Right now, there are few places with as much contrast as a children’s hospital. Our son, who has broken his arm twice this year, had an appointment last week to get his cast taken off. This second time around has been harder. The bone was not healing as quickly as it had last fall. There […]
When you live in Hawaii, you are not allowed to complain. We lived there for over 5 years, and whenever I complained about anything, people would respond sarcastically, “Must be tough living in Hawaii.” If I said anything negative about living there such as the cost of living or the size of parking lots or […]
A few years ago, I became fascinated by a group of loosely connected Instagram influencers who live in Birmingham. I started following several women who spend a whole lot of time sharing their lives online to thousands of followers. These women are probably in their mid-to-late twenties. Some are married, some aren’t. Some have children, […]
This one comes from Jonny Wills: Dallas Baptist University looks idyllic in fading sunlight. It perfectly fits the image of a city on a hill. Students stroll between replicas of historical buildings designed to resemble famous U.S. landmarks like the U.S. Supreme Court Building, Monticello and Harvard Hall. These monuments comprise a campus defined by […]
Slightly truncated weekender today, as we’ve been up to our ears prepping our big Spring newsletter/appeal, which just went to the post office. Needless to say, we need your help more than ever (and hope you’ve appreciated our stepped-up efforts during these past few months!). If you’d like to receive a copy of the letter, […]
Spoilers below (for a film a half-century old) Desire, satisfaction, and justice are uneasy acquaintances. They are asymptotes, or Italian dressing. With space, time, and energy enough, they may emulsify, fraternize, or verge, but they will never fuse. Why? And what to do about it? My Night at Maud’s dramatizes this problem. The film’s fulcrum […]
Blame Michael Jordan, or blame COVID-induced storage diving, or blame birthday number four-zero-one last month, but I’ve been doing some serious time traveling of late. The calendar may read 2020, but inside my head I’ve been traversing 1986-1994, one pop culture artifact at a time. Listeners to The Mockingcast have now had to listen to […]
I went to college about a month after I turned seventeen, from a small town in Wisconsin to the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” known to rural folks as the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There were about 7,000 people in my hometown, contrasted with the student population of 40,000 of the University. To […]
Ideas are sort of like clothes. Like when you find a new jean jacket and it instantly becomes your favorite. The fit is impeccable, as if it were designed for only you. You wear it everywhere with pride and are the envy of everyone. The jacket becomes your signature accessory and it assumes an almost […]
Jesus invited us to a dance, but we have turned it into a march of soldiers. – Steve Brown, A Scandalous Freedom One of my favorite parts of the daily liturgy I read comes at the beginning of the evening liturgy, which I always read at some point in the afternoon–a time when I’ve exhausted […]
Certainly you’ll get a kick out of this:
The stories we engage in novels, memoirs, films, and the stories of our lives all share common elements. Some of those elements are: a hero, a villain, a guide, a problem that needs to be solved, a solution, and a transformed hero. By the end of the story, the hero is not who he was […]
