One of our favorite quotes comes from Thornton Wilder, the great novelist and playwright, who voiced a vision for the rehabilitation of Christianity in the midst of the Great Depression: The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones. This principle, in my view, still holds […]
Ted Hughes on Inner Children and the Center of Magic and Revelation
Consistently in the Gospels, Christ tells people that they must become like little children in order to enter the Kingdom of God, in order to see the world properly through lenses unclouded by the ego (in modern terms), unimpaired by the countless protections and rationalizations and self-justifying constructions which permeate adult life. Last week Letters […]
PZ’s Podcast: Christian Meanings of “My Sharona”
A little change-up, just in time for the weekend, we bring you the must-hear companion piece to this past Monday’s ‘cast, “My Sharona,” in which our hero, um, explains himself. Together they represent something of a summation, or, as PZ puts it, This is Grace in Practice for 2011. EPISODE 55 The Four Theses I […]
PZ’s Podcast: My Sharona
EPISODE 54 People sometimes like to write down where they are, or at what station they have arrived. There’s a tendency I notice in myself to set down a sort of marker, as in, Where was he, really, in July of 2011? “My Sharona” is “My (Little) Confession”: Where have two years in the desert […]
Super 8: Control, Consequences, and Monster Makeup (Spoiler Warning)
“Rabbi, who sinned–this space alien or his captors–that he was marooned on Earth and had assimilation issues?” Some version of this classic biblical question lies at the core of Steven Spielberg’s and J.J. Abrams’s incredible new film, Super 8. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough—and this is also the place […]
