1. A brilliant essay in The American Interest by Tara Isabella Burton on What The Culture War Is Really About in which the upcoming NYC Conference speaker burrows underneath the acrimony that surrounds us and reveals a conflict over, well, anthropology. In her view, the divide in our culture isn’t between those with a high […]
Another Week Ends: Johnny Cash + Jesus, Fitbit Valentines, The French Dispatch, The Green Knight, Closeness-Communication Bias, Malcolm Gladwell, The Decadent Society, Forgiveness, and a Little Death on Sunday
1. Today’s devotional content comes courtesy of the New Yorker, where Casey Cep contributed a concise but heartening column about Johnny Cash and the gospel. “Gospel music changed Cash’s career,” she writes, “and the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life.” This comes from a review of Richard Beck’s new book Trains, Jesus, and Murder: […]
Another Week Ends: Purity Spirals, Plague Theology, Talking Horses, New York Grace and the Golden Girls of Super Bowl XIV
1. Of all the ballyhooing over Super Bowl LIV’s halftime show, Jennifer Weiner wins for the hottest take on J.Lo and Shakira’s lustful celebration of Latina culture and girl power. While some of us were clutching our pearls over stripper poles and close up crotch shots, and others of us were perhaps too gleefully joining […]
Another Week Ends: Alien Religion, Side Hustles, Jesus the Jew, Glossier/Carhartt, Friendship, Mr. Peanut, Mid-Life Crises, and Demi Lovato,
1. The highlight of this past week for me comes from David Brooks’s deep dive into historical Jesus research. Much of who Jesus was is perfectly intelligible within his Jewish context: his miracles, his teachings, or his willful poverty. But Brooks, like Ernst Käsemann before him, still finds Jesus to be an entirely anomalous Jewish […]
Another Week Ends: Advanced Status Games, Insecure Globalists, Wavering Churchability, Cancer Chairs, Redwall Feasts, and Statism
1. First up this week, other than Ozzy Osbourne in 1987 (featured image), would have to be Agnes Callard’s magnificent piece for The Point, “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?” in which she unpacks the not-so-subtle status games we play with those whom we’ve just met. Meaning, when you’re introduced to someone at a […]
Another Week Ends: Reading Adventures, Just Mercy, the Bills Mafia, Rihanna Stans, Marriage Advice, Mystical Experiences, and Roger Scruton
1. We’ll begin this week’s round-up with the story of Keisha Yearby, a second-grade teacher who has taken to Facebook Live to read to her students at bedtime. The Washington Post reports that on Tuesday evenings a new episode airs of “Ms. Yearby’s Reading Adventures,” during which she reads, asks viewers thoughtful questions, and brings […]
Another Year Begins: Masked Mandalorians, New Modes of Time Keeping, Awards Season Hypocrisy, Holding Babies, Hating Your Job, Absolving Your Father, and the Boys Who Wear Shorts All Winter
A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year as the Mockingbird world returns to its regular posting schedule. Lots of great articles came out over the holiday and they’re worth highlighting even if they aren’t timely on January 10. Stay tuned for new podcasts, new magazines, and new posts that are on the way! 1. […]
Another Week Ends: Tara Isabella Burton, A Tired Reverend, Anderson Cooper, Wile E. Coyote, Orthosomnia, Mike Schur, and the Terms of Forgiveness
1. This week, writer Tara Isabella Burton (a guest speaker at our upcoming conference!) contributed a beautifully confident piece to America Magazine: How I Learned to Love My Christianity. She begins humorously. “There was a joke I used to make back before I was Christian: I am the most liberal person in a room full […]
Another Week Ends: Advent Aches, Mom Merch, Morning Routines, Cormac Chilis, Dietary Cults, Perfectionist Paradoxes, and Vertical Lightness
1. First up, a stirring reflection on the meaning of Advent in The NY Times of all places, courtesy of Tish Harrison Warren, “Want to Get Into the Christmas Spirit? Face the Darkness”. This one is pretty much gold from start to finish: For Christians, Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ birth — that light […]
Another Week Ends: Stubborn Optimists, New Parents, Non-Parents, Backwards Empathy, Future Anxious Thoughts, and a Tale of Two Churches
1. First off, we have from the New York Review of Books “A Tale of Two Churches.” This one doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go, and so much the better. It tells the story of two North Carolina pastors, Jay Stewart and Derrick Hawkins, one white, one black, and the joining of […]
Another Week Ends: Nihilism of Grace, Pirate Jokes, Johnny Cash, Nathan Colberg, a Chess Grandmaster, Rich Thieves, and the Punk Churches of East Germany
1. Our first link this week comes from Digital Doxa, new home to peer-reviewed “scholastic musings” about the age of the Internet. They jump off with a fantastic dispatch from Lisa Ellen Silvestri, about widespread online nihilism. As Silvestri points out, nihilism (formally “the experience of nothingness”) has proliferated across the Web in recent years, […]
Another Week Ends: Aging Presidents, Reusable Grocery Bags, the Soul of Pixar, Zero-Sum Happiness, Bad Good Books, Bomb Threats, and the Joy of Being Cancelled
1. There’s much ado about cancel culture going around the web these past two weeks. The New York Times has a pair of profiles on the new morality forming in certain circles of left-leaning activism, though to observe it on the political left is not to say that it doesn’t happen everywhere else, including the […]
