This morning’s devotion was written by David Zahl for The Mockingbird Devotional. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, NASB) When you look at your career, your marriage, your health—do you spend more time thinking about what you don’t have than what you do? Even […]
Living in Denial in Victory
If you read enough popular Christian books, listen to enough Christian sermons, radio shows, or podcasts, you could reasonably get the idea that Christians are like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail. With cries of, “I’m invincible!” the Knight continues to fight, even after King Arthur has relieved him of all of […]
In This Hope We Rebel: Rogue One, An Advent Story
Everybody!! Rogue One: A Star Wars Story delivers magnificently on the promise Star Wars fans have known still lurked within the franchise but struggled to manifest over the last seventeen years of films. Yes, I’m hyperventilating a little–but so will you. Rogue One is so excellent it would be easy to drown the internet in superlatives […]
Doctor Who, Vincent van Gogh, and the Limits of Future Hope
With the recent wave of BBC programs appearing on PBS (Downton Abbey, The Hour, Mr. Bean) it’s somewhat surprising that the 49 year old mainstay Doctor Who hasn’t enjoyed the same popularity. With time travel, aliens, and revisiting historical events, what’s not to like? Either way, this is a major oversight. But I digress… a […]
PZ’s Podcast: Horror Hotel, Les Elucubrations de PZ, Over the River I&II, and “Hoping Without Hope” Conf Preview
Episode 117: Horror Hotel Guess I’ve learned something new, or at least new to me, from an old and beloved source. That source is a tight little expressionist movie from 1960 entitled Horror Hotel. It featured Christopher Lee and Patricia Jessel, and was written by George Baxt. Horror Hotel, which was made in England about […]
Espera: Hope on a High Floor
This post comes from Mockingbird friend and jazz fan Morris Middleton. As a jazz pianist I’m always on the lookout for a beautiful song, and in Esperanza Spalding’s haunting song, Espera, I found one. But in it I heard something even more haunting. The human cry for help. The word espera derives from the Spanish, […]
The Willingness to Entrust Our Lives to Time: Glenn Tinder Defines Hope
From the political philosopher’s essay “The Fabric of Hope”, a passage which featured prominently in Matthew Sitman’s talk at our 2012 Fall Conference in Charlottesville, “The Wound and the Gift” (embedded at the bottom): “The commonplace that no civilization can last forever contains an essential truth: time is the enemy of civilization. And in the […]
"Are You there Jesus? It’s Me, Woman.": The Fall, The Hope, and The Glimpse
This is part “two” in a four part series. For the introduction to the series and the first installment on creation, click here and here click, respectively. The Fall. The fall disturbed humanity’s relationship to God, thus, the relationships between humanity and nature, and man and woman were also disturbed. In Gen. 3:16 we read, […]
