Published in The Curator

One of my poems was published today at The Curator. You can read it by following this excerpt:  An Horologist Returns to Work after His Wife’s Diagnosis.  Here hear the clock: the tick the tock the tickThe swing of pendule swung by gear-dinked chimes,Or quartz hum the pulse that clicked the quickEscape of the wheel […]

Amarillo skyline paintings and sketch. These were part of a larger project celebrating Advent at our church and illustrating passages out of Isaiah. These paintings were meant to illustrate Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 29, but I chose my hometown of Amarillo as the subject instead of Jerusalem. I love our city. At some point, I’ll […]

Our Man in the Pews: The Long Tail of the Rattlesnake

ourmaninthepews: Gone are the days of field research when a renegade ethnographer would pile his hefty recording instruments into the trunk of his car and set out on the back roads of the American South in search of that region’s authentic music. This was the method famously employed by the Lomaxes, John… Several months ago, […]

There’s already a soul-repair role here for friends and family, a big one. Karl Marlantes went to Vietnam, won the kind of medals that get him free drinks, and came home haunted by some of the lives he took. In his 2011 memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War, he argued for the […]

Bernini’s sculpture of Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius fleeing Troy, on their way to eventually found Rome. Anchises, the father of Aeneas, grabs the household gods while the city of Troy burns. Aeneas grabs his father, and has the boy Ascanius grab the fire. The boy carries the fire. The old man carries the gods. All […]

Ms. Odradek: The Chimera of Modern Culture

… our relationship with mass culture is in itself interminable. There can be no conclusion or certainty, where the very structure of communication has founded the reign of perplexity, of dissociation, of procrastination. ‘The consumer’s relation with the real world, with politics, history, and… I both like and hate this. It’s true, therefore I like […]

Winter Wheat (EP Review)

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 343 1960 Arbor Christian Academy 16 3 2407 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false Ryan Culwell’s last studio album, Heroes on the Radio, was released in 2006. Since then he led the rock band The Young Senators through a storm of shows in oil-field bars across West Texas before […]

Recovering from Moral Injury after War

@james_ka_smith tweeted this to me after my last post. If you decide not to read it, then I’ll probably be quoting paragraphs from it over the next few weeks. Introduction, Soul Repairhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/110229994/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll

The sacramental imagination, which affirms the goodness of creation, animates an iconic imagination that affirms the presence of the invisible in the visible—that ‘lifts up’ the messiness of bodies to be more than biological machines. James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (via cwmyers) I think this way of seeing the world – creation as sacrament […]

It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to ‘ideate’ the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself…Among…possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well […]