The Pandemic Has Denied Us What We Most Want: Life with Others.
Broken Bodies: The Consolation of Ash Wednesday
I Felt My Body Betray Me — through Injury or Illness. I was Supposed to be in Control.
The Best Penitential Season Ever, Or, A Lenten Kinship with the Devil
On Breaking Bones and Idealized Visions of Motherhood
If Jesus Paid It All, What’s With All the Ashes?
On Unnatural Death and Suffering the Last Flickers of Sin
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.
You can listen/subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play.
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 […]