Mockingbird is devoted to connecting the Christian message with the realities of everyday life in fresh and down-to-earth ways.
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Join Us for Palm Sunday!
This week we’re streaming the service from All Saints Winter Park FL, with Stuart Shelby presiding and Paul Zahl preaching:
Join Us For Morning Prayer
This week we’re streaming the service from St Albans in Waco, TX, with Aaron Zimmerman preaching:
“Come Crack the Frozen Branch-Ends / That’ve Had You So Long”: Foreword to The Elegy Beta
This foreword to our newest publication, The Elegy Beta, by Mischa Willett, was written by Mark S. Burrows. What are poems for? The question is a perennial one, and the answers range across a wide spectrum of musings. Poets, as “practitioners” of the art, have their own take on this. One of them, the German Romantic […]
Now Available: The Elegy Beta: And Other Poems, by Mischa Willett
Never before has Mockingbird published a book of poetry — but with The Elegy Beta, that changes. From critically acclaimed poet Mischa Willett, The Elegy Beta features impressionistic meditations on faith and everyday life. In concert with Rilke’s Duino Elegies, this collection simmers with luminous, transcendent language. It is elegant, sharp, and frequently funny.
The Elegy Beta is available today in hardcover and paperback. You can find it in our online bookstore, on Amazon, and elsewhere.
Meet the author at the book launch in Seattle on March 10, and RSVP to the event here. Willett will also read at MockingbirdNYC in April. You can find out more at mischawillet.com.
Meanwhile, early reviews are in:
“Mischa Willett has an absolutely distinctive voice, angular, refractory, often unsettling in flashes of psychological and spiritual insight that go deep, by-passing categories. The Elegy Beta begins in sharp, arresting jolts to consciousness and conscience, then moves in the grand title poem to a symphony of symbolic resonance that invites deep pondering and re-reading. A remarkable volume.” – David Lyle Jeffrey, author of In the Beauty of Holiness
“Find a quiet spot where your tongue can delight your ears and read these poems aloud. For some you’ll want to kneel. For others, slap your thigh and guffaw. In some an epiphany will dawn like a sun surprising you at midnight. Dwell in the lilt of Willett’s play. He’s dead serious and death-defying.” – James K. A. Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Image Magazine; author of On the Road with Saint Augustine
“Here is a striking and original collection which responds to both our biblical and poetic heritage with a fresh contemporary voice. The best response to poetry is itself poetry and in Willet’s new sequence The Elegy Beta, Rilke’s great Duino elegies are reimagined in ways that will spur readers on to their own creative response.” – Malcolm Guite, author of After Prayer
“In a world awash in a flood of cheap chatter, and numb from the noise of ALL CAPS weaponizing of words, good poetry is a healing, sensitizing balm. Willett’s The Elegy Beta displays the capacity of poetic language to remind us of the world—its everyday glory and profound peculiarity—that gets lost in the noise. These poems neither weaponize nor worship words; they rather let words do their work, like the sun does its: warming, illuminating, drawing forth life.” – Brett McCracken, senior editor, The Gospel Coalition; author of Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community
What We’re Watching and Listening To: February Edition
Sarah Condon Dracula. This version (BBC/Netflix) takes a wildly beautiful twist where Professor Abraham Van Helsing is replaced by Sister Agatha Van Helsing. It is totally engaging and utterly rapturous. In other words, this is Fleabag season 3. Miss Americana. Hear me when I say: I’ve always been a little suspicious of Taylor Swift. Hear […]
The New Mockingbird Digest!
Dear everyone,
We invite you to subscribe to our new e-newsletter, delivered conveniently to your inbox fortnightly (once every two weeks-ish). It will be a compendium of fresh posts, pertinent archived material, and other grace-filled goodies. Think of it, maybe, as your good-news news.
Note: If you are already subscribed to the Mockingbird mailing list, this is not the same thing. Add your email below to receive new content on a more regular basis.
A Future Not Earned But Given (THE FUTURE ISSUE IS HERE!)
In celebration of the Future Issue hitting the PO today, here’s Issue 15’s Opener, as well as the Contents page. If you haven’t subscribed, the time has come! Like every person who sped through HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, I immediately wanted to know what it all looks like today. After six-plus hours of radioactive waste and […]
PZ’s Podcast: Indiana Wants Me, Down Down, Disco Inferno, World Contact Day, Lobo in Taiwan, and Pre-Code
EPISODE 291: Indiana Wants Me The secret that explains life — I say “secret” because it’s an open but denied truth, known most directly in popular music but suppressed in most “narratives” and conceptual systems — is the aspiration for a connection of love with another human being. This aspiration transcends politics and affinities, affiliations […]
Mockingbird Festival – Tyler, TX – Pre-Registration NOW OPEN
Pre-Registration is NOW OPEN for “Take it Easy: Mockingbird Festival 2020”! Celebrating the God of grace and comfort in Tyler, TX, April 3-5.
It’s our 6th annual gathering, and our contributors list is growing! Our keynote speaker will be Will Willimon, and he’ll be joined by Carrie Willard, Jacob Smith, David Zahl, Leigh Hickman, and Jason Micheli among others, with more music guests and a mini-market this year.
Thank you to Brad Wofford with BW Design for another year of beautiful graphics!
Register by March 15 for the “EarlyBird” discount at mbirdtyler.com and receive 15% off.
Hopelessly Devoted: First Timothy Chapter One Verse Fifteen
This morning’s devotion comes from Paul Walker’s Almost Daily Devotional. Chris Stapleton sings a song called “Drunkard’s Prayer.” “When I get drunk, and talk to God / I say I’m sorry for the things I’m not / I mean every word I say / And I promise I can change / When I get drunk, […]
Little Women and the Truth We’re Too Scared to Say
This response to the hit film comes to us from Grace Leuenberger. Back in August, the first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was released to the world wide web. I watched it approximately fifteen times, enraptured by the casting, the energy, the excitement surrounding a new version of a movie I loved growing up. […]
Mockingbird Update: What’s in Store for 2020 and How You Can Help
With 2020 just a breath away, it’s time for our annual update on all things Mockingbird! The headlines may be filled with stories of a “church-pocalypse” but I couldn’t imagine a better time to be talking about the unflagging grace of God for non-theoretical sinners like you and me. And what a year we’ve had […]
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