dirty,…
Read MoreChoose Life, North Carolina
April 4, 2016
This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live. —Duet. 30:19 Once again, my state, North Carolina, has chosen to refuse life. This time in a hastily called emergency session of…
Read MoreDiego Rivera’s Detroit Industry
March 15, 2016
The Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) is obviously not a religious institution. But damn if its Rivera Court doesn’t feel like sacred space. The Rivera Court consists of wall murals, floor to ceiling, around an indoor courtyard. The murals were painted by Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the famous Mexican muralist. Rivera himself was not an especially…
Read MorePoetry in a Season of Lament, Part 2
February 23, 2016
Two Poets Laureate On Grief, Detachment, and Finding New Ways to Live, Part 2 Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here. Sarah Arthur: As Poet Laureate of Ohio, in what ways do you see the bardic role of the poet as “lamenter-in-chief” having changed over time? What role do you see a contemporary American poet…
Read MoreEveryone’s Waiting for the Victory Song
February 18, 2016
Everyone knows what happened. Everyone lifts a steaming spoon of cinnamon oatmeal to their lips. Everyone crosses “t”s. Everyone knows there’s blood on the fence in Wyoming. Everyone hears God in Charleston. Everyone knows what happened. Everyone tries to beat the nightly news home, but everyone knows the news, licensed to drive, drives everyone mad.…
Read MoreCreating Sacred Literature
February 3, 2016
“We are just at the beginning,” Charles Taylor wrote in his lumpy but essential tome, A Secular Age, “of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.” If we are just at the beginning of a new age, it stands to reason that we are also at the ending of an…
Read MoreWhat Shall I Know at the End of My Days?
January 26, 2016
When I come to the end of my days, what shall I say I know of life in this world? And what shall God say, when the world comes to the end of days, that God has come to know of life in this one of all created worlds? Carolina chickadee, Kafka, vocoder. I…
Read MoreFor the Love of Hank Stuever, Part 2
December 17, 2015
Continued from yesterday. Hank Stuever’s 2005 collection of essays Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere may not be the Good Book—as I said in the first part of this post—but you might be forgiven for thinking that I have treated it as such: My copy of the paperback edition’s spine was long…
Read MoreFor the Love of Hank Stuever, Part 1
December 16, 2015
It’s been a rotten day. The Fed Ex package didn’t arrive; a typo slipped through several levels of Edit. The leaf blower crapped out but not before spitting out a pile of half-masticated leaves onto the wet sidewalk, so that now the concrete looks like a rusted boat hull. The auditor is suspicious of that…
Read MoreThe Greater Evil: Proscription or Compulsion?
December 14, 2015
There’s a new law in China, and it’s aimed at weakening a faith. As the Chinese government is not one to bother with currying world opinion, those who speak for the authorities are quite aboveboard regarding exactly what they’re about and why: If a people are made to do something, they will soon enough not…
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