Tag: religion
Pastoring while Living in the Trenches of Prison
Pastoral ministry in prison can change lives, but it doesn’t magically erase the pain of incarceration.
An Ode to the “Rest Is History”
For the task of understanding the past demands honesty, humility, and respect for all aspects of human nature, from the material to the intellectual and volitional and—above all—the spiritual.
Human Dominion in Kipling’s Just So Stories
Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.
Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and...
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself.
Who Has Children Anymore Anyway?
Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.
On Beating Dead Horses
But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break its supposed sanity and collapse back into a foregone pity?
Paranoia and Perfect Love
It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings.
Flannery O’Connor, Incarnational Writer: A Review of Damian Ference’s Understanding the...
...the real artist, for both O’Connor and Ference, is one who sees and expresses gratitude for what is already there, and deals with it in such a way as to reveal aspects of it that may not be visible at first glance.
Safe at Last
As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars to heaven, yet she returns each day, as close as a whispered web or a patient beetle on my boots.
The Jigsaw Revolution: Finding Peace, Piece by Piece
The way of the puzzler is not about reaching a certain goal. If it were, the perfectly fine image would never have been broken up to begin with. The way of the puzzler is about the puzzling itself.