My friend John and I are the sole members of an organization we call “The Nerd Book Club.” Once a month or so, we grab coffee and talk about books we’ve always wanted to read but lacked the self-discipline to finish on our own. Recently, we committed to read a novel that has been on […]
“Ken M” and the Wisdom of Trolls
It must have been Mockingbird that first introduced me to the “genius of Ken M.” Since then I’ve grown addicted to his commentary. Ken M (aka Kenneth McCarthy) is a 30something comedy writer masquerading as an opinionated 70something, dropping random comments on the internet. Flood Magazine called him “the world’s preeminent Internet troll,” only Ken […]
MLK, Bobby Kennedy, and the Monumental Grace of Sleep
This wonderful reflection was written by Benjamin Self. I. The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be from the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock…and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be […]
Why Won’t You Apologize?
“Okay,” [Charlotte] conceded. “Anything I did that was wrong, I apologize for. “But,” she added, addressing Alice’s receding form with increasing volume as Alice got farther down the stairs, “anything I did that was not wrong, I don’t apologize for!” There are at least four reasons why this little scene from The Last Days of […]
The Losing Economy of Forgiveness
Originally published in The Forgiveness Issue of The Mockingbird magazine. Somewhere in North Minneapolis in February of 1993, Mary Johnson received a visit from the police informing her that her only son, 20-year-old Laramiun Byrd, was dead. He had been shot and killed by a sixteen-year-old boy named Oshea Israel after a confrontation at a […]
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Our family of four was shopping the other day (and by shopping, I mean my husband was pushing a cart stuffed with two whining kids while I looked for an escape hatch) when we dead-ended into one of those homespun signs that make me cringe a little. I read the words, looked at my husband, and […]
The Crucial Eccentricity of the Christian Faith (According to Frederick Buechner)
Thanks to Key Life for bringing this wonderful, Mr. Rogers-esque clip to our attention. Great final line:
God in The Storm
Like you, I’ve currently been trying to move through season three of House of Cards as slowly as possible, and not watch the whole thing in one sitting. It’s hard to do, even though this season is a lot less binge-friendly than the first two. And it’s hard to do predominantly because the Underwood’s ‘house […]
Frederick Buechner on the Confusion of Faces
A great section from Frederick Buechner’s The Hungering Dark, a book of meditations on the light that can be found in the darkness of doubt. Reminiscent of a staircase invention we’ve heard of before… There is a silly little jingle that goes something like this: My face I don’t mind it For I am behind […]
Frederick Buechner on the Annunciation
For today, the Feast of the Annunciation, from his 1966 Classic, The Magnificent Defeat
Here at the end let me tell a story which seems to me to be a kind of parable of the lives of all of us. It is a peculiarly twentieth-century story, and it is almost too awful to tell: about a boy of twelve or thirteen who, in a fit of crazy anger and depression, got hold of a gun somewhere and fired it at his father, who died not right away but soon afterward. When the authorities asked the boy why he had done it, he said that it was because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because he hated his father. And then later on, after he had been placed in a house of detention somewhere, a guard was walking down the corridor late one night when he heard sounds from the boy’s room, and he stopped to listen. The words that he heard from the boy sobbing out in the darkness were, “I want my father, I want my father.”
Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Hopelessly Devoted: Genesis Chapter Three Verses Four through Seven
This morning’s entry from The Mockingbird Devotional, if following the Daily Office index, comes from Addie Chapin. The devotion for today’s date comes from Aaron Zimmerman, which we’ve posted before, here. But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be […]
Christmas Itself Is By Grace: Frederick Buechner Riffs on the Incarnation
Christmas is coming (ready or not!), and while Mockingbird can’t help trim your stockings or stuff your tree, we hope in all humility to be able to offer a little food for thought this season. In that vein, here’s a gospel bomb of a yuletide quote from Frederick Buechner: Christmas itself is by grace. It […]
