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 […]
Another Week Ends: Silent Treatment, 1st-World Problems, Rectify & Rev, Robinson's Lila, Phillips' Freud, Heresy Help, Tragic Soccer, and Soviet Propaganda
1. Under the auspices of “How and Why to Ban the Silent Treatment from Your Relationship”, The Wall Street Journal issued a perceptive and even quite touching treatise on how the dynamic of demand and withdrawal comes to poison so many loving relationships. The article starts out with the same old line about judgment and […]
Another Week Ends: Trophy Rage, Thriving, Cave Churches, Flannery's Freedom, Cheap Trick, and Facebook Love
1. We all love The Incredibles, right? It’s as good a movie as Pixar has made, which is saying a lot (rumors of a sequel are legit!). And we all remember the rant that Bob Parr goes on in the middle of the film, when he objects to attending his son’s “graduation” from the fifth […]
Another Week Ends: Normcore, Eterni.me, Colbert's Late Show Prospects, Post-Grad Advice, and "I Love You, Buts"
Real quick before we get going: Conference recordings should be up early next week! Videos will roll out gradually after that. Also, we’ve pulled Eden and Afterward to make some final changes. Look for a release announcement in the next ten days. 1) Even getting out of the game is part of the game, now. […]
Underachieving Boys and the Masks Men Wear
Note: an updated and expanded version of this post appears as an essay in The Deja Vu Issue of The Mockingbird print magazine [8/15/18]. I was bowled over a few years ago at the graduation of a family member from a high-profile college. Before the seniors walked up to receive their diplomas, a number of […]
Another Year Ends: Best Teacher Ever, Instagram Envy, Tyson on Kierkegaard, Elf Code Origins, Johnny Football, DFW Cobainification, Atheist Gospel
1. Grab your kleenex, cause here comes the one way love, ht JZ: 2. The NY Times lobbed one straight over the plate last Sunday with “The Agony of Instagram,” a look into “an online culture where the ethic is impress, rather than confess.” It’s fairly one-sided of course–Instagram is just as much an outlet […]
Another Week Ends: OWL Pushback, Antihero Armstrong, Pearls for Gleason, New McCartney, Ambitious Slackers, Space Cowboys, Food-Profiling, and Dilbert's Failure
1. Yesterday I mentioned the name-dropping op-ed that appeared on the Washington Post, Tullian Tchividjian’s “The Missing Message in Today’s Churches.” It’s fine little piece, notable as much for where it was published as what it is saying, most of which will be familiar to readers of this site: “Too many churches perpetuate the impression […]
Another Week Ends: Blame Games, Law/Gospel Lunches, FOMO, Tom Wolfe, Lou Reed on Yeezus, Luther S3, and Middleton's Law
Let the pinning commence – not sure what we were waiting for but Mbird is now on Pinterest! Pretty gratifying to see six year’s worth of visual silliness in one place. Also, pre-registration for our Fall Conference near Houston, TX opens next week, on August 1st. Theme this time will be “Overextended, Under God: Christian […]
Another Week Ends: Successful Blueprints, Redemptive Politicians, Don Draper's Truth, Marital Advice, Humanist Blasphemy, Mavis Staples, Bono, and Dropping Keys
1. This is embarrassing to admit. As much as I love The Replacements, it is The Wilson Quarterly that has truly been rocking my world this past week. Two articles in particular, both from their Spring issue, are worth mentioning here. First, there’s Sarah Courteau’s “Feel Free to Help Yourself”, in which the author surveys […]
Another Week Ends: Techno-Fasting, Google Glass, Tiger Babies, Missional Burnouts, Serrano's Backfire, Powell's Joy, and Family Tree
1. First off, a timely rejoinder to our many social-media-is-making-us-lonely posts from Paul Miller on The Verge, entitled “I’m Still Here: Back Online After A Year Without Internet”. As the title suggests, Miller unplugged for a solid year, partly as an assignment to try to discover how technology, and the Internet in particular, had affected […]
Another Week Ends: One Way Love, Platonic Tennis, Curmudgeon Law, Downton Anti-Snobbery, Ecumenical Shipwrecks, Dr. Hook, House of Cards and Justified
1. The hits just keep on coming. Spring Conference speaker and friend Tullian Tchividjian announced his next book this morning and the title will be familiar to some of you, One Way Love: The Power of Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World. Tullian, of course, is paying tribute to the definition of grace that PZ […]
My Baby Does the Hanky Panky: Sex Is Bigger Than You (and Me and Everyone We Know)
Two remarkable articles about sex–you know, coitus–have come across my screen in the past couple weeks, both of them refreshingly offbeat. The first comes from Alain De Botton, he of Religion for Atheists fame and the new How to Think More About Sex. It appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the suitably provocative title, […]
