1. Don’t shoot the piano player but another week, another flurry of #seculosity… This first item comes from Peggy Noonan, who hit the college admissions scandal nail on the head in her “Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots” column in The Wall Street Journal. She writes: In the past decade or so I’ve observed a particular parenting […]
EPISODE 266: Soul Searchin’ Time The previous cast, “Surprise, Surprise”, raised the vexing question of exceptions in the practice of grace to sinners and sufferers. I spoke about the chronic inability of Christians who emphasize grace to embody it in relation to specific sinners and specific sins. One example I chose was from the Reformed […]
Nuclear winter, malaise, transcendence, and an amiable dude in khakis — all this and more in the following video! Very pleased to share this talk by Scott Johnson, from our recent conference in Oklahoma City, a revised version of which appeared in the latest Mockingbird magazine, the Faith and Doubt issue.
No one ever said life would be easy. But does your life ever seem…too hard? Does self-help, strangely, not work? If so, consider Life Is Impossible: And That’s Good News, the new book by longtime Mockingbird writer Nick Lannon. It’s a slim work, biblically sound and buoyed by vivid illustrations from culture and everyday life. Read […]
This post was written by Michael Neal. I was pretty bummed when I learned that Netflix had dropped 30 Rock from its roster. What’s not to love about Tina Fey and 30 Rock? It’s witty and hilarious, socially informed, and often a sound diagnostic of our tendency to self-justify and virtue-signal. Thank God someone at […]
From Picnic in Bablyon, L’Heureux’s journals from 1963-’67.
The Imperfect Eye
I saw tonight that he is on my side,
the lion. For the first time, I saw it.
And by God all the furniture got up
and danced (that hulking desk
a creditable tango) and I, though not much
on my feet, waltzed through Judah
like a Crazy-priest. Sometimes joy
is like that, coming quick as dandelions
springing to attention while the sun
shudders still—a little—from the melting
winter. Anyway here I was with lions
to account for and that desk
and questionable antics all along
(indignities of sun and dandelions
while our bones still creak with Lent)
and I thought God, what now, until
again I heard the music of the dance
again I waltzed through Judah.
“I something fear my father’s wrath” no more.
There are things we cannot say. This is a fundamental truth about life. It is not a lesson we learn explicitly, but early in our childhoods we learn that some things are not to be spoken. Social pressure or the desire for social status cause us to keep our mouths shut. We learn that we […]
It is a scientific fact that there exists a space in the human gut that functions purely to process stories. We’ll call it the Story Organ. You hear a particular story and at once there begins this churning and grinding, like one of those plastic rock polishers you get from the nerd stores. Said Organ […]
Grateful to share this piece by Mischa Willet: The exercise goes something like this: at the start of class, I ask students to take out a piece of paper, which more often than not these days means they cast about looking helpless till a more-responsible classmate offers aid. I give them some prompt, whose subject […]
This post was written by Kyle Dupic. In the last issue of Sports Illustrated, MLB pitcher Trevor Bauer was featured due to his lightning rod of a personality. Bauer is a perfect example of the way social media has expanded and highlighted our love/hate relationship with nearly everything. He is on the cutting edge of […]
This concludes our friend Jeremiah Lawson‘s three-part series on Transformers. If you missed the other two installments, begin at the beginning! For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. […]
