“You suffer from despair,” Emma Stone tells Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the trailer for Woody Allen’s new movie, Irrational Man. “It was at this moment that my life came together,” Phoenix chimes in later via voiceover, “I’m Abe Lucas, I’ve had many experiences and now a unique one … This was the meaningful act I […]
Law & Gospel: News from Across the Sea
The following is excerpted from Mockingbird’s newest resource, Law and Gospel: A Theology for Sinners (and Saints), which is available here. This comes from the beginning of the Gospel section: ‘News’ expresses something different from ‘knowledge.’ We live in a time of unprecedented knowledge: a day’s worth of new data now would, in terms of […]
Another Week Ends: Anselmian Austerity, Finding Your Passions, Gallbladder Cleanses, Descents Into Hell and a Few Conference Updates
1. Giles Fraser at The Guardian is at it again, making a bit of stretch – though an interesting one – on the role of Anselm’s atonement theory on the Greek debt crisis: According to Anselm, and the Reformation thinkers that followed him, the story of Easter is basically God’s response to a debt crisis. The argument is […]
Come Down to the Manger and See the Little Stranger
There’s one particularly ‘seasonal’ portion of A Mess of Help, and here it is (minus the copious footnotes). Longtime readers may recognize portions, but this is the published and much-expanded version, which comes in the book’s final chapter, track nine of “Sing Mockingbird Sing: The Alpha and Omega of Annotated Playlists”. Enjoy: I am quite […]
Walker Percy on Going Down Before Going Up
A psychiatrist wants to buoy up one of Percy’s characters; she wants something else.
The First Three Lessons for the Virtuous Raleigh W. Hayes
As you’ll see in our summer issue of The Mockingbird, Michael Malone’s Handling Sin is belatedly perched upon the book shelf here at HQ. It’s a shame the 1983 novel (even taking place in the Piedmont, for crying out loud!), took this long to find us, because not since Wilder’s Theophilus North, or Cobb’s Old […]
New Music: Arcade Fire’s Reflektor
This review comes courtesy of our friend Brooks Tate. I was late to the Arcade Fire party. A friend gave me their first three albums on a flash drive, and those songs lived on my iPod unnoticed for more than six months. Their songs would appear and reappear, but I didn’t pay much attention. Then […]
Google Mapping the End of Man
I recently had car trouble, near midnight, still three hours away from a weekend getaway. My pickup jammered to a halt on the side of the road in Godknowswhere, South Carolina and, with my girlfriend in the passenger’s seat, it was easy to expect there was some appropriate know-how code for this kind of mishap; […]
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 […]
From Stickers to Likes: Validation, Authenticity, and Social Media for the Children of the 90s
Modern Reformation’s May-June issue is out! If you haven’t already picked up a copy, this issue, entitled “Wired and Tired,” deals mostly with this our age of technology, and the unexpected weight it has brought to its users. Coming from the angle of identity and authenticity, one of the featured articles comes from yours truly. […]
Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)
Reading Mary Karr’s fantastic memoir Lit, one quote in particular stuck out to me as beautifully describing a tendency we humans have to fall into more limited emotional ranges: …anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu […]
Another Week Ends: Assurance Anxiety, Genesis Lessons, Tumblr Love, Lost in the Cosmos, Iron Man Prep, and Hatsune Miku’s Pizza Stage
1. First off, a little pop theology. Phillip Cary contributed an encouraging review of J.D. Greear’s sensationally titled Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart to the recent issue of Christianity Today, under the header “Anxious About Assurance”. As he does in his book Good News for Anxious Christians, Cary gets straight to the heart of […]
