This one was written by Clayton Hornback. Today I was driving around Birmingham, listening to the radio. It was about 3:00 o’clock. And rather than tune into The Paul Finebaum Show, which can be both full of law and humorous grace, I instead turned the dial to the local NPR station (90.3 WBHM). I’m so glad […]
Tony Hale's Awkward, Silent Prison
Tony Hale, who played Buster Bluth on Arrested Development and who we talked to in a 2009 interview called “Tony Hale Controls the World!”, sat down with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last week. They discussed his role as Gary Walsh on HBO’s hit series Veep, which wrapped up its fifth season on Sunday. Here are […]
Memory Wounds and Holes in Our Hearts
But Thomas (who was called Didymus), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and […]
Fearing "the Other" in November 2016
On Monday, NPR did a story on a newish vocabulary word making the rounds this election cycle, one that touches on last week’s thoughts on attempts to define an “Evangelical.” The word is “Otherize,” and if you have three minutes and want to hear more, check the story below: Generally, to “otherize” someone is to […]
Another Week Ends: (Crushing) Childhood Dreams, Mrs. Crews Still Loves Her Husband, "The Atheist Had It Coming," The Arts Strike Back, Belittling Big Data, Snapchatting Nudies, Forgiving Engineers, and Pleasing United Airlines
Click here to listen to the accompanying episode of The Mockingcast, featuring a brand-new co-host! 1. Last Friday The Washington Post ran a brilliantly pessimistic article entitled, “No, honey, you can’t be anything you want to be. And that’s okay.” When my son turned one, friends gifted him with an illustrated Snoopy the Dog book […]
Forgive Yourself, or Die Trying
Unless it has been replaced, the men’s room mirror at Manning’s Cafe in Minneapolis is a little worse for wear. Not broken, but scratched and pitted, and midway across the bottom the words are indelibly scrawled, “Forgive Yourself.” No telling who wrote it or how long ago, even less what they meant. Was it a pep talk from a […]
Serially Forgiven
I realize I’m late to the party, but I recently devoured the podcast Serial over the span of six days. (I also recently discovered what podcasts are, that they are free, and that I can use them to drown out the whines of my two children while driving around town–my version of Riding in Cars […]
The Working Mother's Prayer
Just this week, working mothers got more alleged good news about our guilt. In a piece from the Washington Post entitled “Proof That Working Mothers Need to Stop Beating Themselves Up,” we learned that there is almost no correlation between the amount of time we spend with our children (ages 3-11) and their overall achievement […]
Another Week Ends: Capitalist Christians, Parents Teaching Achievement (Not Empathy), Post-Penitent Pantene, Sedaris's Journey to the Ends of the Law (and Back), Antinomian Aucklanders, and Crooked-Timber Anthropology
1. The New York Times hosted a debate asking the question of whether capitalism has become incompatible with Christianity. It’s a pretty interesting forum, and some highlights with commentary are below: [Gary Dorrien, Union:] The field I teach, social ethics, was founded in the late 19th century as a protest against capitalist ideology. American social gospel […]
Katy Perry, Celine Dion, and the Shamelessness of Poptimism
Another stellar entry from Joey Shook: Once again this year, there’s been a debate going on between music writers about what it means to appreciate that dirty, three-letter genre simply known as “pop”. The spectrum of opinions (and number of those offering them) is of course quite wide—Katy Perry is “genius” vs. “Katy Perry is […]
Another Week Ends: Walser's Wounds, Diet Supremacists, Homeless Christ, Hart's Lament, Flat Circus, Mad Men, Parenthood, and The Secret Sisters
1. Much of value comes across one’s desk during Holy Week, and this year was no exception. But the sources are seldom the expected ones. What stopped me in my tracks this week was an interview The European conducted with prominent German intellectual Martin Walser on “Kafka, Faith and Atheism” (and Karl Barth), which was […]
Another Week Ends: Overprotected Kids (and their Legos), Disney Therapy, Katims Gold, Malaysian Obsessions, Performance Reviews and Symmetrical Wes
1. I had every intention of giving the subject of parenting a rest. Really, I did. But then The Atlantic put Hanna Rosin’s “The Overprotected Kid” on their cover this month and what can you do. Rosin touches on many of the same points that Heather Havrilesky raised in her polemic on ‘scripted play’, tracing […]
