1. A happy ending for a recovering alcoholic who was rescued from drowning by Paulist priests sailing by on a tiki bar pontoon. Not everything about 2020 is awful, folks! 2. In the first of two book reviews for your consideration this week, Judith Shulevitz reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West […]
The Wheel in the Sky Keeps On Turning: Penultimate Thoughts on Game of Thrones‘ Penultimate Episode
Spoilers ahoy for Game of Thrones fans. Sadly, with the finale arriving Sunday, you are pretty much out of time to jump in and watch all 72 episodes before the show concludes, but there’s something here for the non-GoT community too. Also, like the caveats provided by the AV Club, this is post from a […]
Psychic Disintegration in Jordan Peele’s Us
Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. – Jung Nighttime: inside a secluded beach house, a family […]
Another Week Ends: More Meritocracy, Hakuna Matata Election, Dating Apocalypse, Loving Psychos, The Ambush of Grief, and Irresponsible Gender Equity
Click here to listen to this week’s episode of The Mockingcast, which features an interview with Zac Hicks, author of the brand new book The Worship Pastor. 1. In a great piece called “Meritocracy Is Exhausting,” from The Atlantic (ht DT), Victor Tan Chen explains how a society built on reward can be not only tiresome but […]
Parents in the Hands of an Angry God
As I type, my fourteen month-old son is downstairs alone. He is still alive — this is attested by the sound of plastic stacking cups banging together, alongside the odd mutterings and outbursts of a being whose vocabulary includes kitty, Bernie (an instance of kitty), Walter (idem), dada, uh-oh, and duck, but not mama. Mama […]
Mockingbird at the Movies: Reflections on Life of Pi
“When every link is a separation, when we understand our communicating with God to be scratches on a wall, the complexity of life does not have to be evaded; we do not cease to wonder and wander, but merely are assured our wondering and wandering are not futile.” -Matthew Sitman, on Christian Wiman The Life […]
Short Story Wednesdays: “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus
This week, we turn to Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story”, available here. “Ethics demands an infinite movement, it demands disclosure. The aesthetic hero, then, can speak but will not.” -S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling On July 23, 1986, Andre Dubus pulled over onto the side of the road to help a couple of strangers, male […]
Another Week Ends: Anglican Anniversaries, Attractive Uncertainty, Battlestar Theology, The Cooler and Better You, Compulsive Tweeting, and Neurotic Parenting Art
1. As the current edition of the Book of Common Prayer celebrates its 350th anniversary, James Wood at The New Yorker offers a fascinating reflection on the book’s literary and cultural significance. It’s not everyday you read the sentences in those pages like “The sinner is justified—redeemed from sin, made righteous—by faith alone in God, not by […]
Another Week Ends: Dead Liberal Arts, Glorious Ruin, Cagematch: Hoffman-Phoenix, Victorians in Baltimore, Creative Anxiety, and Imputed Guilt (by Association)
1. Over at The Daily Standard, writer and lecturer Joseph Epstein asks, “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?” With pre-professional education and a degree of liberal-arts relativizing on the rise, Epstein finds a central problem with American higher education to be the same kind of achievement cult that recent films like Waiting for “Superman” have criticized. Epstein’s […]
Daniel Kahneman on Taking Credit and the Illusion of Control
From a very interesting, very comforting piece by Nobel Laureate economics and psychology professor/Mbird fave Daniel Kahneman entitled “The Surety of Fools/Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence”; October 23rd issue of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. His thesis, based on years of research, is that much (i.e. all) of what we attribute to good (or bad) […]
Another Week Ends: Anti-Tebowmania, Hipster Mormonism, Sixty-Six Books, Coldplay, Hypocrisy, and Tullian Tchividjian’s Story of Redemption
Filling in for DZ this week as the Birmingham Conference kicks off… 1. Can you be a hipster and Mormon at the same time? An interesting NY Times article appearing on Wednesday outlined a Mormon’s guide to looking cool without totally losing your faith (a.k.a “How to be like Brandon Flowers”). It’s a classic case […]
Simul Iustus et Schizophrenic: A Quick One from Clinical Theology
Dr. Frank Lake was that rarest of beasts: a clinical psychologist, a pastoral counselor, and a learned theologian. Not surprisingly, we consider him a hero. In his landmark Clinical Theology, a textbook for pastoral counselors and theologically serious therapists, he relates classic Protestant anthropology and Christology to the process of psychoanalysis, using real-world case studies (and the Bible) as his foundation. The following is a characteristically profound quote on the simultaneity […]
