God is love. God is good. God is dead.
A Mockingbird Guide to Holy Week
From Palm Sunday to Easter, and Every Day in Between, We’ve Got Holy Week covered.
Another Week Ends: Auden’s Advice, Hospital Chaplains, Good Friday, John Prine, Dorothy Day, the Pope, George Saunders, and Weird Al
1. Today many of us are looking for clarity amidst the fraying strands of daily life: plague, family, politics, Good Friday, Easter, time—which has always passed bizarrely but especially now, in the isolation of self-quarantine. A resoundingly helpful story, in light of all this, comes from writer Jay Parini, who reflects on a brief encounter […]
Another Week Ends: Good Friday, a Grand Miracle, Boomers’ Death Boom, Lazarus Is Dead, Meritocracy, Performance, [chill / lofi / jazzhop], and Oat Milk
1. Today is Good Friday, which means, if ever there were a time to consider the brutal instrument of death at the center of a major world religion, that time may as well be now. Off-putting and oft-baffling, the cross carries a multifaceted meaning that can prove elusive for onlookers and skeptics (and, much of […]
I Love You, But I’m Not Gonna Wash Your Feet
Sometimes I’m asked after our Maundy Thursday service why we don’t hold a foot washing like some other churches do on that night. They’re never quite prepared for my answer. The reason I don’t do foot washings is that I’m not sure about the theology communicated in that act, namely that we are at all […]
The Comfort of a Reasonable Religion
“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:40) The Parish which I serve as Rector is blessed with two campuses, both of which have historic cemeteries. What strikes me every time I walk among the stones in either location is the sheer volume of immense personal tragedy contained in […]
The Beautiful Truth of Collateral Beauty
In the Gospel reading appointed for Good Friday, Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?” He seems to really want to know. He seems to be searching for an answer to explain this bruised and beaten Jew standing before him and the chaotic scene outside in his courtyard. And the truth is what we come to church […]
Sharks in the Water: In the Event of a Failure (on Good Friday)
I come from a pretty competitive family, so it should have been no surprise to find them enjoying the latest season of Shark Tank. Of this show’s many seductions (edge-of-your-seat deliberations, outlandish pitches—looking at you, Pinot Meow), the biggest hook may be the sense of judgment hovering in each episode. A trembling entrepreneur stands and pitches his or […]
A (Prose) Poem for Good Friday: “Decency” by Czeslaw Milosz
“When I was, as they say, in harmony with God and the world, I felt I was false, pretending to be somebody else. I recovered my identity when I found myself again in the skin of a sinner and nonbeliever. This repeated itself in my life several times. For, undoubtedly, I liked the image of myself as a decent man, but, immediately after I put that mask on, my conscience whispered that I was deceiving others and myself.
“The notion of sacrum is necessary but impossible without experiencing sin. I am dirty, I am a sinner, I am unworthy, and not even because of my behavior but because of the evil sitting in me. And only when I conceded that it was not for me to reach so high have I felt that I was genuine.”
President Jesus and Holy Week, Part II
Back in 2008, the New Monastic figurehead Shane Claiborne wrote a generally well received book titled “Jesus for President,” riffing off Woody Guthrie’s folk tune “Christ for President.” In the book, Claiborne argued that American Christianity was too invested in the American political system and, as a result, ignoring a significant amount of Jesus’s moral […]
