This year, my Lent was going to be the greatest in the history of all penitential seasons. I wanted to do something manageable that might make a big impact on my overall life: I had decided that I would go to bed every night at 9:30pm. This seemed achievable and wise. Not overly spiritual or […]
The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Reflections for Ash Wednesday
James Parker wrote a delightful, 500-word gem in this month’s Atlantic entitled Ode to Middle Age. If you only have ten minutes to spare, skip the commentary and just read the whole thing here right now. Not only is it a refreshing tribute to one’s aging experience — you don’t have to be middle-aged to […]
Death and Life Under the Mark of Cain
We, the heirs to the devastating dysfunction that was the twentieth century, clamor to hold on to life at all costs. We fear death above all else: it is the emblem summating all our lesser fears. The myriad anxieties which splinter and spoil our experience find their terminus in that most ancient enemy. We are […]
If Jesus Paid It All, What’s With All the Ashes?
This year’s Ash Wednesday sermon comes to us from Jason Micheli: Whenever I do a wedding rehearsal, I like to quash the unhelpful romanticism of the moment by pointing out to the bridal party that the ancient Church stole the outline of the marriage service from the Roman ceremony for the transferal of property. Who […]
Welcome to the Jungle (of Ash Wednesday)
Those looking for a mockingtastic Ash Wednesday devotional and/or Lent-opening mic drop, be sure to check out the special episode of Same Old Song in which Jacob and Aaron surface the cognitive dissonance at work as well as the awkwardness of low anthropology, doing their best throughout not to dodge the existential gut-punch this day represents. They also talk about The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and GNR. As always, not just for preachers.
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The Ash Wednesday Immortality Bus
From our archives, the following piece by Ethan Richardson was originally published in 2017 — but the Immortality Bus is ageless. Buckle up… There was a dark horse in the 2016 presidential campaign that you missed. And what a shame! This gentleman really promised to turn things around, in ways no one else was talking about. […]
On AirPods and Ashes
This past Christmas, Santa gave me a pair of AirPods, the unmistakable wireless headphones from Apple. I was very excited to walk around in my new Silicon-Valley chic, but it turned out that I was not alone. Upon returning to school, it seemed that almost every other pair of anxious college student ears was adorned […]
The Very Intersection of Love and Death
Grateful to share this Ash Wednesday sermon, by our friend Sam Bush: Well, in a beautiful twist of irony, this is the first time since 1945 that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day have coincided. It’s such a bad pairing for a hybrid holiday that it makes you wonder if someone screwed up. The ultimate day […]
The Romance of Ash Wednesday
This year Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday happen to be kissing cousins. On the same day that people everywhere will purchase bear stuffed animals holding hearts that say, “I love you beary much,” people will also have ashes smeared on their heads as a person whispers to them, “You are dust and to dust you […]
Another Week Ends: More Outrage, More Zoltan, More Tebow, More Busyness, Plus A Whole Lot of Death
1. A really surprising-but-not-so-surprising study from Reason about moral outrage, and its psychological background. Not necessarily new territory for us here, but nonetheless, the findings are not what our culture at-large would say is behind the anger du jour we know so well on our Facebook feeds. Generally speaking, psychologists have always thought that anger […]
The Ash Wednesday Immortality Bus
There was a dark horse in this year’s presidential campaign that you missed. And what a shame! This gentleman really promised to turn things around, in ways no one else was talking about. And I know several of us really liked the idea of bringing in a Washington “outsider,” someone who wasn’t going to go […]
Another Week Ends: Turklean Empathy, OK GO, The Cursed Child, Religious Skepticism, Couples Fooling Themselves, and Hail, Caesar!
Click here for the accompanying episode of The Mockingcast, featuring JR Rozko, Aaron Zimmerman and EKR. Sherry Turkle, at it again, people. In The New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg samples a troop of tech-related books released this year, one of which is Sherry Turkle’s new one, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in […]
